Carrot Garden Cake

I was working on planning a gardening activity for Relief Society and I googled ideas for garden themed treats. This one was so awesome I decided to do a test run to see if I could pull it off. It worked great, and looked soooo cool! Sadly, I actually didn't end up making it for the actual RS event, I just didn't have the time.

This is just a chocolate cake mix, baked in a 9x13 pan. I trimmed the top to make it level, then I cut it in half, and stacked the two pieces to make two layers. To fill and frost it I used this recipe for Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting. It may sound weird, but it's soooo yummy!

Once I had filled and stacked the two cakes, I frosted the top and sides with the chocolate frosting. To make the carrots, I just stuck a plain piping tip in a bag filled with regular (butter cream) frosting that I had dyed orange, and then pushed the tip down into the cake, squeezing frosting into the resulting hole as I pulled the tip out (I discovered that if you twisted the piping tip as you pulled it out then it didn't tear up the cake). Using more of the chocolate frosting I piped the little stars around the sides to make a bit of a lip to contain my "soil" I then crumbled up the bits of cake I had sliced off the top when I leveled it off and sprinkled those on top to look like dirt. I used green butter cream to make the leaves, and then tada! I had an awesome cake. As long as we were careful to slice right on the green tops you got to see the cool carrots in every slice.