Learn How to Make Your Mom a Birthday Cake

We decided to title this post with a command. Why? Because we think moms should get a birthday cake from their kids! Not only is it a fun experiment, but it is guaranteed to make your mom happy. And what will make her twice as happy is if you clean up all of the mess!

As we have stated before on our experimenting blog, we love birthdays! We are pretty sure we know who we inherited this from. She loves going all out for birthday parties and has made some fun cakes throughout the years.

So we thought we would try our hand at a cake for her this year. We went through a ton of different recipes, trying to figure out what would be both easy and delicious. When looking through the pantry to check out our ingredients, we decided to try the chocolate cake listed right on the back of the cocoa powder.

Preparing the Batter

The best part about this cake was that it all came together in one bowl. We started with our dry ingredients and added the wet as normal.

It does call for boiling water, so we got a little lazy and decided to just microwave a cup of water until it was steaming hot!

After adding it in, we got a little nervous about how thin the batter was.

The hardest part was trying to pour the thin batter evenly into the prepared cake pans. I kept going back and forth to make sure one did not have more than the other.

Well, maybe that wasn’t the hardest part. Trying to get the cakes out of the pans always makes me break a sweat. There have been plenty of cakes that we have had to “glue” together with frosting because half of it got stuck in the pan and broke apart. A little trick we found to work is to take a bendable spatula and slide it under the sides and ever so slightly lift it up around the edges.

What frosting to use for Mom’s Birthday Cake?

Both of these came out without breaking! Onto to the next experiment of frosting. The truth is, our Mom is not a huge frosting person. It seems most people fall into two camps with cake, either they want the frosting or the actual cake. Mom wants the cake. But a birthday cake without frosting is just not fun.

We decided to go with a basic butter cream frosting because it is the easiest to decorate with and holds its shape better than most. Plus, it is so easy to add some color and make it pretty!

The only problem? Powdered sugar makes such a huge mess! I could not figure out the best way to get it into the mixer without it blowing up and going everywhere. At this point, Mom walked into the kitchen, and we all shoved her out as fast as possible. Seeing the mixer in this state would only make her twitch.

After the cakes were cool, we flipped our bottom one over and added some frosting. Now here is one of the best parts of birthday cakes! You can really add any topping you want to the middle! Our Mom happens to love coconut, so we layered it on, but you could use cookie crumbs, toffee crunches, or anything that sounded good!

Next, we started with our crumb layer. We felt very professional here knowing that we should put a thin layer on to keep all of the crumbs from coming up into the frosting. But we were happily surprised that this cake seemed to hold its crumbs so well and we barely needed that layer.

Should You Make Your Mom a Birthday Cake?

This was not difficult, and we knew that even if it didn’t turn out perfectly, it would show our Mom just how much we wanted her to enjoy her birthday. So we suggest you try it!