Valentines Day

My routine is pretty much the same every morning: wake up, go to the bathroom. Apparently, they know my pattern. The bathroom I use at the Smart's house is also their laundry room--so imagine my delight when I wandered in there yesterday morning to discover a bag on the washing machine.

Aww, it was a bag of valentines from the each person in the family. They are so kind to me!
Well, this year I actually had the will and the time to get stuff for people, so I spent the day buying balloons and little gifts and writing cards for my family and the Smarts. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea for Bethany and Chris.

See, tomorrow is their first anniversary and Bethy had mentioned how sad Chris was that he didn't get any cake at their wedding (besides the feed-eachother-bite), and how much he wishes that they had a frozen part to bring out for their anniversary (I know, yuck). Anyway, sometimes I suffer from over-confidence in my abilities and so yesterday I decided, "Oh, I'll just make them a little wedding cake for Valentines Day and their anniversary." No problem, right? So I went to the store and I got some white cake mix and some eggs and a white deco-tube of frosting. I bought some frozen strawberries that I was going to use to make a filling. The only problem was that I don't know how to make filling. I opened up the strawberries and added some powdered sugar--but that barely thickened them at all. I added some vanilla pudding mix, but barely noticed a difference. I vaguely recall my friend's mom making candy and so I decided that since there was sugar in it, I could just cook it and it would thicken as it boiled. Well, needless to say, nothing worked so in the end I made some frosting, flavored it with the strawberries and just used that for filling. It tasted good (we were all eating the scraps). But it kind of looked....pyramid-ish. In my head, the three tiers of cake were very straight and symmetrical and weddingesque. Instead the top layer of the bottom tier cracked and kept splitting when I put more frosting on it. The second and third tiers were then sitting on very VERY thick frosting, and they soon began to slide toward the side. The end result was a not-very-beautiful, not-very-symmetrical cake that looks reminiscent of the ruins of an ancient civilization.
I wish I could put a picture up of what I was imagining in my head so that you could compare it with the actual result. It was really a very beautiful concept. :-)

At least my whole family and I had a good laugh at it.
But Bethany was very gracious...let's hope for her and Chris' sake it tastes better than it looks!