Baking a Camo Cake

The last few days and the next few days include some serious baking. I was asked to do the desserts for a graduation party on Saturday. The guest count is around 75. That is a lot of desserts, especially when a good number of them will be teenage boys. 

Then I was asked to do a birthday cake for one of my best friend's daughter. How could I say no? The cake needed to feed 20 and so I did a stacked double 9x13.

Both the graduation boy and the birthday girl wanted a camouflage cake. Yup, we live in the country. 

Here is the birthday girl's finished cake. Her mom is picking it up tomorrow. 

And guess who helped roll out the fondant? My husband of almost 12 years. 
 

The cake is camouflage both inside and out. Wal-Mart sells this mix: 

But you can easily make your own camouflage cake batter. I did for three of the four cakes and it came out the same as Duff's brand. Just use white or yellow cake mix. You also need green and brown food coloring. I love food gel which is more concentrated. I found mine on Amazon. The light green is one drop of green, the dark green is 3 drops of brown and 3 drops of green, the brown is 5 drops of brown and the tan is one drop of brown. Easy. 

Then use a spoon to spoon the batter into the cake pans. This part takes a bit of time since you are going back and forth between the bowls.

 I made 4 cakes and 3 cupcakes. The cupcakes went to my father-in-law who ate 2 immediately.

The finished cakes were pretty impressive in my opinion. I didn't do anything special besides spooning the batter in the pans.

Savannah's cake got bright "hunter" orange icing in between the layers. The graduation cake will have green in between. 

I "dirty" iced the cake twice making sure to use a light layer of royal icing. Royal icing is basically powdered sugar, butter, water and meringue powder. Some people also add cream of tartar which I have done in the past. Today I didn't have it and so I skipped it. It came out just as well. 
 

 I stuck the cake in the fridge to harden the icing quicker in between icings.

I then used Fondaric's buttercream fondant which is SUPER yummy. I buy mine on Amazon for about $12 for two pounds. I used about a pound on this cake to give you an idea. This was a large cake. 

Basically I separated the fondant into four bowls and mixed the same colors of food gel as I did with the cake batter. The hubby helped which is why he has on gloves. I didn't and my hands turned lovely colors. But by the end of the day, it had washed off and I am back to having normal hands. 

We rolled the fondant into little balls and basically just smooched them altogether. Make sure you use powdered sugar so they don't stick to the wax paper.

Rolling fondant is a nice work out. It took us about 15 minutes to roll. 

Then we put the cake next to the rolled fondant and flipped it onto the cake. It worked great. This was my first time using fondant to cover the entire cake and couldn't believe it worked on the first shot. I love when that happens. 

Then I decorated the borders with orange icing and stuck on some sugar cookies I had made earlier in the day.

The entire cake took me about 4 hours not including the cooling time. It weighs a ton. 

Tomorrow's baking schedule includes baking 600 cookies and dirty icing the second camouflage cake. Thankfully all the dough is made for the cookies. I love baking!