Today's Special Value

When I started thinking about making my mom's birthday cake, I had trouble coming up with a design theme. I was discussing the cake with my brother and jokingly suggested making her a QVC (the TV shopping channel) cake. He liked the idea and thought I should go with it. When I mentioned it to my dad, he had a good chuckle about it. And so it was decided - QVC it was!

The cake was a funfetti mix that I thought would be festive with the red logo. Icing the cake was trickier than normal because I didn't realize I was missing a few important tools. My large cake icing spatula had broken in the dishwasher, and I forgot that I hadn't replaced it. I also didn't realize that I was out of 16" bags until I was elbow deep in icing. Because I was already so far into the cake-making process, and because I was a little short on time, I decided to forge ahead. I iced the cake with my smaller cupcake sized spatula and used the cake icing tip with a 12" bag. It was tricky, but I was able to get the job done. The result, however, wasn't as smooth as I would have liked. I then cut the QVC logo out of red fondant. Moving it to the cake was made more difficult by the open portion of the Q, but overall I didn't think it looked too bad. I didn't want to bother with trying to tint red icing, so I used store bought red for the borders. I did a shell border around the bottom, and considering that I hadn't practiced in a while, I thought it turned out pretty good. I didn't have quite enough, however, and had to space out some stars along the top. I was hoping that I'd be able to cover up the messy icing a little bit better, but again, being short on time, I went with what I had.

Mom was surprised, and everyone had a good laugh about the design. Apparently, it was so tasty that the leftovers never made it to her co-workers. :)  Aside from the icing being a little messier than normal, it was a good cake.