Rusty's Birthday

For my brother's birthday, I decided I wanted to make him a cake that was baseball related in some way. Before making this cake, I stumbled upon these:

I also stumbled upon a review by Confections of a Foodie Bride for these that included this image, that looked VERY promising:

So, with as promising as this image made them seem, I went out and bought them. The strips come in two different sizes, but I got the ones pictured above. Using them can be quite simple. All you do is roll them out (I keep my rolled up because I typically use them on round pans, so it makes them already round for when you use them), completely soak them in cold water and then slightly drain off a bit of water. Then you wrap them around the batter-filled cake pans (it seems that it's better to put them on right before you put the pans in the oven so they are still cold), and pin it in place. I'm assuming that the coldness of the strip keeps heat from penetrating the sides of the cake and focusing on the bottom. Therefore, the cake rises evenly. Here's how mine turned out!:

This is the cake right out of the oven. Notice the strip is still on it.

This is a side view of the cake, you can see how evenly it baked.

This is the view from the top. Notice the sides are still pretty yellow and not overdone. It's hard to tell, but they pulled away from the sides of the pan as well.

Here's the cake out of the pan. Look at how beautifully yellow those sides are!

I was pretty happy with how the two different cakes turned out. It made it SO much easier to make the actual cake. I didn't have to level anything and the cake just turned out well over all. Here is the final product:

Not bad for my first try at the border like that. By comparison with the previous cake, you can tell this icing was MUCH better.