Back to the birthdays…

And speaking of themes – we are back in full birthday swing around here. Chia’s birthday was yesterday and The Captain’s in next Monday.

Chia theme was "tea party" since I had thrown a tea party for the 5th & 6th grade girls group at church and figured  I could reuse some of the stuff from that. I bought each girl a tea cup at a thrift store that they got to take home after the party and I folded and stapled coffee filters into "teabags" and filled them with M&M’s and made a tag with their name on and it attached to the "teabag" with string. I put one in each of the girls tea cups at their place setting and used them as placecards. Then I made a teapot-shaped cake. AND THAT WAS IT!! No tea party games, no teapot / tea cup oriented prizes or anything. All I did was decorate and bake a cake (well, I made them lunch). I tell ya – I’m losing it! It’s frustrating – I have so many great and lofty themed ideas but homeschool has really ramped up each year and I seem to have less and less time to invest in these parties how I would really like to (or writing diary entries) than ever before.

The cake was slightly disasterous. I show Chia some teapot cakes I found online and let her pick what she wanted. She wanted a 3-D teapot shaped cake. Which I figured would be quite easy since it was 2 cakes baked in glass pyrex bowls and put together to make a ball shape. I knew the handle and spout could be tricky but figured fondant would be the answer. Yes – fondant would have been the answer if I had made the fondant shapes several days before and let them dry. Oops. I went to make fondant at 5pm the night before and discovered I was missing most of the ingredients:

water (check!)
powdered sugar (check!)
gum tragacanth (nope!)
unflavored gelatin (nope!)
glucose(nope!)
glycerin (nope!)

Now, what would a normal person do? They would go to the store and buy the ingredients or figure out an alternative to using fondant. What would photo mommy do? "Well, I’m sure it would be fine without the gum tragacanth, I’m pretty sure I’ve made it without that before. Hmmnn, unflavored gelatin – I seem to be out. But here is a box of white-grape powdered jello. That’s the same color, I’ll just add three times the amount to make up for all of the sugar and extra stuff that is in it. Glucose…hmmnn…ah – corn syrup! I think glucose is just liquid sugar – I’m sure corn syrup would be fine. Glycerin, hmmnn – well, I’ll just skip the glycerin – I’m sure it’ll be fine!

So there you have it – I made fondant with only 2 of the ingredients it called for and tried to substitute the rest. I think I would have had half a chance if I hadn’t: (A) Had about half of the amount of corn syrup that I thought I had and (B) Not have misread the amount of water and accidentally added three times the amount that it called for! I couldn’t figure out why it was SO runny. Till I looked at the recipe again: "ONE QUARTER cup of water?? Oh crud – I thought it said THREE QUARTERS cup of water!!" So, I threw in several more tablespoons of jello and ended up using a total of FOUR POUNDS of powdered sugar before it thickened up. "Well, I have enough to do the whole cake and not just the spout and handle – I might as well use it." I made the spout and handle first and set them aside to dry and right before I rolled out the fondant to cover the cake I glanced over and saw that the spout and handle had sunk down into a pool of fondant. "Well, crud!"

Hubby looked at me – "Baking is a S.C.I.E.N.C.E. – COOKING is an art!! You can’t add whatever you want to the recipe just because it’s the same COLOR as what the recipe calls for and expect it to turn out. GO TO THE STORE AND BUY FONDANT!!!

Alas, after several worthy attempts to fix it, I had to wave the white flag and slunk off to JoAnn’s at 8pm to get fondant. It actually worked fairly well, but I should have not attached the spout till the next morning giving it more time to dry as it totally sunk into itself. Here is the semi-pathic finished product:

The handle was slightly droopy and the spout was totally droppy – but the rest was okay. Chia loved it – ah, the grace of a seven year old!!

Here is the wall next to the tea party table:

And here is a shot of the whole tea party area:

I bought Chia a beautiful dress the night before which will be her Birthday/Easter/Thanksgiving/Christmas dress:

The blowing out of the candles:

I got this one of her spinning in the yard after the party in her dress:

My favorite photo of the day!!!

 Okay – I did it, my entries are all caught up!! Now, if I can just stay current!!!

And now it is on to The Captain’s "Dragon / Video Game" theme party this Saturday. My goal is to maked a tall mountain or tower shaped cake and have a fondant dragon wrapped around it. Stay tuned for more insane birthday projects, coming to an overachiever near you…