Red velvet birthday cake with the best ever cream cheese frosting!

                                  My fabulous mother's birthday just passed this weekend.  We celebrated with pizza and red velvet cake.  She is truly a beautiful person inside and out.  She often goes out of her way for others and has a very positive outlook on life.  I strive to be the same type of mom to my own children.  We typically do a birthday dinner in her honor at my house ,but schedules have been so busy that we opted for something more simple this year. 

 I made this rose out of fondant.  I used this great tutorial.
I was surprised it was much easier than I thought it would be.

Here are the boys blowing out her candles!

 How cute are these Holiday dessert plates?

I used Duncan Hines red velvet cake mix.  I usually choose to go with a box cake mix because I am not the world's best scratch baker.(Which is really an understatement). Cake baking is my biggest downfall in particular.  I'm much better with cupcakes though!  My biggest issue is that my cakes tend to stick in the pan, for whatever reason.  I find this problem less with box mix so I like to stick with what works.    

I used one of my favorite icing recipes that I found on Annies-eats.com
 The icing recipe goes along with an oreo cupcake recipe that is linked above.
The first time I made this icing I made her cupcake recipe also. They are amazing but a little more involved than I anticipated.  They are beautiful cupcakes though. I'd even consider them cupcake wars worthy! I made them for my son's birthday a couple years ago and luckily was doing well on time because my kitchen kind of resembled a cupcake wars set after they were done! lol
Here is the icing recipe!

Best ever cream cheese frosting!
8oz cream cheese
6 TBS butter
1TBS vanilla extract
4 Cups confectioners sugar
2 TBS heavy cream

Combine your cream cheese and butter using an electric mixer.  Add in your vanilla extract.  Whip in your powdered sugar a little at a time.  Last add in your heavy cream.

I doubled this recipe to have enough to ice the cake.

Enjoy, this icing is so good!