Snow Drift Cakes

Just a tiny bit of seasonal sweet stuff! Introducing my Snow Drift Cakes with laser cut shovel spoons: putting the fun back in shoveling since 2014!

Supplies

• white cake batter (whatever your favorite recipe is)
• paper cupcake cups
• 2 (12x) cupcake pans = 24 cupcakes
• cream cheese icing (your favorite recipe)
• powdered sugar
• shredded coconut
• laser cut shovel spoons
• optional: yellow food coloring

Step 1: White Cake Cupcakes

Make your favorite white cake recipe and fill 21* cupcake cups 3/4 way full with cake batter.

*A fun optional game of sorts will make up the other 3 cupcakes if you're up for it!

Step 2: Optional: Prizes for Picking the Yellow Snow!

If you're going to be serving these to a large group of folks, try adding even more fun to the party mix by adding yellow food coloring to the last bit of batter. This will produce approx. 3 'yellow snow' cupcakes. Let everyone know that the 3 people who get the yellow snow get prizes! (There's no way to tell once they're all iced which ones are yellow!)

Step 3: Making the Shovel Spoons

I've attached an Illustrator file with 20 shovel spoons laid out and ready to be laser cut from a piece of 4" x 24" x 1/8" craft basswood (or an unfinished/untreated hard wood).

Make sure that the shovel spoons are running parallel to the wood grain, so that they are the strongest they can be.

Also, to reduce the amount of burning on the front and back of the pieces, before cutting, cover both sides of the wood in masking tape.

Once cut*, the shovels will have burnt edges that will taste, well, burnt. So after you've removed the masking tape, take a small piece of 220 sand paper and gently sand all the edges of each of the shovels. You don't have to go nuts and get all the burnt edge off. Just as much as you can, easily, focusing on the part that will scoop the cake.

*If you don't have access to a laser cutter, ask Google for a list of local makers/manufacturers who might be able to cut them for you OR these are two great online resources:

http://www.bigbluesaw.com
https://www.ponoko.com

Step 4: Icing Icing Baby

Remove the paper cupcake cups and put the cupcakes face down on individual serving plates.

Using a butter knife, ice each cupcake with a thick layer of the frosting.

Step 5: Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow!

On each cake, sprinkle a thin layer of shredded coconut, then using a sieve, sprinkle a layer of powdered sugar.

Step 6: Shovel It In!

The only thing left to do now is get shoveling!

Happy Holidays everyone!!