Banana Split Cake and Sheep Cake for Birthday

I'm a big fan of Paula Deen's Home Cooking Show, and saw her make a delicious looking cake on her tv show last week. I thought that this would be just the dessert to serve family and friends on Granny's 80th Birthday.

So yesterday, I made Paula Deen's Banana Split Cake, and it was a hit at the end of our bar-b-que meal outside. It was very tasty, cool for summer, and an easy recipe that will feed up to 20 guests.

Since Betty (Granny) reached eight decades in age, and is a collector of "anything sheep," I decided to also make her a sheep birthday cake. Err, I mean a birthday cake in the shape of a sheep.

I looked at various places on the internet searching for how to make a cake in the form of about any object you can imagine. In this web hunt, I came across a cool video for making a DOG CAKE . Click here if you want to see a spectacular dog cake made over four days, compressed into a four minute video:




This sheep cake was shown at Family Fun with Recipe Finder:

It was cute, but who would eat all those marshmallows?

I came up with a different cake by using a boxed white cake mix, the required ingredients, and then baked the cake in a 9" x 15" jelly roll pan. After the cake cooled and was then frozen overnight, I cut out a sheep cardboard form and cut around the form placed atop the frozen cake. (It helped to freeze the cake thoroughly before cutting it.) The "waste" cake taken from around the edges of the sheep form was frozen for later use with strawberries in a different dessert.

After spreading the cut-out sheep cake with white icing, I sprinkled on colored sugar daisy petals purchased at the craft store. And I added two goofy eyes to the face of the sheep. With a little imagination, you can see the result looks a bit like a sheep:

This cake was a separate dessert for the birthday girl.

Granny's birthday present from Gene and me is this original watercolor by Maggie Ehmann. Matted and framed, it measures 23" x 25." I purchased this several months ago in anticipation of the Big Eight-O:

Maggie did a beautiful job with the sheep, shepherd and dog!

This is Betty blowing out candles on the cake at her birthday party yesterday.