Cooking like crazy

Here we go: Cake #2 from my decorating class. This week we did drop flowers and scary clowns. I found the drop flowers to be harder than they look to execute correctly. Mine look nothing like the little practice sheets we were using! I think my frosting consistency had something to do with it, as the edges of all my flower petals look like they were nibbled on by aphids, rather than being all smooth and even like they are supposed to look. My frosting issues also caused my roses to look like old heritage roses with ruffly edges instead of the kind you get by the dozen from the florist. Oh well, I'll fiddle with my frosting and keep practicing. I really love how the roses look and I'm determined to get them right!

I did a lot of baking and cooking this last weekend, with varying degrees of success and failure. I hosted a baby shower at my home on Saturday morning so Friday I made 4 dozen chocolate cupcakes and 4 batches of buttercream frosting to top them, along with a double batch of pasta salad. Then on Sunday afternoon I made my first cake for my decorating class. I say 'first' because the one you see above is actually the second. I made the fatal error of letting the cakes cool in the pan, and even though I'd greased and floured the pans well, the cakes fell to pieces when I tried to turn them out.

What's more, just before I tried unsuccessfully to turn those cakes out I had actually whipped up a quick chocolate snack cake and put it in the oven to bake. My plan was to crumble that chocolate cake up with some chocolate pudding, whipped cream and raspberries and make a trifle for Father's Day dessert. I don't know where I went wrong, but that cake was a complete disaster--it fell horribly and looked like someone knelt right in the middle of it! That brought my cake disaster count to (2) for the evening. I was able to salvage the first crumbled class cake (a white cake mix) and use it in the trifle instead, which actually worked out really well, although I didn't have any instant chocolate pudding mix so I had to use cook n' serve instead and I wasn't paying attention and scorched the bottom. At the same time as I was doing all this I was trying to make mashed potatoes for dinner while Quin grilled the steaks.

Dinner and dessert turned out to be great, but when that was over I had a total disaster of dirty dishes in the kitchen, I was tired, and I still had to make my cake for class and 2 batches of nasty Crisco frosting and dye it all the appropriate colors for decorating my cake. It was past 10:00 pm by the time I got it all done and I was absolutely exhausted. It's probably no surprise that for dinner last night we had leftovers--I needed a break!

I hit a couple of estate sales this weekend and one VFW garage sale and found some fun goodies to show you once I get them photographed. Right now, I'm off for a little nap while Maren sleeps. We went to a Colorado Crush arena football game last night and didn't get home until well after 11:00 pm, which is way past our normal bedtime! Back with thrifty photos tomorrow!