Angelina Cake

My first plan was to make a laminated picture to simply stick on the cake.  You can buy frosting cake toppers of characters but I didn't want to pay $10 for one online.  This was only about 50 cents to laminate at the local printshop.  However, I was thinking "mouse" when I colored it and forgot Angelina is white!  FAIL!  When my friend Tina suggested I trace a coloring page on wax paper with frosting to make an Angelina topper, I was excited to try it!  The laminated picture was demoted to front door decoration.

Here is my friend Tina's cake, which she did several years ago for one of her 5 lovely daughters.

All that I had on hand was whipped frosting (store bought) so it made a bit of a gooey mess but here is the final result of tracing a coloring page.  I thought I was supposed to freeze it to make it hard so that it would scrape off.  It turns out I should have just traced the outline of her, dumped it straight onto the cake and filled in the outline with other colors.  That's how Tina did it.

Instead I tried in vain to scrape the frozen Angelina from the wax paper with a metal spatula.  The legs, head and tail came off.  The body and tutu were a jumbled mess.

Here's my attempt at using decorator gel tube frostings to cover over the frozen whipped frosting Angelina.  I'm thankful the head and tail stayed intact because they were the cutest parts.

Here's what happens when you get halfway through your daughter's full first name only to realize it won't fit.  Should have stuck with her nickname!  I was out of pink base-colored frosting too!  Uh-oh!  FAIL!

Here is the solution to the problem.  Cover it over with MORE frosting!  I had thought about making a homemade batch of white buttercream to trim the cake with white lacy ridges but then I thought, "They don't need any more sugar!"  The cake is 2 9x13 layers, the bottom layer is strawberry cake, the top layer white.  I snipped a raisin apart with scissors to do the eyes and nose.

I did this cake two days before the party and have it in the fridge because I didn't want to be either melting down with stress on the day of the party or have a flop and no time to run to the store and get stuff to fix it.  Preparation is my key to party success!

For more Friday Fails, visit sweet Myra's blog here.

Friday Fail!

I decided to let you in on one of my FAILS this week to show you that I really don't have it all together like some of you may think.

I made a HUGE batch of tortilla dough a while back and only had time to roll out and cook 1/4 of it. So, I put the rest in a sealed container in the fridge, thinking I'd roll it out later. A week later, when I tried to roll out the tortilla dough, it was NOT cooperative. Not about to lose my precious ingredients I pressed on (literally) and squeaked this big stack of ROCK HARD and SUPER THICK tortillas out of the dough, figuring that if nothing else, our human garbage disposal named Justus might possibly eat them.

He didn't. I don't blame him.

And they all ended up in the garbage....FAIL!!!

For more Friday Fails, visit here.

Yard Sale Flop

It's only fair to share my worst yard sale buy after all the great yard sale buys I've bragged about on this blog. I know now why the parents got rid of this for $2. It's a little machine that turns old crayons into racecar crayons. It takes load of batteries and needs plugged in too. After 20-30 long minutes, one small crayon is done. The racecar crayon (which had wheels it can ride on) was so flimsy Jeremiah broke it instantly. One of my good friends' whom I went Black Friday shopping with said, "There's a really good sale on little crayon maker things." I said, "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

My advice: Make your own swirl crayons the old fashioned way in an old muffin tin or metal cups in the oven.