Birthday Cakes

This year I've made a fair amount of birthday cakes and am proud to say that I made all of them from scratch, down to the decorating icing. No cake mixes in this house! First I made one of my bosses a cake in March (yellow cake, chocolate frosting), then I made my husband's cookies and cream cake in June (chocolate cake with cookies and cream frosting), then my mother-in-law's in September (yellow cake, chocolate frosting) and finally my mother's last weekend (chocolate cake, chocolate frosting). For all of these cakes, I used recipes from the awesome food blog Annie's Eats. The chocolate cake, chocolate frosting and cookies and cream frosting (doubled) came from this post. The yellow cake came from this post. For the colored decorating icing, I generally just make a small batch of a basic buttercream and tint it with the wonderful Wilton gel colors. For my mom's cake, where I decorated in lighter chocolote frosting, I just added more confectioner's sugar to the chocolate frosting until I was happy with the coloring. Here are a few pictures.

David's

Mom's

Mother-in-law's

Definitely give these recipes a shot if you're looking to do a cake from scratch. We thought they all turned out great!