First experience with floral foam went stunningly well.
Did you know I am a professional flower arranger? Right, neither did I.
First: I am super aware that this does not look easy. It is so easy. I whipped this arrangement – which is nice and low, so you can put it on your dining room table without completely obliterating your view of your fellow diners - up using exclusively grocery store-bought flowers, and in about ten minutes.
We've done spooky, Halloween-themed cakes for a few years now, and so this year I thought I'd try something different.
Cat Cake.
See, my son loves cats. LOVES them. He has an especially deep bond with Riggs, who trails him from room to room, sleeps in his closet during the day, and lays next to him reading books (on his back!) like a furry little human at night. But I also didn't want to test my sculpting powers by going full-on Here Is A Cat, so I had to get a little improvisational.
My daughter likes candy. Like, a LOT.
Here, as an example, is a photograph of her trick-or-treating at 2 years old. That's what you call "laser focus."
YES, GIRL.
For the full duration of my trick-or-treating years - we're talking 3-13 - my mother crafted my costumes entirely by hand. They ranged from the truly extraordinary (a hand-stitched cancan dancer costume with multicolored ruffles that required multiple trips to visit a sewing-machine-having family friend in New Jersey) to the slightly phoned-in (a Cher costume that was basically a piece of sparkly fabric and a fright wig), but I cherished them. I cherish them still; many of those old costumes are now parked in my kids' costume box, and are just as serviceable as they were back in the day.
Things made by hand have a tendency to do that: they last.
I want to be humble about this one, but it took me five hours, so I'm not going to be. (Granted, the creation process might have been slowed down ever-so-slightly by the fact that I was catching up on the 2-part season finale of The Bachelorette while fondant-ing, but STILL.)
So. To recap, the make-an-impossibly-fancy-birthday-cake-for-my-child tradition started with the Mermaid Cake (a process that began with my friend Alisa taking pity on me and teaching me how to make a cake that did not turn out like this).
Then came the Spooky Ghost Cake, the Moana Cake, the Bloodshot Eyeball Cake, and the Tie-Dye Rainbow Cake. This year my daughter suggested a "Moana Rainbow Unicorn Mermaid Cake," but I gently steered her in the direction of something a) new, and b) not that, because the chances of me executing that extremely specific vision were zero, and?
