The Buttercream Kitten

Know what that is? Not shredded cheese or shag carpet. That's a picture of my peanut butter buttercream frosting from my most recent cake, a kitten. I just want to lick my screen. I've loved frosting since I was a wee tot. My mom always made homemade birthday cakes with delicious homemade icing for as long as I can remember. I grew up thinking everyone's mom made their own birthday cakes and all frosting was delicious buttercream. The first time I tasted store bought birthday cake with its whipped, sweet frosting the notion I would make my own cakes was sealed. I've never taken a class to do cakes. Instead the first time I wanted to try my hand at cake baking and decorating I just called my mom. She came over to my house and walked me through her recipe for frosting, baking a cake and then how to pipe on frosting...all for a Darth Vader cake for my coworkers on the eve of the first Star Wars prequel being released. My first cake was so much better than Jar Jar Binks.

My mom gave me her old few Wilton cake pans and I've added to them through the years; I now have over 50 shaped pans. This is just a portion of my stash hanging in the basement.

I also have more stacks of pans on shelves in the basement. I desperately need a better organization system.

This is the pan my mom used the most when I was a child. This single pan created dolls, Wonder Woman, Cub Scouts and many ice cream cones.

It's from before I was even born and still bakes a beautiful cake.

 I've used it to make Alice in Wonderland.

And more recently my own Velma birthday cake last year.

This vintage Superman/Batman pan with plastic inserts is one of my favorites I found for a steal. I've used it to make my son a Mystic Force Power Ranger and more recently I used the pan and Superman face to create...

Hal Jordan as Green Lantern for Thing Two's sixth birthday.

This is another favorite. I wanted this pan and cake desperately when I was a little girl. I would fondly touch the page at the back of my mom's Wilton catalogs each year dreaming about this cake.

Without that pan my mom made me this awesome cake in 1978 for my fabulous Wonder Woman birthday party from the pan mentioned above. The party where Linda Carter (note the spelling, it was a friend's secretary) called to wish me a happy birthday and all the four year old girls wore yellow headbands with red stars across our foreheads and chased the boys across the yard. But now that I finally scored this gem from the seventies, I had to make my own Wonder Woman cake.

And she was everything I hoped she'd be! I was four years old again.

Vader is my only pan from the Star Wars collection Wilton sold in the early 80s. I'm always on the lookout in thrift stores and garage sales for the R2D2 pan and the much harder to find Boba Fett pan. I've made a Vader cake many times, once I even made a black rice crispy treat in him. My favorite has to be the solid chocolate candy mold I made from it. But my favorite Star Wars cake is of course the towering Death Star cake I made Thing Two last year for his seventh birthday.

But this post was supposed to be all about the latest cake I made, from this 1979 kitten pan. I'm easily distracted by pretty pictures of aluminum pans. I hope you're still with me and awake cause things are going to get more interesting now; I hope. I can at least promise no more pictures of empty cake pans and instead I give you this gem...

Meet Newton! He's the inspiration for the kitten cake I made for a friend's daughter's seventh birthday. Now don't get too excited thinking I'm fabulous enough to create a cake of an orange kitten shrieking in terror under the belly of an AT-AT. Although, how amazing would that be? *daydreams* Great, now my simple cat with yarn seems far too ordinary. *sigh* Oh well, here goes the reveal...

Meet Newton the cake!

I was nervous about pulling off the multicolored fur. I'd never attempted such a thing.

However, I'm very pleased with how Newton's fur turned out. And better yet the birthday girl declared it looked just like her cat...and that ultimately is all that ever matters.

If you're so inclined and killing time wandering the web you can see more pictures of cakes I decorated at my flickr collection here.