Fun With Cakes (Part 1)

Remember when you were a kid and your mom made the most wonderful cakes? Me too! I loved it when my mom made cakes for my birthday, so I make them for my kids also. I love to decorate cakes and sometimes I even decorate for other people when I am asked, if I have time of course.

This post I am going to focus on what is called a chocolate base. Where I got that idea is from when I agreed to create a motorcycle track cake for my friend's son's birthday party. The only problem was that I didn't have time to bake a cake myself since she lives 3 hours away, so I had her get the next most logical solution for a cake... Costco cake (we know how good those are! yummy!) anyway, (yeah I know its cheating when you do not bake it yourself, but oh well, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do).




What you do to make a chocolate base is get almond bark from the store (or you can get the meltaways for candy making from the craft store or the Wilton's cake decorating site but for my purpose I use chocolate bark since it's less expensive and does the same job). Melt the chocolate and pour it into a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Smooth it out flat and freeze it for about an hour (that makes it such a nice hardness that you can build anything on top of it); or you can let it sit out for about an hour and it is still hard but more pliable if you have to cut it to fit a cake or whatever.

After it is done being frozen, then just pick it up and place it on top of the cake and you are ready to build on it. Let's face it... if the kid wants or you think they would enjoy a fun cake; building on actual cake is just calling for disaster to strike since cake is soft, you cannot build much on top of it that wouldn't fall. You need the chocolate base. The picture above is of the cake I made (the motorcycle cake) with the track built on the base. I wish I had taken a better picture of it to show how tall the hills were but I didn't. (Hindsight is always 20/20, go figure!).

That is it for this segment of Fun With Cakes. Check back for more cake decorating tidbits in the cake decorating section in my labels. It is just plain good fun to decorate cakes. I love it!!