Flower Birthday Cake

esNormally I try to make things more healthy than they already are, but I have a huge weakness for cake. This is the one food that I will not mess with. So here is the full fat, sugar and chocolate (yes chocolate!) version of the flower birthday cake I created for my daughter's 4th birthday. I got lots of inspiration as always from

Bakerella, and then changed a few details to fit my needs.

First we started with 3 boxes of the funfetti cake mix. This is for 4 year old after all :) We prepared the mix as the package said then put half of it in a 9X13 pan, and the other half in a Wilton Heart Tasty-Fill Cake Pan. http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?id=9349557A-423B-522D-F223D89DFC184E85&killnav=1 I was a little worried that the pan would overflow, but it did not, and the result was exactly what I had hoped for. I wanted the cake to stand taller than just two 9" rounds stacked together, and it did.
This is the bottom of the cake before I filled it with the pudding.

Once baked and cooled I filled the cake with chocolate pudding and frosted it with one of my favorite cream cheese frosting recipes. The recipe was originally for a carrot cake, but goes well with just about everything and is easy to use in a decorating bag.

Cream Cheese Frosting
1 block cream cheese at room temperature
1 stick of butter also at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
1 box confectioner sugar (3 3/4 c)

Now the fun part: The Cake Balls! Here is a link to the original that inspired my take on these balls:
http://www.bakerella.com/mom-pops/

Because it is not the season for Easter candy corns I used pink marshmallows that I cut in quarters to make the petals, and M&Ms for the center of the flower. All glued together with white chocolate melt aways.  I found it easier to set the dipped pops onto the petals that I laid out on some foil, rather than place petals onto the cake ball upright. I also found that the colder the balls were the easier it was to do, but this created a little cracking problem at the end. When the balls warmed up some of them cracked, but not bad enough that I would do anything different.

Also on a side note, thanks to ShopKo for the Styrofoam. I am chronically cheap and did not like the idea of buying some Styrofoam so I asked a nice worker at ShopKo if they had some they were throwing away and he gave me as much as I needed!

When I was all done I placed some of the flower cake balls on top of the cake and displayed the rest in the Styrofoam. It was also tons easier to serve each little kid a cake ball rather than a slice if cake. Perfect size for little kids :) Plus it left the yummy cake for the moms.

Look how pretty it turned out!