Every time a holiday or birthday rolls around, I find myself up until about 4 am the night before, cooking. I love to cook. I love labor-intensive dishes with funny names and 54 ingredients no one has ever heard of before. I love decorating cakes. But I always find myself unable to get things done in a timely manner. This leaves me scrambling around at the last minute, after everyone else has gone to bed because it's the only time I can get to myself.
With the Boy's birthday being tomorrow (technically today, but I haven't gone to bed so I'm pretending it's still Wednesday), I should have made his cakes on Tuesday at the latest. Freeze on Tuesday night, thaw Wednesday morning, and decorate Wednesday afternoon. Scrap that. I had a crappy day in terms of getting anything done. First, Imri had no nap. When she doesn't have a nap, I can't get anything done. Second, I had to schlep it to the store for cake boards and luster dust and my new star-shaped pan. Oh, and strawberries because Mr. Birthday Boy decided that he wanted a strawberry cake. So I was starting to bake at 3:30 today. And he wanted to help, which means he added one agonizingly careful spoonful of flour at a time, whereas I usually just dump in about a third of it all at once. Not complaining, but it did make it take longer. And it being Wednesday, I didn't get to bake until after class and our obligatory Wednesday night wally-world run. So now it is midnight and I just finished washing all the baking things and supper dishes. The cake won't have enough cooling time so I'm just going to throw it in the freezer for about 1/2 hour and hope it tightens the crumb enough to ice tomorrow.
The boys are pushing for a 3-d chainsaw cake. I don't know how advisable that is. I did a 3-d tractor last year, because their confidence in my cake sculpting skills far outstrips what is possible given the laws of our universe. They may have to live with a 2-d chainsaw piped onto a rectangular cake. Andy was like, "Naw this is easy. I drew a diagram. Make 3 rectangular cakes, cut here and here and here, assemble like so." [stupid engineers.] He expects a miracle; they may just have to pound sand.
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wakeful dreamer