A celebration of cake

Friday morning. It's going to be a hot one. I drop Paul off at daycare around 8:30. He's an instant celebrity, greeted with much enthusiasm by his friends. Being four apparently creates quite a bit of magnetism. Or, it could just be the cupcakes he brought in the day before (thanks grandma). Chocolate does that to a person. I manage to sneak in a kiss between his many hugs and head off to the grocery store. The party is in one day and there is much left to do. Faithful readers (and anyone who has spoken to me in the last six months) know that I am completely obsessed with making the drum cake. I collect the last minute ingredients and head home.

By 11:00 the temperature is headed straight for 80. Not the best day to have the oven on for several hours. The design requires two cake mixes in three separate pans and a giant sugar cookie. All of this bake ware does not fit in the oven at the same time. My kitchen reaches new levels of heat. Ugh. Then there is the matter of my impulsive behavior and lack of ability to follow directions. Honestly. I plan for months and when it comes time to execute I muck it up with my impatience. The deep 8" round cake comes out beautifully, but the two 9" cakes do not. Later I asked my mom what I did wrong and she said, "I told you last week to use waxed paper on the bottom!" Oops. She did. I forgot. When I tip the cakes out, the bottoms stay in. I spend a long time trying to "glue" them back together with frosting. It's not pretty, but I refuse to turn the oven back on and cook another cake. The frosting itself is a sad story too. Despite the heat, my butter takes forever to soften, and the frosting requires extraordinary strength to mix (not to mention the mess of confectioners sugar spewed everywhere) and doesn't spread as easily as I had hoped. At 4:00 I call CJ and tell him to pick the boy up from daycare as I am knee deep in blue frosting. He comes in all excited to play outside. Mommy can't. She's working on your drum cake. I stop at 6:00 to go out to dinner with an almost finished cake in the fridge.

Saturday. We are supposed to head over to mom's to dye Easter eggs. I send the boys over first and promise I will meet up with them shortly. I just have to finish touching up the frosting. This time I remember to take the butter out early and the frosting forms without strenuous mixing. I need to touch up the blue and then make yellow for the cymbal. Oops. Instead of splitting the batch of frosting, I dye the whole thing blue. Seeing as there is no way to get from blue to yellow, I have to make ANOTHER batch of frosting. Good thing I bought extra confectioners sugar. It is nearly 11:00 by the time I finish. CJ makes a handful of comments to Paul along the lines of, "You know this is not about you anymore, right son? It's about mommy." So what? So I like the challenge and the positive feedback. It wouldn't have taken nearly as long if I could actually follow directions. Perhaps one day I will learn to stop and think things through. In the meantime, here it is (drum roll please... hahaha), birthday cake 2010:

My thoughts at this point: John will not be home in time for his first birthday in June. Do I make him a cake in honor of the day, or wait until he comes home? Can the van family survive this madness twice a year???