Baseball Birthday Party

My oldest has recently started to take an interest in softball. Every Monday we go to watch his Aunts play baseball and every time he hopes to play with them. So as it was getting closer to his birthday I decided to throw him a softball party.
Now that he is starting to get older I like to let him help me plan the party and decide what all he wants there. This is where my pinterest board becomes very helpful. I let him browse through all the cakes I had on my board and as soon as he saw the baseball glove he was hooked.  The cake Idea came from parenting.com

The day before his birthday I baked the cake. I had wanted to make this cake a bit more unique so I decided to make the inside of my cake look like a zebra stripe. I got my inspiration from Recipe by photo. She shows step by step how to make the zebra stripe cake. When I first saw her pictures I was very unsure of how that would work and I didn't want another pinterest flop, I decided to give it a try and if it didn't work I would just have the entire cake be chocolate. To make her you pour a fourth a cup of batter in the center of the pan and alternate between batters always pouring another fourth of cup. The batter magically spread out to the outer layers and worked just like she said it would.  Here is how it looked in the pan before I cooked it. After it was all cooked I froze it which make the cake a lot easier to work with when molding and frosting

The day of his birthday I got all the supplies ready to decorate his cake.  I colored the frosting brown, red, and black. I left some of it white for the baseball. My kids loved helping me stir up the flavors and trying to guess what it would be before it was all stirred in.

I like to work with my cake upside down. It gives me a flat surface that is easier to work with. Before I cut anything out I took a butter knife and made an outline of where to cut so that if I messed up I could easily fix it. I cut the fingers out and rounded them and then also cut the bottom to look more like a hand.

Then came the fun part..... Frosting the cake. I love seeing the cake come together and to have it start looking like the finished product. I like to make my cakes out of honey to make it more healthy so I also used a honey frosting. Many people have told me that it is impossible to decorate with honey frosting because it gets runny but I have found a few tricks to help with that. I like to put mine in the freezer for a couple of minutes so it will have the consistency I want. I also add a little flour to make it a little thicker.
I put a base coat of brown frosting on the cake. I like to do the bottom layer a little thick so that I will not have a problem with crumbs.

After that I did the black lines with a skinny tip. To make the ball on top I took a cupcake and molded the bottom of it to look like a ball. I then frosted the cupcake to look like a ball. Here is the finished product.

 

I also decided to put a five on one of the fingers which my son thought was a excellent addition to the cake.

Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe

 

Ingredients

1 1/2 packages of cream cheese

1/2 Cup Honey

1 tsp Vanilla

1/2 Stick of Butter 

2 TBL flour

Directions:

1. Cream butter, cream cheese, and honey until smooth 

2. Add vanilla and Mix for two minutes

3. Add the flour and refrigerate for and hour or freeze for five minutes to be able to use with decorating.