We baked it up! {ended}

Posted by: Lizzie

I suck at baking cakes.  Sometimes, I order cakes from a bakery just so I won’t go through the humiliation of offering my family poorly decorated cakes or cakes that I have pieced back together after accidentally dropping them.  The one time I tried to bake a cake from scratch, I couldn’t get it out of the pan and the entire thing ended up on the floor as a big pile of crumbs.  I cried.

If I opt for personally baking birthday cakes, I always get a cake mix.  I don’t have a favorite brand, so I usually go on whatever flavor the birthday boy requests.  Since it was Timothy’s first birthday, he couldn’t exactly choose his own cake.  After looking on the Betty Crocker website at the different cakes, I immediately knew that the Robot Cake would be ours.  I was going to make it work, by golly!

And I did.  I even tried to plan the entire Robots Rule Party, but there were many complications:

  1. I went to a grocery store I’d never been to and couldn’t find everything I needed.
  2. I got a flat tire on the day before the party, which was the day I planned to bake the cake.
  3. I couldn’t find all of what I needed at the grocery store.

The robot cake called for black and blue food coloring with which to dye the icing a grey color.  Um, those colors aren’t available at your neighborhood Kroger.  I had to step on over to the Hobby Lobby and look in the cake decorating aisle in order to find some icing coloring.  It gave me a good excuse to get a fancy icing spatula, though, so I guess I can’t complain.

I never realized how much work goes into decorating a fancy cake!  I had to refrigerate the cake several times as called for in the instructions, so the assembly/decorating took a whole lot longer than I realized it would.  Of course, if one doesn’t spend five hours waiting on a new tire and alignment, I guess making the cake the day before wouldn’t seem so daunting.  I was able to bake the cake the night before, but all of the decorating took place the next morning.

Personally, I think my robot cake came out really well.  I didn’t drop it or mangle it, and I was so inspired by the first cake that I made Timothy a mini-cake from the leftovers.  He didn’t care too much for it, but we’re still working on the whole Solid Foods thing anyway.  In fact, he spit out what little cake we got in his mouth and didn’t really appreciate having icing all over his hands.

Case in point:

Now that you’ve read about our cake baking adventure, I’m happy to offer one of my readers a Betty Crocker “Bake Life Sweeter” Prize Pack (includes everything seen in the picture below)!

To enter, leave me a comment telling me which Betty Crocker cake you’d like to make.  Visit BettyCrocker.com to see all the different cake ideas.  For additional entries, leave me a comment for each of the following:

  • Subscribe to any of my feeds (current subscribers count)
  • Become a fan of Suzy Q Homemaker on facebook
  • Share this giveaway with a friend
  • Tweet about this giveaway

I will close comments and choose a winner on May 2, 2010.  U.S. only, please.


VIP coupons, gift card, Flip video camera, information, and gift pack provided to me by Betty Crocker and MyBlogSpark.

Win and Give with Betty Crocker

Posted by: Lizzie

With specially marked boxes of kid favorites – including Fruit Roll-Ups, Gushers, Fruit by the Foot, and Stickerz & Shapes – your child could win one laptop to keep and Betty Crocker Fruit Flavored Snacks will donate another to a child in Africa.

Read more…

Double Trouble by Susan May Warren

Posted by: Lizzie

Welcome to my stop on the Double Trouble blog tour!  After you read my review (and enter the giveaway) that you hop around to the other blogs who are hosting.  It’ll give you a chance to get to know some other bloggers and read some more reviews of this fun little mystery. Read more…

Letters to Darcy by Tracy Ramos

Posted by: Lizzie

I wanted to review Letters to Darcy for a number of reasons.  The first reason was that the book originated as a blog from a mother to her unborn child.  Read more…

Once in a Blue Moon Winner

Posted by: Lizzie

Thanks so much to everyone who entered to win my copy of Once in a Blue Moon!  Here is the winner:

book

book2

Powered by eShop v.6