Tuesday Treat: Crayon Cake

I hope you enjoyed President's Day, working or on holiday. We had a lot of fun around here. Since the kids had a four day weekend from school, we started an art project using wax crayons, poster boards, and a hair dryer. It was a lot of fun. I got some video of it and the finished pictures. I will post at least the pictures later this week.

Today's Treat celebrates the fun that we had this weekend with a patriotic flare.

Crayon Cake!
So here are the directions (I assume you can figure the ingredients out on your own).

1.  Get a cake mix of your choice. We used a yellow cake mix. Let it cool completely. And I do mean completely. Otherwise it will crumble to pieces and will not work for this.
2. While your cake cools, mix 1 can of vanilla frosting between 3 bowls and tint two bowls with red and blue, giving you a bowl of red, white, and blue icing. Trim one end of 5 ho-hos to a point (to look like a crayon!) and set them on a wire rack one at a time. Microwave a bowl of icing for 5-10 seconds to make it slightly like whipped cream and then spread over the ho-ho. Make 5 blue crayons or 2 red 3 blue crayons, or 2 red 2 blue 1 white crayons, or 3 white 1 red 1 blue crayons... you get the idea. However you want to work it. Let those sit so they can harden on the wire rack.
3. While the ho-hos set, return to your cake. Make sure it is level first. Then, at one of the short ends, score out a half circle (give it a decent diameter, about 4") so that it looks like the open end of a crayon box. Using a sharp knife, cut out the half circle at a depth of about 1" and discard the half circle (or use it for some other mini-treat). Frost the cake in the white vanilla icing, including the inside of the half circle. Another can of vanilla frosting will probably be needed.
4. Place the "crayons" in the opening of the "box" and trim them to fit the curvature of the opening. Using a combination of the three colors, line the opening of the box and the bottom corners of the box (don't use white on white... you want it to be visual), the markings on the crayons which are the lines around the top and the crayon circles, and any kind of message you want to put on the cake where the brand would usually be at.

You can use candy strips (like licorice strips) to make the lines on the box instead of frosting if you'd like. Or you can skip the patriotic colors and go for a more traditional look. I got the original idea here and they used yellows, oranges, and greens. They also made a suggestion of using disposal zip lock bags as icing tubes, which I had never thought of before. Just put the frosting in, squeeze it into a corner and seal the bag, then snip the corner and voila, instant icing tube. We used real ones but that is only because we happened to have them. Not everyone has those just laying around the house.

Since we didn't take a picture, I'll describe our cake as best as I can. We used a yellow cake mix and made 3 red crayons and 2 blue crayons. We iced the cake in white frosting and then lined the open end with blue. The bottom corners were also blue with an additional blue line around the inside edge. We used white icing for the lines and circles on the crayons. We drizzled red candy stars into the blue corners and then throughout the white box portion of the cake. In the middle, we chose to leave it blank rather than write on it. It looked really cute and the kids loved it. They started eating it before I could get a picture. Or, I should say, our father started eating the cake before I could get a picture. Ha!