As you all may expect, Travis was walking on cloud 9 last night and this morning, as he repeatedly gloated about how vindicated he felt after reading all of your comments on yesterday’s post.  I would just like to say I did some research on yearbook guy and he’s “fo’ reelz, yo.”   He is a yearbook archivist and basically sells the celebrity pics to media outlets.  I’ll admit, it’s still weird, but at least I know it wasn’t technically a scam.  You will all be glad to know that I decided not to go through with it, though.  My precious yearbooks will remain hidden away in our attic amongst other things I hold dear to my heart. 

Now…onto more serious matters.

A couple of months ago my crafty friend, Kristin, and I discovered the local junior college offers a cake decorating class.  Our fabulous husbands overheard our conversation and decided to enroll us in the class as a Christmas gift.  Kristin and I were both ecstatic about the surprise and finally went to our first class last night. 

This is where things started going downhill. 

Kristin and I had visions of learning how to create really chic, cool cakes like this:

We quickly realized we were going to learn to make cakes like this:

I’m not quite sure why we weren’t a bit more suspicious of a junior college decorating class.  It’s as if we thought we were signing up at a French culinary school. 

We sat for two hours listening to the instructor go on and on and on about us learning to make roses out of icing…I’m not exactly an icing-rose-kind-of-gal, ya know (no offense to those of you who are)?  She’s also a huge proponent of buying your cakes at the grocery store and then decorating them (even though she told us over and over and over that these cakes were probably baked 10-30 days prior).  I know not everyone enjoys baking like I do, but come on.  If I’m going to spend this kind of time decorating a cake, it darn well better taste good once it’s cut into. 

I know, I know.  I’m a big fat snob. 

I’m determined to get something out of this class, though.  We’re going to continue attending and, by golly, I’m going to bake Arle the best birthday cake EVER.  Well, maybe not the best one ever, but it will surely look better than the one I made for her first birthday. 

Can you tell what it is?  I’m guessing the answer is no.  It’s OK, most of the guests at the party couldn’t make it out either.  It was supposed to be an elephant.  I found this great elephant cake pan on-line and thought that if you bake the cake in that pan it would look like an elephant.  Well, it did at first.  But then I slathered it up in green butter cream frosting and it suddenly looked awful.  A bit phallic, actually.  I panicked.  I had purchased the white M&Ms to make polkadots because the invitation had a white polka dotted elephant on it.  During my last minute panic attack, I decided to just trace the elephant “parts” with the M&Ms.  Not exactly what I had in mind, but the party was in an hour and a mommy’s gotta do what a mommy’s gotta do. 

So, like I said, I’m going to learn how to do something in this class.  Even if it’s something as simple as how to keep the cake crumbs out of the frosting during the spreading process.  Wish me luck.