Better late than never

So my friend's little sister started a blog to show off her baking skillz and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea, so...here I am.

The first cake I ever did was for my niece, Grace's 5th birthday party. She had been running around since October telling everyone that her Aunt Anna was going to be making her a Hello Kitty cake for her birthday, but since she changes her mind every 5 seconds I didn't really think anything about it until my mom called me the Thursday before the party and asked me if I needed any help with the cake.

This was the first cake that I had ever baked that was larger than just an 8 in. pan. The first 2 cakes I did broke as soon as I tried to take them out of the pan. The 3rd cake I tried to make I got out of the pan in one piece, but ended up cracking later on when I was transporting it. Once I FINALLY got the cake out and partically in one piece I started to put on the icing.

So to start this cake I took her birthday invitation and blew it up on my computer. I printed the paper out and traced it onto the cake with a toothpick once I got the dirty icing on. (Since then I have found out that there is a much easier way to transfer, but like I said before this was my first cake. )

This is a picture of my icing in progress. Originally the invitation had Hello Kitty flying over a city skyline, but since Grace's favorite color is blue ("Hey. I have to tell you something...my favorite color is blue!") I decided that I would put her on a sky blue background to make it look like she was floating through the sky.

Here is a picture after I got all of the icing filled in around Hello Kitty. It took a while to do because most of the spaces were really close together so I actually had to use a toothpick to pull the frosting around and fill in the spots.

I started icing the cake around 7am on the day of the party...while I was work...and finished around 2pm, with 3 hours to spare before the party started. Here is the finished cake at the birthday party.