Father's Day

Father's Day is a time when we get to get together with friends and family and celebrate the gift our dads are to us. My dad just happens to be in Mexico being a father to the fatherless. Who could ask for a better dad? Not only does my dad have Kenzi and I and has always been an amazing father and friend to us, he then decides to pack up everything he owns and move to Mexico to help raise 6 boys. I really feel lucky to be blessed with my dad.

Some people shows that they love others in special ways. I like to bake for people to show them I love and appreciate them. I put a lot of thought into my baking and a lot of love into everything I bake and when I give someone something I have spent so much time and energy on it is to tell them how much I love them. This year my in-laws bought a cake decorating kit for me for my birthday. So I decided to use it for the second time to make a father's day cake for my dad, my father-in-law, and my granddad. I wanted to show them just how much I love them all!

I began the cake by baking a 9X13 chocolate cake. I let it cool overnight before I cut it into the shapes I needed. I found this template online and used it as a reference for how to cut my cake. I could not find a pan big enough to fit the entire cake on so I ended up having to leave off the very top pieces but other than that this template worked really well. I also encountered a small problem when I cut the cake and flipped it onto the pan a big chunk fell out of the cake, so I had to quickly doctor it and piece the cake back together. In the end I got all the pieces put together and the cake pieced back together.

After I covered it in blue icing the cake looked a little like this. It started looking like a tie though! I was kind of proud. Before I was able to finish icing the cake I ran out of blue icing and had to mix up more. Well, when I went to tint more icing the icing tinted darker than my first batch...so I tried to blend it into the entire cake and ended up with kind of a marble appearance which actually didn't look so bad.

After icing the entire cake and letting a dry for a little while I began adding on the stripes. I really wanted to do yellow flowers with green stems and make it look like an ugly father's day tie, but in the end I decided to settle on stripes. I began the stripes by piping on a larger green stripe and then adding two yellow thin stripes on either side of the green stripe. I discovered that piping the side of the cake is harder than it look! So if anyone has suggestion on an easier way to do that I would appreciate it.

I think in the end the piping turned out ok, but you could see the messy spots at the end of the stripes so I decided to pipe circles around the bottom of the cake. I thought about doing rosettes but I did not want the cake to be too girly so I thought circles would be more manly.

I also decided to pipe "Happy Father's Day" on the foil. I have never piped writing before so it was fun to try for my first time.

Overall I think the cake turned out really great! I think it looked just like a tie and all the dad really loved it. I wanted them to have a special cake just for them to show them how special they are to me. I love each one of them so much and could never have asked for better men in my life. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!