Wendy's Favorite Recipes from www. EagleKnights.com

Fancy but Easy Cakes

 I usually buy a package of cake mix.  Here in Mexico we can get Duncan Hines Devils food and Swiss Chocolate and I find these make excellent cakes.  I do sometimes doctor these up you can check out my Banana Nut recipe and I make a carrot cake from scratch.  

Then I make my own frosting.  I tried to find a nice cake dish for a 9x13 cake for years and couldn't find anything, one day I was making some book shelf's and I had to cut some off end of the board and I thought that's my Cake dish.  So what I have is a 16x12 piece of wood, I sanded it down a bit and put a coat of paint all over it.  Then I sanded down the top real smooth, and put a final coat of gloss black paint on it, You can use any color you want, but I strongly suggest you make it a high gloss, it looks good and its easy to clean.  And, you will always (at least I do) drop a bit of frosting on the wood while frosting the cake and need to touch it up.   Viola I have a great cake dish.. This gives me a nice edge around the cake for holding decorations, fruit, candy, or just leafs.  It looks great, easy to keep clean and was very cheap.  

As for frosting the cake, I took a cake decorating class (what an easy way to gain weight, you make a cake every week and decorate it).  But, I did not like the frosting you need to use for a base coat and it was very time consuming to put it on all nice and smooth.  

I much prefer a cake that tastes good to a cake that looks good.  All of my Mexican friends started asking me to make birthday cakes for them and their kids.  Since I wanted them to look good I started experimenting with different things.  I have came up with some really nice looking cakes that taste great.  I wish I had pictures of all of them but I promise to start.  This picture was of a cake I made for a young man who had a birthday the day after Halloween.  So I sprinkled a bit of coco on the frosting and then added some cheap plastic bugs.  It looked great!!  

Other household things you can use,  Cereal; Fruit loops look great.  Some small flowers put on the cake look nice, you can also coat flowers with egg white and then sprinkle sugar all over them.  But that's a lot of work and my cakes never seem to last more then an hour or two and they are all gone.. So I just use fresh flowers, pansy's look good and are edable.  One cake I made I used some fresh red grapes over one corner and around the edges of the dish and some fruit loops along with the candles it was very pretty.  Its so easy, so simple and looks so nice.