New cake decorating technique!

Every month at our church we have a women's fellowship meeting. "Godly Girlfriends" it's called. Before heading into devotion time, prayer, and snacks, someone shares an "added attraction". Last night one of the ladies taught us how to make bows, last month we got some fun ideas for creating gift baskets, and the previous months we've learned how to make candles and do cake decorating.

Now cake decorating isn't really my thing. It's hard and frustrating, takes forever to do, and the cake never quite turns out how I wanted. But I try. And I'm learning. So I was pretty excited when we learned some tricks at our fellowship meeting! Afterward I went out and bought the same pan (12x2" circle pan) and frosting spatula that our friend Rachel used in the demonstration, and now finally since it was Kevin's birthday this week I got a chance to try it out!

Step 1: Cut up a towel into strips the same width as the cake pan depth. Use metal safety pins to pin together your strips of towel so the whole thing will wrap around your pan 4 or 5 times. Wet the towel and wrap it around the cake pan. Bake according to your directions. I'd sort of tried this before and knew it helped, but this was so much easier to have the towel cut into nice strips and pinned together. This whole process helps your cake come out with a flat top instead of rounded. See?
Step 2: Let your cake cool fully.

Step 3: Pick an image you want to use for your decoration. Anything you want. Kevin likes Jeeps, so I went online and Googled "jeep coloring page" and printed. Now cut out the picture, cutting along the lines of the picture as much as you can without actually cutting the picture apart.

Step 4: Frost your cake as normal and let it sit for about 10 minutes, 'til it's dry to the touch.

Step 5: Now lay your picture on the cake and gently press it into the frosting with a butter knife, especially so you can see the inside edges of your picture where details are.

Step 6: Now gently lift the picture off the cake, and you'll see your print in the frosting so you don't have to try to freehand a design or find a specific-shaped cake pan. Now when I did this I didn't let the frosting sit quite long enough so it smeared a little bit when I pulled the paper off, but I could still see it clearly enough. You'll see most of the lines for your picture, and then you can fill in where needed when your doing your frosting outline.

Step 7: Using a small frosting tip, outline all the lines on your picture. Then fill in accordingly with colors of your choice. Two more lessons I learned trying this one: 1) a Wilton 16 tip was NOT small enough, so I didn't have enough space for all the detail of the picture. I should've used my Wilton 3 tip, which I realized as soon as I started, but the tip was already in the bottom of the frosting bag so I couldn't really change it out. 2) For me the WORST part of cake decorating is getting the frosting the right colors. I couldn't get black for my outline, the darkest I got it was dark gray before I ran out of coloring. Then I wanted the Jeep to be a green color, but it turned out to be a really bright green, so I added in a little bit of the gray from the outline frosting, but that just made it a super dark green, and now you can't see the detailing of the Jeep because there's no contrast between the gray and green. But at least it gives you an idea of how it can turn out. I can't wait to try it again for Hannah's birthday in a few weeks, hopefully with a picture of a little less detail. Still came out pretty good though, huh?

I'm not very good at star-tipping, so for this one I just filled in the frosting and smeared it together a little bit. But still it was pretty easy and I'm excited about this new method! So what do you think? You gonna try it??