Tuesday, January 13th was Spence’s 28th birthday. He had the day off of work and as I hadn’t started back at school yet, we got to spend the day together. We went to see Taken 3 in theater which was actually very good. We are both fans of the first two and heard this one was going to be different, but it had good reviews. It was definitely different (plot line-wise) but it was an excellent movie. They also set it up very well for the potential of a fourth movie in a few years. For dinner we went to Bonefish Grill for dinner which was excellent. Our waiter was phenomenal and so was the food. For Spence’s birthday I bought him a Filson briefcase, because at 28 its about time he stopped carrying his backpack to work! (Okay, it was his idea and not mine, but the rationale was still the same). Every year I also pride myself on making Spence a cake. In the past I have made an Atlanta Braves cake, Bowtie Cake, and Angry Birds cake (among others). This year I decided to go with camo. It has been a long running joke about Spence’s love for camo and my not-so-love for it. My parents provided camo t-shirts on our wedding weekend for the guests and my mom bought Spence a camo Santa hat for Christmas this year. I realized I will never win the camo fight, so I decided to embrace it. So, pretty much like any female with a computer and internet access I turned to Pinterest to find a recipe. Now, I will be the first to admit, I should have started documenting a long time ago the recipes I find on Pinterest and attempt to make because I would have a good compilation of “Pinterest Fails” but this one was actually a semi-success.
Most recipes I found called for both vanilla and chocolate cake mix; however, as Spence is really the only one who eats cake in this household (I prefer the baking process than the eating) and I really didn’t want to make a 4 layer cake, I decided to just get vanilla and dye part of the batter brown. I also bought vanilla and chocolate frosting, which ended up being too much (simply because my initial plan didn’t work but oh well, I will get to that).
So I mixed the batter and then separated it into 4 bowls. I added green dye to two of them (at varying drops to make the different shades) and then added chocolate sauce to the other one to make the brown color.
I then dropped the different colors of batter in the pans randomly and baked and voila, out came the “camo.”
So then comes the icing. My plan was to cover it in chocolate and then do a swirl of white and green (dyed vanilla frosting) around the bottom of the cake. Needless to say the swirls didn’t really turn out and the frosting wasn’t very even, so I decided to improvise and just add it to cover all the sides and make it kind of look like grass. So then I decided the brown will be dirt, and suddenly we are back to the camo/hunting theme…sort of.
But here comes the fail. Although I followed the instructions, when we actually cut the cake we realized that the camo doesn’t really look like camo, but more like a multi colored checker board….But you know, oh well. At least it tastes good right?
In other news, we are getting our puppy tomorrow! So I am sure I will be posting plenty of updates and pictures about him!
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