Planet Neptune Cake
As another birthday passes for our daughter, I realize this gem of a cake never made it out of my draft folder last year. I shared the one photo with friends, but not the rest of the world – so here we go! One of my favorite cakes!
Every kid out there wants an out of this world birthday cake, right? I have tried to make it a point to make each of my kids cakes since they were born. I had intended to follow through with using the Wilton Mini-Bear pan for all their birthdays as a fun tradition, but sometimes princesses and planets get in the way. (I don’t mind!)
This year (Last year) I asked what princess or Barbie did my daughter want on a cake. First answer, “No princess, I want PLANET URANUS!” Okay then….excuse me while my thirteen year old self stifles a laugh at Uranus. We finally agreed on Jupiter or Neptune, Neptune won because it’s blue and it is her favorite color.
Everything was going great until I went to color the icing, and realize I have almost no blue left. I have no time to run to the store, so I divide the icing up as best I can and get the icing as blue as I can. I scraped the insides of the little squeeze bottle just to get enough to make the dark blue spots and swirls.
Every time I make a new birthday cake I proclaim it as my favorite one, but this one will always be really cool. I want to make others, like this amazing Jupiter cake by Cakecrumbs!
The way this particular icing has a really cool texture to it as it whips. I was a bit worried about all the smoothing that needed to happen, but as it came together I thought it really brought the cake to life with all the extra swirls.
I spooned some of the darker blue into a mound on the cake and used a toothpick for swirls and texture. For the clouds and other lined areas I put a bit of dark blue icing and just swirled it along.
I took a fair amount of inspiration from the Voyager mission gallery located on the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab website.
Swirls of color! Working with frosting is like working with paints. Less is more, and it’s hard to go back.
To top it all off we have Voyager 2 doing a Happy Birthday swing by. It’s made out of foil wrapped toothpicks, a foil wrapped bamboo skewer, and a cupcake wrapper. (Way less scientific than the actual craft, and not to scale!)
Sqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqueals of delight everywhere! The yellow cake recipe comes from RockRecipes.com. So moist and delicious!
Easy Vanilla Buttercream
Ingredients
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 tablespoons heavy cream / or milk
- ⅛ tablespoons table salt
- 2½ cups confectioners’ sugar 10 ounces
- 20 tablespoons 2½ sticks unsalted butter, softened<BR>
- DOUBLE RECIPE FOR TWO-LAYER CAKE!
Instructions
- Using whisk attachment in a stand mixer, beat butter on medium high until smooth (20 seconds).
- Add sugar and salt, and slowly increase speed to medium-low. After 45 seconds most of the sugar should be moistened.
- Scrape the sides of the bowl down, and mix again for 15 seconds.
- Scrape the sides of the bowl down, and add vanilla and heavy cream. Beat at medium speed until incorporated, about 10 seconds. Increase speed to medium-high and beat until light and fluffy (about 4 minutes). Scrape the bowl down once or twice.
