What's Been Put Together At My House

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

This is the cake I made for the Ward Christmas Party. So fun! The bottom is chocolate with raspberry filling, the middle is my famous Lemon Chiffon with lemon filling and the top is Hubs favorite, banana with allspice cream cheese filling. And it's all topped off with my absolutely divine butter cream frosting. MMMMMMM. If you look close, you'll see that the candies are covered with coarse sugar and there is a light skift of sugar "snow" on the cake as well. So pretty and such a nice change from flowers and fruit! We had about 190 guests and had plenty to go around!

Setting the bar too high

Maybe this should go for Wisdom Wednesday, but, I just love giving unsolicited advise. LOL No, really, the intent of my post today is to copy my new friend Nettie who posted in her blog today about the Tea Party she threw for her daughters birthday. I was thrilled to see that she made the same cake that I did when K turned 4!

Anyhow, I've always made a special cake for the kids for their birthday. It's my thing. I've made license plates for the big 16, Tweety Bird, numbers, just whatever came to mind. And for all the creativity, they weren't difficult or spectacular. But then I made a Barbie cake, and my adventure into 3-D cakes began. Now I've been faced with the pressure of coming up with better and better cakes each year! I will show you what I mean:

Here's the cake that came after Barbie:


Next came the Dragon Cake:




Then I was asked to make a wedding cake:



Who can forget the Pink Mini Cooper?


I can't find what I did with the photo's, but there was also a ladybug cake in there somewhere. Black and Red frosting is cute, but it's also a clean up nightmare.

And this last year, B wanted a Dragon Castle Cake. I totally cheated on this one! LOL


I really love Nettie's idea about only having "friend" parties every other year. I knew this last year as I was sticking Imaginext peices to the Dragon Castle cake that I was approaching burn out level. The wedding, car and castle cake were all within the space of a month and a half. Given that each cake takes most of a week for me to complete, I was beginning to feel like an indentured servant. Slave to the cake. And we've already established that I have issues with keeping the house up. Adding cake baking, making and decorating to the fray doesn't do that situation any favors.

I have people telling me all the time that I should sell my cakes. To them I say "NOT"! It's something I enjoy doing (most of the time) and the surest way to kill a hobby is to try and turn it into profit. Anyhow, my mouth preceded my brain again, and I offered to make my sister's wedding cake. So now the question becomes: The last wedding cake took 11 batches of batter, 4 batches of custard and 3 batches of butter cream; What can I do to top that?! :O)

Sixteen

I guess the adventure really began months ago, as my step-daughter contemplated her upcoming sixteenth birthday. Someone really should shoot the producers at MTV for their stupid show, "My Super Sweet Sixteen" . If you have a 14 or 15 year old girl in your home, you've probably been subjected to veiwing an episode or two of it. In all my high mindedness concerning my dear, sweet D, I never guessed she would take a television show to heart. Oh, how wrong I can be at times. I won't elaborate on the interim drama that ensued with her mother, at least right now, but once it was all said and done, D got to have her very own Sweet Sixteen birthday party, paid for by her mother, chaparoned by yours truely and Dad of all Trades. Oh, and I did the cake.

Yes, I know it seems like a small thing, but, really, it's not ever a small thing for me to make a cake. You see, I am somewhat of a perfectionist. After having been repeatedly accused of not wanting to have "anything to do with the party", me, being a sucker for punishment, commenced to baking and sculpting and frosting. Yes, that is a car cake, yes it is pink, and yes.....it is large. Very, very large. 6 recipes, large, in fact. It's supposed to be a mini cooper. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but, after 20 hours of baking and frosting, it was close enough.

So the party was scheduled for the Saturday night after the big day. After a long day of feeling slightly nauseated, I gathered the three small children's belongings and paraphenalia, and dropped them off with my friend Sheryl. We drove to the appointed party place and commenced to partying. The place was rather nice, and the kids spent more time playing sand volley ball and shooting hoops than dirty dancing on the dance floor or playing tonsil hockey in the darkness, which freed up my husband and I to shoot some very bad games of pool and *gasp* DANCE.....while no one was looking. ;) I don't think the turnout was quite what Delani had hoped, but she was determined to have a good time anyway. When the designated party stopping time came, we cleaned up the balloons, assorted paper goods and chased off the party goers so they could roam the streets without the pleasure of our company.

While the party was *the* main event in D's eyes, for me, the real event was the obtaining of the driver's license. I have now accompanied all three of my step-children to take this test of all tests, in fact, I've been largely responsible for teaching them all to drive as well. If that won't turn your hair grey, I don't know what will. Our present to D was a 1991 Honda Civic, purchased (or purchasing, as the case may be) from my SIL. We gave her the car several months early to allow her to practice driving it since it's a stick shift. After lots and lots of practice, some tears, and a couple close calls, we feel reasonably confident that she can drive it without one of us in the front seat with the obligatory white knuckles, stomping at the invisible brake pedal on the passenger side of the car. The significance of this event is that after 8 years of non-stop chauferring of teenage type people, I get a break. When you have one or more small people to strap into car seats each time you leave the house, and bus service that doesn't accomodate either early morning seminary or after school practices, this becomes a very big deal indeed. The idea of not having to plan naptime around afternoon pickup, or not having to drag sleeping children out into the night to pickup kids after a dance or movie makes me positively giddy.

Of course, I am a little sad that this little girl is getting so big. She was 5 when her dad and I got married, so there's quite a lot of accumulated history between us. I've watched her grow from the little girl that was sad her dad kissed me at our wedding, into a bright, athletic young woman who doesn't seem to be in a hurry to act like a crazed and angry teenager, bent on self destruction. I keep bracing for it, but so far, we've been pretty lucky. I think that *just* maybe, she might still like us enough by the time she has her own wedding, she will be willing to laugh when I cry because her new husband kisses her.