The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men...

(... often go astray.)

This turned out to be not bad, despite my frustration levels and snappishness.  And Eric was great about it.

See, we again held our annual Mardi Gras in June party, which I posted about last year.  It's always a big hit, and the guest list keeps getting bigger and better.  This year, in addition to my traditional southern pecan pies, I decided to try my first ever topsy turvy cake, since I'd taken that class.

I knew I'd need practice.  Thing is, covering a styrofoam practice round with fondant is a lot easier than actual cake.  And with a topsy turvy cake, the tiers are cut with the sides angled inward.  Not easy.  But I want to be able to do cool cakes for my nephew's birthday and other events.  So this was my first, and we'll sort of consider it practice.

It started off well.  I chose red velvet, since it's Eric's favorite.

I piled up the layers into the two tiers, and cut 'em to shape.

So far so good.  Then I filled and crumbcoated them with a cream cheese frosting recipe I got from this blog.

And therein lies the problem.  Not the frosting or the recipe, because holy crow was it good!  The problem is that it's a very wet type of frosting.  And fondant just loves to absorb moisture.  So... yeah.  There I am trying to cover the cake with fondant I colored and rolled out nice and thin, and it's getting all wet and sticky while I'm trying to get it to lie smooth and flat.

Frustration makes me snippy.

And Eric was really so awesome.  He kept getting things for me, and taking trash away, and asking what he could do to help.  And I was kinda snarly.

See, this was my plan.

Nice sharp edges, which if you look at the cut, shaped, but uncovered cake, were successful at the time.  Feathers, beads, a mask.  And those squiggles were to be fleur de lis.

Yeah.

In the end, I fought through, and came up with this...

Not as smooth as I wanted, obviously, and I got too tired to do beads for the top tier too.  The fleur de lis were a little misjudged.  And it got kind of ... bulbous rather than sharp.  Well, I tried.  And it's not bad, I suppose, for a first attempt.  I am, I have to say, really happy with my gum paste mask and feathers.  This was the first time I ever made or used gum paste.  And I'm happy with the Mardi Gras beads around the bottom.

Just... I need practice.  I know that.  And never again will I do cream cheese frosting with fondant.

It was a hit anyway, friends wouldn't let me cut it until they took a sufficient number of photos.  And of course they devoured it.  We were left with this.

Don't worry, we ate it.  But what of the leftover cake, the parts I had to cut off to shape it?  No worries, those became red velvet cake pops!

Yum!

Leave it to me to start with dessert first.  We did have crawfish too, I promise.  What's Mardi Gras without crawfish?

And etouffee, still my favorite food in the world.  It was such a hit last year that we ordered five pounds of tail meat this year instead of one.

Also devoured.

And drinks and platters, corn and potatoes.

In addition to the bubbles, balls, and sidewalk chalk we had for the kiddos...

... my friend Emilie pulled out her face painting kit.  There was one request for a tiger, though, so Emilie suggested I take that one.

He is my friend's son, and was hysterical.  He proceeded to run around the party roaring at everyone!

And to finish up, the photo I call "Aftermath of a Party."

Another success, in the end!

Lots of work, lots of payoff... and oh yeah, happy belated Memorial Day!

Eric and I had a heck of a weekend.  On Saturday we went to a wine and blues festival with a friend.  On Sunday we spent the afternoon with Eric's brother and nephew, mostly shopping, mostly for Eric's brother... with a quick stop at AC Moore for me.

Sigh.  Always a dangerous store, that AC Moore.  A stencil, a dozen skeins of yarn, several packets of beads, some vegetable seed packets, and one Bakerella Cake Pops book later, we checked out.  And then I got obsessed with the idea of cake pops.  They're the hot thing, and I've been seeing them everywhere.  They're so cute!  And they looked so easy.  Ha.

So at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Eric and I were at the supermarket so I could buy cake stuff.  We came home, and I baked a white cake in a 9x13" pan.

And then, per Bakerella's instructions, I let it cool overnight.

Meanwhile, I'd gotten these rainbow star sprinkles to decorate the pops.  The supermarket was completely out of anything in blue besides this; they were overrun with red and green.  In case we want to make Christmas cakes ahead, maybe?  Well, my nutty husband and I sat and split up all the stars so I could use the blue and white ones on my pops.  Yes, we're insane.

On Monday, Memorial Day, Eric and I went to lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in way too long.  From there, we went to Home Depot for a bunch of 2x6" 8' wood and some 2x4" stakes... and then came home, and Eric built this, after clearing away all the weeds from the area.

While he was doing that, I was making my very first ever cake pops.  Deceptive, terribly deceptive.  They looked so simple.  So cute and easy.  Those suckers are seriously labor intensive!  And that's not even including doing crazy sprinkle-separating.

First, you crumble the cake into fine crumbs.

Then you mix in icing (I used vanilla), 'til it's all mixed through, roll it into balls (I made mine bigger than the recommended 1.5" diameter, and was kind of glad I did... fewer to fight with.  So far it was still pretty easy, though I'm not a fan of playing mudpies, really.

And then they need to fridge. While they were fridging, I melted some dark chocolate I had.

Good stuff.  And you know, I have a double boiler.  But I thought rather than digging it out, I'd do it the "easy" way and melt the chocolate by microwaving it.  Only I forgot I've never been really good at microwave-melting chocolate, and much prefer a double boiler.  Well, the first bowl of chocolate turned useless when I overheated it and it just kept getting stiffer instead of more liquid.  So... second bowl.  More chocolate.  This time it worked better, though it was still finicky to work with and I really should've just dug out the double boiler.  Next time.

I learned some other things too.  It's really not easy to keep those balls on the lollipop sticks while swishing them through the chocolate.  It's also not easy to cover them in "one swipe," as recommended by Bakerella, and so it's not easy to get a nice thin, even coat of chocolate.  I also learned that drawing icing is not as easy as it looks.  As Eric put it, when I try something brand new like this, my artistic flair sometimes exceeds my skill level.

Practice should fix that, right?  Right?

Meanwhile, this time around, I ended up pretty much with melted chocolate everywhere.  I ate so much chocolate, I made myself nauseous.

Anyway, I did a whole bunch of 'em, Memorial Day themed, and then set up 6 in tiny flower pots to wrap as a gift.

And I wrapped 'em up.  I wanted to bring them over to our neighbors who shoveled the snow off our walk several times this winter.  It was really the least I could do.

OK, that really looked cute.

Of course, Eric and I had to taste test a couple, just to make sure.  Wow!  I'd never had a cake pop before, and they taste like, as Eric put it, chocolate-covered cupcakes.  Yum!

Before I could bring them over, though, Eric had finished that garden box... and then, Eric being Eric, he was on a roll.  He needed soil.  Lots of soil.  Over half a ton of soil.  Thirty 40-lb bags of soil.  And a bag of rocks.

We came back, gave the neighbors their gift, and made them happy.  Then headed into our own yard, to fill the box with soil... or almost fill it with soil, since it could still use a few more bags.

It's really going to be nice.  The rocks are going to be along the front, to make a border where the dirt hits the driveway.  And he's forming a brick walkway around the left and back of the box for us to use in gardening.

Then all it'll need will be the plants!

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