Pizza Cake (or Piece of Cake!)

Today we had nothing scheduled, so I planned to let the kids just have fun playing whatever they wanted to play...they built a fort & set up a Littlest Pet Shop Village & all other sorts of things.

I subscribe to Family Fun magazine & one year they sent me these little magazine "extras"--one being a booklet of fun cakes to make. The kids came across this a few weeks ago & spent quite some time looking at every cake & reading the ingredient list. Jack went so far as to check the pantry for the items we might already have on hand. They decided on this "Pizza Cake" & have been asking for weeks to make it, so I determined that today would be the day! It is basically a yellow cake that is the "crust", red frosting for the "sauce" and then various fruit "toppings" to make a pizza. I had a box of Jiffy yellow cake mix, so we baked that up in a round pan.

Next, the recipe called for 2 cups white frosting colored red with food coloring to look like tomato sauce.

Here we are starting with the red food coloring...

And here is some more red food coloring...

Stirring it in & it's pretty pink...

Jack is really working hard to get it mixed in...still pink.Here Darcy is adding MORE red food coloring...

See, still pink!

The real reason Darcy wants to help...licking the left-over icing!

So after one whole bottle of red food coloring, it is still a beautiful, bright PINK! At this point I was digging in the cabinet for more red coloring & found some "concentrated" food dye...I used the whole red container of that & it finally started looking red, but I do think all the food coloring made the frosting taste a little bitter...next time I'm going to try to find frosting that is already red or pink to start with or perhaps try the powder food colors.

We topped our pizza with crushed pineapple "cheese", sliced strawberry "pepperoni", sliced banana "mushrooms" and mandarin oranges (I'm not sure what their real pizza equivalent would be!) You can use any fruit you have on hand & you can also use grated white chocolate for the cheese. For added fun, serve in a pizza box as shown in the picture!

Putting the toppings on the pizza...first the crushed pineapple "cheese"...

Then everything else...there was a fair amount of tasting involved, too!

And here are my 3 little chefs with their Pizza Cake!

Mmmm, can't wait for dessert time!

Go here for the official recipe! I just noticed that the online version says to use red frosting...our booklet does day white frosting with red food coloring...they must have realized that was not working very well after all! LOL!