Surprise Party Birthday Cakes!

Store bought cake generally doesn't interest me - the frosting is always too sweet and the cake is always too dense. At a party it's the thing I skip so I can eat more potato chips. But homemade cake? That, I'll take a slice of. Even when the mix is out of a box and the frosting is out of a can it's somehow so much better.

But if you're going homemade you might as well make it from scratch and you might as well make it interesting. As you can tell by previous posts, I prefer things like pink lady cake, carrot cake, and root beer cake. Why go plain old vanilla and chocolate when you can add things like root beer and cream cheese frosting?

Our friend Mark just turned 30 and his girlfriend, Jackie, was throwing him a surprise birthday bash. I was asked make cake! I ended up making two - first was the root beer cake then in a last minute holy-crap-this-isn't-enough-cake panic I made a peach cake with brown sugar cream cheese frosting (I know, yum!). I doubled the root beer cake recipe to make a two layer 9x13 cake and turned the peach cupcake recipe into a 9 inch 2 layer cake. I had white peaches, regular peaches and nectarines on hand from the CSA so I used a combo of all of them in the batter.

Here's the before:


Here's the after:

Mark was VERY surprised, everyone liked the cakes and I only had one mini-meltdown so I consider this a successful baking venture!