CAMOUFLAGE BIRTHDAY CAKE

I was away for a rotation when hubby had his birthday so two weeks ago I decided to make it up to him and bake a cake.  I have a delicious chocolate cake recipe that I've made a lot recently, so I went with carrot cake.  (I don't use nuts or raisins in mine.)  Carrot is actually the only kind of cake I like so obviously our wedding cake was carrot. :)

I thought it would be cool to do a camouflage cake so a quick Pinterest search came up with a fab option.  Hers is much more professional than mine, but mine wasn't a disaster either, which is why I'm posting.  For my first try it turned out ok and I came away with a couple of tips.  I found this tutorial if you ever want to try to make a "petal cake" yourself.

The things I learned making my first petal cake:

1. The icing has to be really thick.  If it's gooey at all it will just run all over the place.  You can tell in this photo the darker brown frosting was closer to the correct consistency while the beige is getting a little droopy down near the bottom because it's too soft.

2. You can use cocoa powder to make different colours!  Genius!  I'm not sure why this never occurred to me before, but adding cocoa to my bright green frosting made olive green.  Adding cocoa powder to my white frosting made beige and adding more made brown!  Simple, I know.  I just never thought of it before.

3. Have a piece of paper towel or clean dish rag nearby because I had to clean the spatula after every swipe.  Maybe if the frosting had been thicker that wouldn't have been a problem; I'm not sure.

Hope this inspires you to try a new cake technique!  Or ask me to do one for you.  It only took me a gazillion hours.