The Mommy Blog | Adventures from the Wonderbelly of Motherhood

Thursday, November 20, 2008

I’ve always wanted to say that to my ex. Biiiig birthday yesterday. In keeping with our current insolvency, we decided to have homemade gifts and to bake a cake. Easy AND prudent, no?

So then I went to a craft store to get fondant, a fondant roller, alphabet cutouts, and child cutouts. Once all that was done I picked up the kids, took them shopping for the ingredients, and started to mix the sugar and eggs when I realized we had forgotten a dealbreaker ingredient. Back in the car, back to the store, back home for three minutes and… phone call from child still at Dad’s (home sick, fell asleep, didn’t come to the store with us). “I want to heeellllllp! Come get me!” Back in the car, back to Dad’s (two blocks from the store), everyone ran in to get something or other and then spent fifteen minutes saying goodbye to Dad when we’d see him at dinner in two hours WITHOUT A CAKE if we didn’t get going. Back home, freakage ensued because we’d already cracked the eggs, then everyone wanted to stir and sift and measure and oh, man, didja see how that flour just flies everywhere?

After we finally got the cake in the oven, I opened up the fondant and proceeded to break my wrists rolling it out. Yes, I know it needs to be at a certain temperature, thank you. And I also confirmed later that there is a point beyond which it just rolls over and over the pin and will not come unstuck. The kids were highly amused.

“This is great, Mom. It’s very funny.”

“Whoa! Look at that! The blue rolled out okay but MAN that green is giving you a hard time! This is great—the green won’t even—hey! It’s breaking apart. This is awesome. Hey, where’s your after-comment?”

“You mean my comeback? I need its help smashing this stuff so it will roll properly.” See? That would be an after-comment.

They couldn’t believe I wasn’t laughing along with them, since it was apparently the funniest thing they’d ever seen: me stopping myself before swearing, then giving in, but using made-up words.

“FA-mangia!”

“Score! We made her say famangia!”

“Schaumburg!”

“Double score!”

I presented them with a palette of red, blue, yellow, and green for the letters, plus pink, light brown, dark brown and black to make themselves. Hilarity ensued.

One child was in charge of “Happy 50th,” the next in charge of “Birthday,” and the third in charge of “Daddy,” plus the exclamation point. You would not believe the discussion that went into the exclamation point.

We placed all the letters on wax paper, me reminding them every three seconds that the placement didn’t have to be perfect - we were going to be putting them on the cake later. This did not stop them from handling every piece many times over and leaving oils and generally making it extremely hard to work with. Did you know that if you handle fondant too much it won’t stuck together? It’s true. So when you roll tiny eyeballs and try to place them on a face, they just roll back off and hide under the shirt and get stuck in the icing. That was especially fun, and not all of them have the same color eyes. And then I dropped Logan’s face upside down into the frosting. We riffed off the whole, “Oooh noooo! Mr. Bill!” thing the entire time. I love that he does commercials now so they can do it with me. You know, because I used to watch him on Saturday Night Live twenty-five years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

In the end, the cake was wonderful, and once placed on a fired-clay cake pedestal one of them made at school, it was a work of loving art. It blew Daddy away.

Oh, and Phil took us all out for sushi. Now that’s love.

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note the giant A's logo on Logan's shirt.

(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) said on...
11.20.08 at 11:45 AM |

This is kind of off-topic, but if any mothers on this blog have tweens, you might be interested in trying The Fashion Fantasy Game. It’s an online game where you can design clothes and sell them in a virtual industry with other players. Essentially, it simulates what the real life fashion business is like.

Here’s how the game goes—when you sign up, you can be either a designer or a store owner. You have a certain amount of Fashion Buckz (the currency in the game; think of Monopoly money) that you can use to buy materials and other resources. The object of the game is to be as successful as possible, just like in real life. Success is measured by how popular your clothes are or how much wealth you have.

There are also a lot of contests where players can compete to see who has the best designs.

Playing the game is free and is a great way to practice your business skills if you are really serious about entering the fashion industry. No real money is spent, so it is risk-free (unlike going to the mall, where you are compelled to purchase every pretty thing in the windows).

The game is available on http://www.fashionfantasygame.com/

jMom said on...
11.20.08 at 11:46 AM |

Verrrrry nice! So. What did you end up doing with the leftover fondant?

*runs away fast*

Wendy said on...
11.20.08 at 07:26 PM |

I love the way y’all are doin’ family. Excellent! Um, what is fondant?

Mindy said on...
11.20.08 at 07:37 PM |

Well, before I looked up the definition, I told the kids that it’s that stuff that people make roses and stuff out to decorate cakes - you know, harder than frosting, softer than candy, kinda like clay but not really? Also, it’s the stuff that wraps around cakes that don’t have a gooey frosting - they look like you could rest a wine glass on it. Like white chocolate or marzipan wrap.

And then I looked it up:

Fondant is a cream confection used as a filling or coating for cakes, pastries, and candies or sweets. In its simplest form, it is sugar and water cooked to the soft-ball stage, cooled slightly, and stirred or beaten until it is an opaque mass of creamy consistency. Sometimes lemon is added to the mixture, mainly for taste. Other flavorings are used as well, as are various colorings. Rolled fondant is commonly used to decorate wedding cakes. This gives the cakes a smooth appearance. The main filling of a Cadbury’s Creme Egg is fondant. [Wikipedia]