The Ultimate Cake Wreck

Last week Aston had a birthday party in the park. It poured with rain beforehand and at one stage we were thinking of canceling. The rain stopped, praise God, and the kids had heaps of fun splashing in puddles! Here is the cake I made.

It looks impressive doesn't it? It's even more impressive when you know it's the second "red and green rocket cake" that I made!

I was very organized and baked the cake on Thursday ready to decorate on Friday afternoon, so far so good. I cut out the template (from my super edition of the Women's Weekly Kids Party Cakes Book), made a big batch of buttercream icing and got out the food colouring.

Not wanting my buttercream to go too runny I had bought proper gel food colouring from a cake decorating supplies store on eBay. I also knew that this type of colouring would have a better chance at turning the icing bright red.

Apparently I was wrong. I added a few drops of food colouring, the icing was pink, so I added some more, still it was not red so I added more and kept on adding more until I used the whole bottle! Even then it was not quite red but I decided it would have to do.

I finished icing the cake and put it in the fridge ready to add the finishing touches after dinner. By this time the kitchen was varying shades of red as were my hands (it's a week later and I still have pink under my nails)! As I was cleaning up I decided to taste some of the left over red icing.

It was terrible! It had a really strong toxic taste to it like it had been mixed with nail polish remover! It turns out food colouring does have a taste to it when used in large concentrations!

I panicked. I cried. I Facebooked and then tried to fix it.

I went to the shop in search of red things, I bought liquid red food colouring, red jelly crystals, desiccated coconut, and hoped some kind of inspiration would strike. (I had a brief moment where i thought about changing the colour of the rocket but my client had been very specific in what colours he wanted).

Initially I tried to scrape the icing off the cake but when I tasted the top layer the evil toxic taste had seeped into it, so I started again.

It was finished by 11pm which is not too bad, working with a warm cake is tricky though as it kept crumbling. I tried to colour the new buttercream with the red food colouring but it turned out a lovely shade of pink so I used the food colouring to dye the coconut and spread that on top.

Aston was very happy with his cake and still doesn't know I made it twice.

 

Kayler's Birthday Cake

This week I got to exercise my cake making muscles and make a cake for Aston's "best friend" Kayler.

Kayler loves all kinds of vehicles so I decided to go with a digger theme. Stu came up with the idea of creating a number 2 made out of 'dirt'.

This is how I made it:

Bake the cake (Aston 'helped')

Plant some grass

Make some dirt

Create a number 2

Add Bob, a digger and other essential elements

The Birthday Boy (in black) and his cake

Blue Drum Cake!

Today I am 30

And it feels the same as being 29 ;-) I am thankful for 30 mostly good years and for almost 30 years of having a relationship with God, which, as MIke reminded us on Sunday at church, is perfect because of Jesus!

As part of a work exercise this week, I took the Clifton Strengthsfinder test which measures the presence of talent in 34 categories called "themes." These themes were determined by The Gallup Organization as those that most consistently predict outstanding performance. The greater the presence of a theme of talent within a person, the more likely that person is to spontaneously exhibit those talents in day-to-day behaviors.

My five themes were: Harmony, Consistency, Connectedness, Responsibility and Individualization. I was going to post all of the descriptions but they're a bit long for one post, maybe I'll post them one by one and you can see if they really do describe me... I think some of them do quite well!

A Long, Full and Awesome Weekend!

The Easter long weekend was pretty full this year (even more full than usual)! As well as Credo's anual Easter Time Convention (ETC) I also went to my Grandfather's 90th Birthday party!

Here he is cutting his cake, there were lots of people from my family there, many whose names I still don't remember...

It was slightly surreal to leave ETC which feels like a big family event away from the rest of the world and go to another big family event...

ETC as always was awesome, lots of brain stretching teaching, this year on Christian Ethics, and lots of community building fun!

The staff and grads team won our annual Faculty network soccer cup - yay!

Now I am back in the real world attempting to write an essay for Bible college - the last essay (and the only at university) I wrote was in 1998 on mammograms... I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all...

I am not ashamed!

For those of you who are familiar with the book of Romans in the bible this post is not about the gospel... Although let it be said I am not ashamed of the gospel, I'm just not specifically writing about it today.

What I am not ashamed of is the fact that my 30th Birthday is just around the corner (see The Big Birthday countdown on the right).

At our first Bible Study for the year on Tuesday night we introduced ourselves to each other and for some reason it was suggested we share our ages... Very few people were willing to give their true age, there were a few 30-somethings (rare for the 715 congregation) and a couple of 20-somethings...

I've been thinking about it a bit lately, why are we afraid to admit we are older than someone else? Especially when in the scheme of things 30-something is really not old at all. I've decided to embrace the fact that I am older (and hopefully wiser) than alot of people I know and most of the students I work with. I've been alive for almost 30 years and that is an awesome gift from God!

Jono's 21st

At Sapore in Leichhardt, lots of people, nice food. More photos here

Happy Birthday Stuart

Today Stu turns 36! We've had a nice relaxing day at home catching up after spending a week and a half apart while I was on NTE.

I baked a carrot cake - we haven't tasted it yet but it looks awesome, I hope it tastes as good as it looks.

Now I'm 29

I'm not sure what I was thinking here, perhaps hoping that mum wouldn't guess where I was hiding?

About 2 weeks ago I turned 29 (and would probably break the washing basket if I sat in it). 29 does not really feel any different to 28 or 27.

Hmm, as you can tell I don't really have much to say...