Valentine's Day Cake with Marshmallow Icing

When it comes to cake decorating, one thing I've been thinking of trying for a while is decorating with boiled icing. Growing up, we didn't make this type of icing very often. In fact, we didn't make icing for cakes very often, period. My mom usually just bought a plastic container of pre-made icing and I'm totally fine with that. (I could eat rainbow chip icing plain... it is so good!) But, for cake decorating, it's definitely not the best option.

When I married John and as we started having more birthday celebrations with his family, the first thing I noticed was that they don't really like the traditional buttercream icing. But one thing they do like is boiled icing! 

I had never seen anyone else use boiled icing other than my Grandpa Grimes, so naturally, we called it "Grandpa's boiled icing". It wasn't until I was married that I realized that this type of icing was actually a thing and that my in-laws call it "Mom's marshmallow icing". Whatever it's actually called, it tastes like a jar of marshmallow fluff. Well, thinking John wouldn't scrape all the icing off if I used this kind, I wanted to see how it would hold up if I used it to decorate a cake with. 

I knew ahead of time that this icing was gooey, so I decided to pipe it instead of spread it like a traditional cake. 

I used a 1M tip (a.k.a. my favorite tip!) to pipe swirls on each layer and then waited for a little while to let the icing set up a little more. Then, I stacked them up and put in the cake topper. 

Speaking of the cake topper... I made it with some thicker, sort of a card stock type of paper. I wrote and cut out the word and then glued glitter to it. I then hot glued part of a wooden skewer to it. It worked great and I'm definitely saving it to use again some time.

Although this cake turned out cute, it had one major flaw...

It's mostly icing. There was no middle filling like I was planning on using. At first, I was indecisive about what to put in between the layers, and when I finally decided, I realized John had the car seats with the car at work and I couldn't get the supplies I needed from the store. Aaaand since I waited until Valentine's day to make the cake we were going to eat that day, I had to just go with what I had, and that was icing...

Unfortunately, this was way too much icing which ended up with John (and I) scraping off the extra frosting... Which was one major reason I made this cake... So he wouldn't scrape off the frosting... Haha! 

Oh well, after talking about it, it turns out he likes pudding on his cakes more than icing... not sure how I'm going to find a way to decorate with that... but I'm up for the challenge! And maybe this time he really won't scrape it all off! Hahaha!