Green Ham Cake

When I made June's birthday cake, I tried to google how to make a green ham cake, but all of the suggestions I found were confusing, and not big enough for what we needed. There were 40 cake-eaters here! What I wound up doing was using two boxes of yellow cake mix. I know, I'm a slacker, but I'm on a gluten free diet and don't have any flour. I don't want to buy any either. I wish I had taken photos of the process, but my husband's truck broke down the night before the party, and it took 3 hours out of my evening to get that sorted out. He called me right when I was setting all of my ingredients out to start. I didn't get to start mixing batter until after 9 p.m., and was in such a rush that I didn't even think to get my camera out.

I mixed up one box of cake mix and baked it in a 13x9 pan. Then I mixed up the second box and divided it into two loaf pans, one was about 2/3 full, and the other one was not quite half full. I used the 13x9 cake as the bottom layer of my ham. I covered the top with a thick layer of frosting, and put the taller loaf cake on the front (bone end) of the ham, with the shorter loaf directly behind it, and cemented in between the two loaf cakes with more frosting.

Then I starting carving the hard edges off with a serrated knife.  I used the scraps to fill in the top where the loaves stair-stepped down, I cut a slight curve on the back of the 13x9 cake, but really didn't wind up taking off much cake. I pasted it all together really well with store bought frosting, which seemed better for sticking things together.

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I frosted the cake with home made buttercream, which had about half a bottle of green food coloring in it. I did a crumb coat first, and then slathered on the rest of the frosting as smoothly as a could, and stuck it in the fridge overnight, because at that point it was really late. I got up at the crack of dawn the next day and smoothed out the frosting by laying a paper towel over the cake and rubbing it with my hand. I had to be a bit more firm than if I had just let the buttercream crust before smoothing it out, since the whole thing was cold.

I cut a marshmallow in half to use as the bone, and attached it to the cake with a toothpick. I forgot to tell anyone that, and when my husband served the birthday girl her slice of cake, he gave her the marshmallow end, toothpick and all. No one lost an eye though. I bought some black Wilton decorator icing to draw the outlines on the cake. I LOVE that you can screw the wilton decorating tips directly to the tube. I did not know this when I bought it, since I have never used it before, and it totally blew my mind.