Sunday evening I had laundry covering our couch, dirty floors, two unfinished projects I'd spent most of the afternoon on, and e-mails to return but I needed a mental break from work. When the urge to bake hits, and it rarely does, I go with it. I had everything I needed to make a cake with cream cheese frosting except for powdered sugar but that's what neighbor friends are for, right? Everyone else in my house was tucked in for an early bedtime when I took Sunday for a walk down the block to pick up her bag of sugar. I like letting my kids be a part of the baking process because I want them to learn to enjoy it but I was so thankful for a quiet house so I could do it the easy way.
I scrolled through my Sweet Treats board on Pinterest and came across this post. It leads to a bad page but the instructions are all there. The idea is fun but the recipe didn't read true to me as the cake batter amount was only enough to make two tiny cakes (not shown but imagine half a small corn can) instead of five or six small cakes. I made a second batch that I doubled and made these two from. I suggest using cans that have the same top as they do bottom so you can remove both ends (as suggested). I used two corn cans that had bottoms I couldn't cut off with my opener so those were tricky to remove after I was done baking. You could also use a glass jar if you didn't really want to remove it to frost, I suppose.
I had to bake my batter longer than it suggested as well but it may be because we are at high elevation and my oven is off. My batter always ends up really dense and not fluffy so I still need to figure that one out. The frosting on the other hand is just your basic cream cheese frosting with cream cheese, butter, vanilla, salt, and powdered sugar. The recipe I used made enough for a standard cake so I have lots of mint colored frosting in the freezer! To get that color I just added about five drops of blue food coloring and one drop of green. I wasn't sure what I'd get but it turned out to be the same shade as my pistachio-colored mixer! I wanted pink cake but it ended up a bit more salmon colored. Next time.
I told the kids they could have cake for breakfast and since they were so small I didn't have to worry about eating the leftovers all by myself! Can I get a round of applause for that?
The cake toppers made them even more special, don't you think? They're from Lisa Leonard Designs and I don't think I'll ever be able to bake another cake without adding something fun on top!
Three cheers for mini cakes!
-Rachel
