I likes my men young and my cakes tall.

Apparently the star of this blog aside from me is my buddy Trevor.  You may remember him from such posts as my trip to Ireland, the Trevor Cupcake, and the beer caramel sauce recipe post that featured his beer company:  Evil Genius.  So when his birthday rolls around, I know it's time to show my appreciation for him listening to all my daily crap.  He's a chocolate lover so I roll with my standard chocolate cake recipe.  I make three layers of the cake and filled them with chocolate ganache and white chocolate fudge frosting.  Then I topped the whole thing with a milk chocolate fudge frosting.  (hmmm - no buttercream this time - that's weird).  Anywho, the combination of all the chocolates was awesome and everyone loved it.  But my favorite part was the decoration this time.  I used a simple but new (to me) technique to make the topper.  I wanted to do his company logo but instead of the
"Evil Genius" in the circle, I wanted "Happy Birthday".  So I tried my first buttercream transfer - brilliant!  

Here is the logo  (just the circle part - not the black square):

And here is my cake:

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's not QUITE as perfect as I would have liked but really really not bad.  The logo is actually buttercream.  I used the Wilton premade black because it's too hard to make black frosting.  The lettering I freehanded and but you have to do it backwards!  All you have to do is print out a mirror image of your picture and then put a piece of parchment over the picture and trace the picture with frosting.  Once your have all the front facing things on the picture colored-in, you just pipe on a thick layer of buttercream over the whole picture and put the whole thing in the freezer.  Freeze at least overnight until solid and when you're ready to use it take it out and carefully peel off the parchment - it comes off pretty easily.  Finally just cover up your edges with a border- see my ropey type design around the circle and voila!  Done!  

The buttercream thaws nicely and doesn't run at all.  You can cut right through it after a few hours out of the freezer.  

YAY!  Happy Birthday Trev!  <3