'Homemade' Birthday Cake

This week we had a birthday at our house.  So I thought I would share the birthday cake that I made.  It was really easy and I only spent $7.15 on the ingredients and that was after a no holds barred planning session on what it would take to create this ultimate pizza cake.

First I found a friend who had a large deep dish cake pan and borrowed it.  I am also happy to report that it is now washed and returned to my neighbor less than 48 hours after I borrowed it.  I am pretty sure that is a world record for me and will likely not be repeated again.

J couldn't make up his mind about what flavor he wanted and finally decided that he wanted both chocolate and yellow so this is what it looked like before we put it in the oven.

Now I bet you are wondering just how we did that, and amazingly I remembered to take a picture of it as a sort of reenactment.

First we mixed up both flavors of cake mix in separate bowls and then I held the large square platter in the middle and we both started pouring our cake mix out of the bowls.  When we had almost all of it out I removed the summer platter you see.  Of course we had to save some batter to lick after the cake went into the oven.  

Some of us got into a bit more than others.  I managed to get all of mine with the spatula and didn't need to get my fingers covered in cake batter, but I'm just like that sometimes.  

After the cake came out of the oven and the chocolate almost took over the whole top of the cake (sorry no picture to show you that), and I have no explanation as to why that happened either.  

Then I mixed up a batch of frosting with very complicated ingredients, a stick of butter, almost 4 c. powdered sugar, vanilla and then milk until it started to look like the consistency that I wanted.  I set aside 1 c of frosting so that I could color it another color if I needed to.  Then to the main bowl I added red gel food coloring to make the 'pizza sauce'.  I thought I could add black food coloring too to make it a little darker, but that was a bad idea so I just stopped, panicked and started using the frosting from around the sides of the bowl that I hadn't 'ruined' yet.  

Now it was time to start putting on the toppings of the pizza.  First up, 'sausage' which was some leftover brownie pieces that had been in the fridge since Easter last week. You can see the weird black/gray tint to the red frosting.  now you know that it was my bizarre coloring experiment gone wrong.  Then came the 'cheese' which was melted vanilla chips drizzled over the top.  

Then we cut out fruit roll ups into circles for our pepperonis.  The toothpick lid was our template.  The shot glass was just a little too big of a circle for what I thought a pepperoni should be.  

We added crushed up pecan sandies to make our crust.  You can see the extras that fell off the pan and onto the counter top.  

Finally our finished cake.  And just in case you didn't know or notice, he's seven today.  Happy Birthday!

So how did I spend $7.15? 

$2.00  on cake mix.  I got one on sale, the other was regular price.    

$1.00  eggs and oil

$0.65  butter

$1.25  powdered sugar

$0.25  fruit roll ups (3 of 8)

$0.00  leftover brownies

$0.75  vanilla chips (half bag)

$1.25  pecan sandies.

It was a fun weekend, making the cake and then of course eating it.