Kitchen Adventures: Birthday Cake from scratch!!

My Niece who's in 2nd year of highschool had her birthday last March 23. I wanted to give her something really special so I decided to bake her a cake. I have baked cakes before but that was soooo long ago and I used store-bought icing and candies back then. This time around, I wanted to make everything from scratch. I already had the type of cake in mind which is a new recipe-Strawberry carrot cake. I basically came up with this one because we had this jar of strawberry jam sitting inside the ref that nobody cared to touch so I decided to make something out of it so it won't go to waste ( I also have this knack for creating something out of what ingredients are available around the house this is due to watching door knock dinners on the food channel when I was young...familiar with this show? :D). I made that as my cake base and decided I'd do a special icing  I came up with just recently, again utilizing what ingredient is available. I have come up with a cream cheese icing dupe that is actually much more affordable. Now, I don't want to dwell on measurements in this post, because sometimes my experiments were made out of gut feelings meaning, I don't measure I just mix, mix, mix...haha! Making the icing was somewhat of a challenge also because I don't have a mixer. I incorporated air by mixing by hand( it's all in the wrist baby!! :D). Since my niece likes the color pink the cake has to be the same color. Initially I planned to just frost the whole thing and pipe in the borders but then I noticed the cake was crooked so I just decided to pipe icing on the whole thing. Well, the project did not disappoint me. Here's what the cake looked like (drumroll please...):

  

I forgot to tell you, this is just a mini cake I'm not yet that ambitious *wink. Now, problem is, I have no box to put this in! Guess I'd just have to come up with something.. :D