Balloon Birthday Cake

This is a basic birthday cake I decorated. I used my signature chocolate cake recipe and my signature vanilla buttercream icing. I spread one of the cake layers with a layer of buttercream, topped it with the other, and iced the entire cake. Then I used my cake comb to make a design of lines around the side of the cake. I used two different colors of buttercream, pink and green, for decorating. I did a simple dot border, alternating big dots in green and small dots in pink, around the bottom of the cake. Then I did a rope border around the top, again alternating pink and green. I wrote on the cake in a pink and green pattern too. I made two basic green balloons and piped some pink ribbon to them. The balloons are a simple idea I picked up looking at other cakes. They are much simpler and quicker than buttercream roses, which is good given I didn't have a lot of time to decorate this cake. Also, this is not the case here, but balloons may be a better choice for cakes for boys, who may feel roses are too girly. For the balloons and the bottom border, I used my new decorating tip. It is an open #3 tip, which is simply a round opening. It is a bigger opening than a basic #1 open tip I used for writing on the cake, but you can also get tips with much bigger openings as well. These tips are good for filling in shapes, covering large amounts of space with icing, or making large swirls, such as those on cupcakes. This is a pretty basic and simple birthday cake, but a design that you see on many store-bought and bakery cakes. It is fairly quick, simple, and classy, and always seems to go over well.