Birthday + cake = Happiness

With 3 major family celebrations in the third week of April in our house, it seemed as though each day last week brought a new dessert treat. Each was personal and special, depending on the celebrator (is that a word?). My daughter’s birthday cake was made out of cupcakes and featured a bouncy-ball motif that I think only we understood. My husband loves coconut, and coconut he got in the form of coconut cupcakes with coconut frosting, served at our weekly neighborhood TGIF. And the only requirement for my cake was strawberries, just now in season in California. 

Strawberry cake

Strawberry cake

Coconut cupcakes

Coconut cupcakes

How to make your own Cupcake Cake

Cupcake cakes are great when you are serving a crowd and don’t want to deal with cutting a cake, plates, forks and napkins. To serve, you just stick your hand in and pull out the next cupcake, the frosting comes along with it. And because cupcake cakes are frosted completely over the top, you can decorate just like you would a sheet cake. 

Step 1:

On a cardboard cake support, or plate or pan, arrange your baked and cooled cupcakes, snugging them up close to their neighbor. If your support is slippery, I recommend a dab of frosting on the bottom of each cake.

Step 2:

Using a large frosting tip (Wilton #789), lay frosting over the tops of the cupcakes. Try to be as even with the application as possible. If necessary, you might find that thinning your frosting out will help. For this cupcake cake, I used 2 batches of standard buttercream frosting. 

Step 3: 

Decorate any way you would like. This birthday girl’s party was at a bounce house facility, so we tried to decorate with bouncy balls and trajectory lines. 

And this was decorated for a camping-themed birthday party. The graham crackers make the tent, the pretzel sticks are a fire (along with red gum drops for flames), and the green cornflake blobs are supposed to be trees! Any idea what the brown blob is?