So I signed up to review this new web service called AboutOne.com. It’s one of those online productivity tools for moms and “home managers” that allows us to input all of our family information into one place so it’s easily accessible. We can include medical info, scan in photos or our kids’ artwork, or just write little notes about what happened one day. I’d say it’s like an online scrapbook/home organizer in one. Read more…
Alright. If you’re a guy or don’t feel like reading about my personal care, I suggest moving on. Otherwise, keep reading. I’m about to get honest up in here. And it involves bladder problems…
Imagine the look of wonder and surprise when a child receives a photo of Santa caught in their house.
I think this is so neat! Alls you do is take a picture of your tree or your fireplace, upload it to iCaughtSanta.com, then you can place Santa in your photograph.
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:
I went to a grocery store I’d never been to and couldn’t find everything I needed.
I got a flat tire on the day before the party, which was the day I planned to bake the cake.
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)
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.
