Mom's Birthday Party!

As promised, I have a series of retro posts coming up!  This one is about my Mom's surprise birthday party in July!  We'd talked briefly about gathering the troops to celebrate mom's birthday.  Even a usual weekend at the lake is a lot of fun (filled with family time, great food, laughter, etc.).  But leading up to her birthday weekend, my Dad thought it would be even better for us to give the occasion a little extra fanfare!  Mom does so much for all of us (all.the.time) so everyone had no problem rallying to celebrate her birthday!

My task was to put together her birthday cake!  I had tossed around a few ideas for Mom's birthday in years past, but it's always tricky coming up with a design.  I'm an amateur baker/decorator so the design can make or break me!  It's important (for me) to have a plan that is within my limited skill set, doesn't take 80+ hours to make, and that can travel 1.5 hours in the car, all while making it theme appropriate to the occasion!  In a lot of ways, the design is the hardest part!

I decided to go for a fish scale and relaxation theme.  I've seen some beautiful pictures of fish scale cakes!  They all looked like a lot of work, but it was mostly repetition.  With the weekend coming up quickly, I got started ASAP on the scales!

I made several thick layers of red velvet cake and then frosted them in a vanilla butter cream frosting.  Just a tip - red velvet tends to be VERY red so you have to be prepared for white frosting to "stain" in some areas.  Then, I started working on the scales made from fondant.

I did a monochromatic color scheme of purple, turquoise, and mint.  I also threw in a few marbleized scales, and then randomly dusted a few with edible shimmer powder in multiple shades.  By the time I added so many decorative variables, I'd say that it was difficult to find two scales exactly the same!
The cake turned out pretty well!  The red velvet was trickier to work with than I'd expected, but overall I was very pleased with results.  Then came the transportation....

I'd assembled the cake on a silver cardboard cake board and did not realize that the cake board was too wide for our cooler!  The cake was a little manhandled in the process.  It took a little extra effort to trim the cake board, but Jordan and I managed to get it into the cooler.  What we didn't count on was traffic and construction on I35!  We had a long journey that weekend so the cake took a beating bouncing around on rough roads!  The poor cake ended up having two big stress cracks!

I was a little bummed about the cracks but, hey, it happens!  The important thing is that Mom was surprised and happy!  This was the final cake, fully assembled.

Not my greatest work, but not my worst either!  And hey, it tasted amazing and Mom was truly surprised!

Top Left: Jordan and me
Top Right: Me, Mom, and Cindy.  I particularly love Mom's tiara!  
Bottom Left: Cindy and Mom!
Bottom Right: Dad manning the grill!

Top: Cake and gift table!  
Bottom R & L: Present time!  I just love the bling sunglasses that S&E gave Mom!  Perfect for Mom's personality!

That's about all I have from the party!  Lastly, I wanted to share a funny picture with you.  You win some and lose some in baking (at least that's the rule-of-thumb for me).  In July I shared pictures about our new dishwasher and oven.  The dishwasher has been a fantastic new appliance in our house, but the oven has come with a steep learning curve!  I made a pie a few weeks back and over estimated the convection feature.  I put my homemade pie just a littttttle too close to the heating element on the top rack of the top oven.  Well, long story short, it caught on FIRE!  It didn't just burn, no....  There were actual flames coming from this pie!  Well, lesson learned!  Convection still has it's drawbacks! 

Left: Our burnt pie!  Except for the burnt part, it was actually pretty good.
Right: Abby and I in the car with a photo bomb from Jordan.  We try to take her on lots of rides and she loves it!

That's it for today!  Happy baking!

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