I made a Christmas Tree cake to celebrate Epiphany, and to close out the kids' school vacation in style.
The cake itself is the ever-popular chocolate banana cake, with the same frosting mentioned in the column -- 8 ounces of cream cheese, softened, whipped with about 2T of sugar free vanilla syrup, folded into about a cup and a half of heavy cream, whipped separately with another couple of tablespoons of sf syrup. I added a tablespoon of dried egg whites to the frosting this time to see if it would stabilize it; it tends to evaporate overnight in the refrigerator. I used a ton of green food coloring but still the color came out that pale mint green, but the flavor and texture were excellent, and nicely set off the dense chocolate banana cake.
Trimmings were about 1/4 cup unsweetened coconut in a ziploc bag with a drizzle of sf syrup and 8 drops of liquid food coloring, followed by shaking like mad to distribute the color and sweetener evenly.
I used a teaspoon to trim the tree, and then dotted the white chocolate chips around for the ornaments.
We ate about a third of it after dinner. DD, who was over at a friend's house for most of the day, was completely enchanted with the cake when she came home. She finished her salad in record time so she wouldn't "have to wait forever to have some Christmas tree cake!" For the first time in recorded history, she finished dinner first.
It worked out perfectly having this now. We've eaten our way through all the Christmas treats and sweets. If I had made the cake for Christmas day, it would have been lost in the shuffle. Having it now made today special. The kids have already asked if we can do this again next year; I think it would make a lovely family tradition. I'm already looking forward to making a lamb cake at Easter.
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