If I knew you were coming...

Those in my inner circle are aware that when I'm not clubbing, playing high stakes poker or committing random acts of macrame, I dabble in cake decorating. ("Ah ha!" you say. "That must be why she has 45 pounds to lose!" No, not quite, but this hobby may have contributed to the need for others to drop a few pounds.) 

I enjoy cake decorating like I enjoy giving birth: it's a big, messy pain, but the results are pretty great. (Don't go too deep with this analogy--I have yet to consume one of my children.)

I decorate maybe 10-12 cakes per year. That's about all I can handle at this point in my life. Keep in mind that some of these are wedding cakes and take 40-50 hours from start to finish. Also, keep in mind that spending 40-50 hours on anything, ever, goes against my very nature. 

Today is a cake day. In fact, I'm taking a break from making my 3-year-old nephew's birthday cake to write this post. It's close to midnight, but I still have at least 2 hours of work before I can go to bed, and that's being optimistic. However, I'm grateful that this cake doesn't appear to be an all-night project. 

It helps that I'm making a cake shaped like a rock. (The picture above is of a previous cake I made for the same nephew, which was much more elaborate and large than the planned rock.) One of my nephew's favorite pasttimes is lifting up rocks in his yard in order to unearth the bugs beneath, then smooshing said bugs. So, his cake is going to be a bug-covered rock. It won't be one of my prettier babies, that's for sure. But I hope this cake will teach Ethan that bugs are for eating as well as smooshing.

This post doesn't have much at all to do with dieting. That's OK--we've warned you already that cake will play a part in this blog. At least I'm trying to create an association in your mind between cake and bug smooshing. You're welcome!

 

The Dog Ate my DVD Player

I very much wanted to complete Sara's inspired "Do an Exercise DVD Every Diddly Darn Day of August" challenge. Really, I did. But you see, one day in August I was baking my cousin's wedding cake when something terrible happened. The second tier of this wedding cake was supposed to be strawberry flavored. "No problem," I thought. I've made this recipe dozens of times. So I whipped up the cake batter, filled the pans and popped them into my trusty, preheated oven. I set the timer, then immediately began washing the dishes. Ha! Just kidding--I left the dishes to "soak," and turned to more important tasks like Googling my name (turns out I'm a fairly famous Harlequin novelist). Twenty minutes into the baking/Googling, I smelled a smell--not the fruitily fragrant smell of baking strawberry cake, but the acrid smell of a big fat burning mistake. With a heavy heart (it eats a lot of bacon), I opened the oven door, sending smoke spewing into the kitchen by way of my face (*cough choke sputter*). I found cake batter flowing out of the pans and onto the oven floor, where it was quickly turning into little mounds of carbon cake and creating the aforementioned billowing smoke. I turned off the oven, and began scraping the mess out of the oven, hoping that I could continue to bake the batter left in the pans if I was able to get the oven to stop smoking. (I'll save you the suspense--it didn't work.) Meanwhile, the smoke detector began to beep, sending the parakeets into noisy conniptions and causing my 3-year-old to start crying at a pitch several octaves higher than the detector. (I have yet to have my life saved by a smoke detector, but they've caused me to age 5 years on more than one occasion.) My husband walked in the door at this moment and asked, "What is going on? And why haven't you opened a window?" (see illustration). I responded the way any reasonable woman would, by throwing a handful of burning cake at him. (Hey! He happens to like burnt cake.) I missed him by a mile (I'm not good at sports [even those that involve cake] on the best of days, let alone in stressful smoky situations) and the cake landed on the dog's head. He (the dog) hardly noticed, as he was busy chewing the dickins out of my DVD player. So now you know why I wasn't able to complete the exercise DVD challenge or write in this blog for months. Thanks for understanding.