Super Dad to the rescue

Father's Day happened to be just a few days after a midnight S.O.S call to my dad when the chain on bike broke on my home from work in the middle of a not-so-nice NE Minneapolis neighborhood. In the spirit of the rescue, I made my dad this cake for Father's Day.

I was stumped for gifts to begin with (how do you buy something meaningful for someone who receives the typical gifts from 7 daughters and a son every Christmas, birthday, and Father's Day?) so this was the perfect opportunity to step outside realm of ties and power tools and try something a little more creative.

My dad's favorite flavor is butterscotch.  It has been as long as I can remember- late night dessert trips as a kid inevitably ended up with a butterscotch Dilly Bar at DQ.  I've never heard of a butterscotch cake, but I was sure it had be done.  It ended up being as easy as adding butterscotch pudding to a yellow cake mix and making adjustments for consistency.

To add more butterscotch, I decided to make a butterscotch ganache for the center icing.  That ended up being easier said than done.  I ended up using half and half instead of whipping cream because that's what I had on hand.  Unfortunately half and half is very hard to whip and the stickiness of the butterscotch did nothing to help matters.  I ended up making a very wide dam of butter cream icing and just pouring the butterscotch ganache on top.  I didn't have too much trouble with leaks, and it definitely still tasted wonderful.

I was able to use some of the Wilton techniques for the design that made decoration pretty simple.  All of the icing is a basic butter cream.  I used a piping-gel transfer to get the image where I wanted it and used a star tip to fill in the spaces.  I got the idea from a cake I saw online; it was done with fondant, so it looked a lot different, but I thought icing worked well.  There were two things I need to work on with icing.  First, I'm still not great at smoothing the icing out after it crusts.  It turned out relatively smooth, but not as good as it could have been.  I also need to work on colors.  I intended the blue to be a dark blue and the red to actually be red, not dark pink, but it seemed like no matter how much gel I added, the colors weren't getting any darker. 

On the plus side, I am most definitely getting faster at designing and icing a cake.  For my decorating classes (and my Easter cake) decoration took several hours.  I'm pretty sure I pumped this out in 45min.

-Beth