Making a birthday cake in Spain

My birthday is tomorrow. I will be turning 27. Does that now make me in my late twenties? Ah! Here in Spain oddly enough it is the person celebrating the birthday who is responsible for treating their friends on their special day. I guess we do the same things as kids in the States by bringing cupcakes to class but here this tradition continues into adulthood. In order not to be shunned by my co-workers (who I love) I figured I would make something to bring tomorrow. Anyway, I decided to make myself a birthday cake which has been a more complicated process than what I originally expected. I shouldn´t be surprised since this tends to be the case. 

 First off, I love funfetti cakes. When I was back in Michigan for my sister´s wedding I bought two boxes of Halloween cake mix (it was half off since we were shopping the day after Halloween) and brought them back to Spain with me since you can´t have a birthday without funfetti. This afternoon I baked the cake, adapting pretty well to the metric system here. I had to consult the internet a few times to get the measurements and temperature right but things went off pretty well. I even used my new oven for the first time!

Here is the cake, please to note the black and orange "fettis" making it quite fun. After having finished the cake itself, I began to lament not having any frosting to top it with. Here in Spain I have never seen frosting available at the grocery store. My co-workers say you can buy it at a few specialty stores but that it costs a lot. Even if I decided to spring for a can of frosting since it is my birthday and all, it is Sunday and NOTHING is open. This is a case of bad planning on my part but what can you do? I was too busy buying a bunch of different kinds of beer for our party on Friday to worry about cake. I decided to Google recipes for homemade frosting, hoping that I would have all the ingredients on-hand.

 This one seemed to fit the bill and got very good reviews. Bonus, it doesn´t require powdered sugar, something I didn´t have in my cupboards:

 http://tastykitchen.com/recipes/desserts/thate28099s-the-best-frosting-ie28099ve-ever-had/

I kind of had to cobble together the recipe since my kitchen isn´t exactly fully stocked. I added a bunch of sprinkles in the end since everything is better with sprinkles. Actually the frosting tastes pretty good even if it is a bit ugly. 

After a long afternoon this is how the cake ended up. Let´s see if we can choke it down tomorrow.

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