Adventure's in Cakeland

I've decorated cakes before, but nothing fancy. I buy the Wilton icing and I buy the colorings so I can color all my icing, but I never really do anything too fancy. Icing one color, piping another, maybe some dots or sprinkles. But with my daughter's 9th birthday fast approaching next month, I knew I was going to have to do more then that. She wants an ICarly theme. So I decided it was finally time for me to try my hand at using the star tip to decorate a cake.

What better excuse to bake a cake then Valentine's day? I bought a red velvet cake mix to bake. If anyone has a homemade recipe they'd like to share, please do! I baked the cake yesterday morning so it would have plenty of time to cool so I could frost it. Here's the cake after it was done cooling.

Next I colored just over half of my frosting with the red coloring. What better design then a pretty red heart for Valentine's Day? Let me tell you....it takes a LOT of the red to get it a decent shade of red! Not like the other colors where a little bit goes a long way. Here's a picture of the red frosting...I think I should have taken the picture without the flash, I'll remember that for next time! As you can see, it looks pink in the picture...but I promise you it was red.

I'm not much of an artist, so my heart is a tad bit lopsided LOL, but it was all done free hand, and I didn't draw a heart on the cake before I began. I debated doing that, and I think I might next time. It took a lot longer then I thought it would, and man did my hand hurt! But here is what my heart looked like 8)

See, I told you the icing was red!! As you can see it's not perfect, but I was pretty happy with it considering my artistic abilities. I need to work on my spacing some, but now I know for next time. After I finished the heart I mixed some pink frosting with the last of my frosting. I took a picture of it, but it was just way to bright with the flash you couldn't even tell that it was pink. I was running a bit low on frosting at this point. I had made too much red. But it's better to make too much then not enough, because if you have to mix another batch it's very difficult to match the colors again. Because of this I decided to just frost the sides like a regular cake. Once I got the pink icing around the sides I used some water and my finger tip to smooth the icing. Then I filled the rest of the top with pink stars. Like I said earlier...I need to work on my spacing some, but I'm pretty darn proud of my first attempt at using the star tip! I hope you like it!!