First off, I have to admit that I totally cheated and used cake mix and pre-made frosting. I did this because I really wanted to decorate the cake and not spend hours making both cake and frosting from scratch. Besides, cake mix always tastes great.
The first challenge of this endeavor was how to make grey frosting for the cake. Luckily, Safeway now carries black food coloring. This was a pleasant surprise because I figured I was going to be making black out of red, yellow, green, and blue food coloring. A possible, but challenging escapade. When you mix enough black food coloring into the frosting to turn it the dark grey of MixMatch's logo, it starts to lose it's sturdy consistency and get more liquidy. This made frosting the cake (or rather getting the frosting to stick where you put it) rather challenging. I can't really offer any pearls of wisdom for getting this to work except persistance! It will go where you want it to eventually.
Here's what it looks like after the first frosting...
To decorate the cake, I used toothpicks, a spatula, butter knife, and a nifty reusable plastic pastry bag and tips that I also found at Safeway. I drew all of the white outlines and white shapes with the pastry bag and then used the toothpicks and knives to spread out the frosting inside, kind of like outlining the shape in the coloring book and then filling it in.
Here's what it looks like after the addition of the MixMatchMan...
After I finished all of the frosting...
I plotted to figure out how to bring this to a restaurant. ChuThis suggested that I go to Whole Foods and see if they'd give me a pastry box. They gave me both a pastry box and one of the gold cardboard thingy's to put under the cake. I had to very precariously transfer the cake from the plate to the cardboard, but luckily all went well. Here's the finished look.
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