Wayne's 12th Birthday

Today is one of our friend's birthdays, so we gave him the gift of cake! Yum! Wayne is a neighbor friend of ours who is often here playing with my boys. All I could get out of him for favorite cake flavors and colors was "CHOCOLATE!" So... here it is! The only design element he suggested was "Silly bands." Late last night I decided that wasn't going to happen and I created the stars instead. Had I only woken my almost 7 year old... he had the great idea (this morning after I showed him what I did make...) of using his silly bands to imprint various shapes and then piping them in with frosting. Leave it to the 7 year old to come up with a great idea! Argh.... .next time I get the request, I will do it. In any event, Wayne's parents were very happy with the cake when we dropped it off this morning. The birthday boy was still asleep in bed! I am sure we will hear about it and maybe even eat some with him later... Happy Birthday Wayne!

The cake is a new chocolate cake recipe I tested, based off of an America's Test Kitchen cupcake recipe. It has coffee and cinnamon in it along with Dutched cocoa powder and unsweetened chocolate to really boost the flavor. It does taste a little different from my basic chocolate recipe, and for cupcakes I really liked the texture -- not sticky and had good loft. The cake is covered in chocolate butter cream frosting and the stars and balls and birthday banner are all fondant or fondant-gumpaste mixtures.