Mike celebrates his 30th birthday tomorrow, and I wanted to make him a special cupcake cake in my Big Top Cupcake mold. As you might recall from a previous post, Mike likes vanilla with chocolate frosting cupcakes. You probably don't know that he also has a dog named Marley. I therefore wanted to put paw prints on the top of the cupcake and I thought that chocolate frosting wouldn't be ideal. As a result, I decided to go with Oreo cake with Oreo frosting (recipe here). Oh, and how about a little Oreo pudding in the middle to make it extra special? Oreo-tastic!
Instant Oreo pudding
In order to fill the cake with the pudding, I just used a knife to cut out part of the base of the cake and filled it with the pudding. Mmm... pudding. I got the idea from one of the medical assistants that works in the family practice office that I'm at this month. She said that it makes cake taste amazing. :)
The extra cake that I left out for the roomies
I made the paw prints using color flow, a technique that I recently learned in my cake decorating class. It's nice because it comes out shiny, but it's not as easy as just melting chocolate. It takes a lot longer to harden, too. I arranged the paw prints on the top part of the cake and took a step back.
I thought that it needed something else.... like frosting on the bottom part of the cupcake. There is all of that hidden pudding, so I decided to use a little bit of yellow buttercream that I had leftover from my cake class to give a little color to the bottom half.
Ah, much better! Happy birthday, Mike! Hopefully you won't see this post until after your birthday dinner :)