Super Mario Bros Cakes

We have had joint birthday parties for my kids the last couple of years.  My husband's entire family lives out of state and its easier for them to come to just one party.  Plus, its much less stressful on us to just do one party and get it over with.  And they are still young enough to enjoy each other's company - most of the time.

Little man licking the cake LOL

I have never ever ever made a cake with fondant before but wanted to try it out this time.  HOWEVER, I never got around to doing a practice cake.  Please, please, please keep in mind that I am not - nor have I ever claimed to be - an expert cake decorator.

I ended up just using dyed frosting to decorate cakes and was super psyched with the results.  They were incredibly super easy to make and had I not been rushed (like the cakes made it to the party 15 minutes late kind of rushed) they could have been even better.

For both cakes, we used store bought boxed cake mixes.  The 1up cake was dark chocolate with cream cheese frosting and the question mark box cake was lemon supreme cake with lemon supreme frosting.

For the 1up Mushroom Cake:

• Mix up your batter and pour it into a round cake pan that I first sprayed with Pam for Baking.  I used one of my silicone cake pans that I absolutely adore (thanks Mom).  
• After the cake cooled, I removed it from the pan and trimmed off two little triangles (I did curve the edges a little, but if you've got a picture of a mushroom, this should be pretty easy peasy.

But just in case you aren't sure what I mean - here is a crudely drawn example.

• I then used some plain frosting to seal the side edges - let it sit for a bit to dry a little.
• And because I'm a nut about running out of the perfectly mixed color of frosting - I always tend to have more frosting than necessary.  I used about half a container of cream cheese frosting tinted with just a little bit of red and yellow gel food coloring to get a light peachy color for the bottom (face) of the mushroom.  I used a small spatula to frost this part of the cake.  When mixing food coloring into frosting, you want the gel.  If you use the liquid, it will make your frosting way too runny.
• Use the other half of uncolored cream cheese frosting in the can to make the circle/oval shapes on the top of the mushroom.   I use plain plastic bags and snip the corner off to pipe it onto the cake.  This can be a large opening because it doesn't have to be super precise.
• Open your other can of cream cheese frosting and use pretty much the entire tube of green gel food coloring. It took a lot to get the right shade.  Mix it well and the use another plastic bag with a large hole to cover the parts that need to be green.
• I used some black decorating icing with a fine tip to put the eyes on the cake and that's it!

For the Question Mark Box Cake:

• Start off with a square cake pan (or a rectangle and trim it down).
• While waiting for the cake to cool, I mixed in basically an entire tube of yellow gel coloring into Lemon Supreme frosting (it wasn't bright enough as is).
• Once the cake was cool, I popped it out and frosted the entire thing with the bright lemony frosting.
• I used the rest of my white cream cheese frosting (in the bag with the snipped corner) to make the "?" and rivets.

Now have fun and be creative!  Below is the video to the cake that I was originally inspired by.