Pina Colada Cake

Happy Saturday!  I'm getting ready for a scrap night with one of my best friends.  Her birthday was on Wednesday, so I made a cake that I'm going to surprise her with when she gets here.

She and her husband went to Turks and Caicos back in January for my wedding.  While we were there, we enjoyed our fair share of pina coladas.  Just a couple weeks ago, I was over at her place scrapping and she whipped up a pitcher of pina coladas - I had to laugh as we've never drank and scrapped before!  But, there's a first time for everything I guess, and they sure tasted good!  When I was looking for a cake recipe for her birthday cake, I stumbled upon a Pina Colada cake.  Seems perfect to me!  This recipe used a boxed cake mix as it's base, so it's not entirely from scratch.  But it is slightly modified so it's not just a 'plain' box cake.  And the frosting is from scratch, so that has to count for something, right?!?

I also used this opportunity to try out my Cricut Cake machine.  My hubby bought it for me for Christmas and I had yet to take it out of the box.  My good friend Missy has been making good use of her Cricut Cake lately and she was gracious enough to give me a lot of tips.  A huge thank you to her for all the advice!  I decided to start with sugar sheets, because I've heard they're very easy to work with.  I've never worked with fondant before, so I'm very nervous about that.  Hopefully you'll see a post before too long where I try fondant, but this time I stuck with the sugar sheets.  The sugar sheets were so easy to work with and the Cake cut the images very well - I was impressed since I chose fairly small images, but everything came out great.

Thanks for coming by to take a look.  I hope you have a wonderful weekend!!

Pina Colada Cake
1 box Betty Crocker super moist yellow cake mix
1 can (8 oz) crushed pineapple in juice, undrained
1/2 c water
1/3 c vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 tsp rum extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour sides and bottom of pans.

In large bowl, beat cake mix, pineapple, water, oil, eggs and rum extract with electric mixer on low speed 2 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally (do not overbeat).  Pour into pans.

Bake as directed on box.  For round cakes, cool 10 minutes before removing from pans to cool completely.

Coconut Buttercream Frosting
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, room temperature
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tsp coconut extract
4 cups powder sugar
2 tsp to 2 tbsp milk

Beat the butter until pale and fluffy.  Add the vanilla and coconut extract and mix well.  Add the powdered sugar 1 cup at a time, making sure the icing is smooth before adding the next cup.  After all of the powdered sugar is incorporated, bet in the milk, one teaspoon at a time until the desired consistency is reached (I used about 3 tsp).

Decorations
Wilton sugar sheets
Happy Birthday from Cake Basics cut at 2 inches
Hibiscus flowers from Life's a Beach cut at 1.5 inches

Place images on cake as desired, using small drops of icing to adhere them to the cake if needed.