My Attempt at a Cherry Blossom Tiered Cake

Several years ago I saw a cherry blossom wedding cake on the cover of a magazine while in line at the grocery store.  Since I couldn't afford to purchase the magazine, I tried to sketch it out before it was time to pay the cashier because it was the perfect thing for our annual Mother's Day/Birthday Celebration (Mother's Day, SIL birthday, Dad's birthday).

It looked something like the one from Diane's Cakes and More:

I ended up with something entirely different.

Obviously my sketch wasn't very good, and you can tell it's my first tiered cake.  While it's on my flickr set, I don't usually talk about it much because all I can see when I look at it are my mistakes.

That was until yesterday's Cake Wrecks post.

Now I don't think it looks so bad after all.

Christmas Shopping: Bon Appetit Christmas Tea Collection from Target

Two of these teas are not like the others,
Two of these teas just do not belong,
Can you tell which teas are not like the others
By the time I finish my song? 

Did you guess which teas are not like the others?
Did you guess which teas just do not belong?
If you guessed the teas with no artificial flavors,
Then you're absolutely...right! *


(*apologies to Joe Raposo and Jon Stone)

Sunday Annoyances

A group of us meet up on Sunday mornings for breakfast at the local bagel shop.  Actually, it's a chain, because the locally owned cafe we used to go to now sucks (after a while, you get tired of ordering one thing and getting something else).  There is another locally owned place that we like, but it's so tasty that you can't get a table without a very long wait, so we save that for special occasions.

On average, there are about nine or ten of us there each week.  There is only one large table in the cafe and we tend to take it up as well as adding one or two additional tables unless another large party beats us to it.  Sadly, it's usually not a large party that uses that table.  The cafe will be practically empty, but two or three people will sit at the large table leaving all the little ones for the large groups.  This is what happened last week.

This is us:

And this is the "large" group that used the only big table in the place:

Yep.  Shitterdoodles.

Optimum Primo

Mom called and asked for an Optimum Primo cake for my nephew's birthday a couple of weeks ago.  Now granted she may have been confused because Cannon just turned four and can't say Optimus Prime's name correctly, but she went through all the Transformers crap with my brother in the 80's and should have remembered something.

We tend to celebrate birthdays with a dinner and small party at my parents' home on a day that everyone's free.  With my brother's company going under and having to work retail while job hunting - he doesn't have many of those evenings, so we sometimes have to wait a few weeks before having the party.  Or in this case, we had to combine my birthday from September with my nephew's birthday from early November.  I got to pick dinner and Cannon got to pick the cake.    

We had a thick chicken noodle soup with my Dad's homemade noodles served over mashed potatoes... yes, it's a lovely, lovely starchy fest.  There were also veggies and a salad to round it out, but this is comfort food for my family.  The cake was a chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting inside and regular cream cheese frosting outside.  It was a Transformer's cake with small Optimus Prime and Sidewinder action figures that snarkyboy found for me. 

 I left off the action figures until we were ready for the cake so Cannon could put them on himself.