More Winners

You might be familiar with a little trend on Facebook called "100 Happy Days". I don't know much about it, but I gather that the point is to post something that makes you happy for 100 days in a row. It's a nice idea. I don't post on Facebook every day and I don't want to, so I'm not joining in, but it does make me think about how I might shift my outlook just a little and feel a lot luckier than I do. Despite everything that has gone wildly wrong, so many things are going right these days.

So here are some happy thoughts for today. This year, Smunch spent a second baseball season (as is customary) playing in the Bronco division of our local PONY baseball league. Last year, as you may recall, was a stunning success. It would be hard to measure up to that.

This year, Smunch played for the Pirates. And he was on the older side on this team. In fact, he wasn't even the shortest kid on the team. There were THREE players shorter than he was...which is kind of a big deal when you've been the shortest for so long. Admittedly, this was a pretty darned short team in general.

The coach was a good guy. He had a short major league career with the Atlanta Braves, or say they say. Smunch got to play a lot and got to pitch, even though he was far from the most menacing pitcher on the team.

Geez. He looks intense.

As with last year, I managed Mam's softball team. And as with last year, I missed much of baseball because I was a a softball game or a softball practice. By the end of the season, Smunch had lost a lot of patience with that, so I started finding other moms to sub for me at practice when Smunch was playing in the days leading up to the playoffs.

That's the only reason there are any pictures, really.

The Bronco divison included 10 teams. The playoffs include four games of "pool" play (two pools of five teams each) and then single-elimination bracket play. It meant a lot of baseball between May 29th and June 4th for the Pirates. Nevertheless, at the end of pool play, they were the only team with a 4-0 record. They went on to the semi-finals Friday night where they played a tense game against the Nationals, who they had mysteriously not played against the entire season. The Pirates won 4-3. So, Saturday was the big day of the Championship Game...again. And again, Smunch's team faced the Rangers...who were again, "the dreaded Rangers".

But these weren't the same kids, or even the same coach as the team from a year ago. One of their players, having been warned about he propensity to "truck the catcher" at homeplate, had left the team since the last time the Pirates played them. Another of their players was tragically undergoing treatment for cancer. It almost made you want to root for them...almost.

Last year, I'd had to juggle Mam's travel softball tournament with the championships. This year, I was lucky. The championship fell on a weekend with no softball tournament. So I was there for the entire game. Smunch initiated a wicked-good double play from his knees at second base, but that was the most memorable part of his performance.

These games make me tense. I decided that I would pay attention rather than take pictures. I'm not sure that was a good plan. I need the distraction. The game see-sawed back and forth and it seemed like an eternity before the final out was recorded...the out that gave the Pirates a 5-4 victory.

This was not the Giants team of last year either. There was none of the same celebrating on the field that that team did. There wasn't quite the same joy, but perhaps it's because the game was so tight that there was mostly just relief at the end.

Two of his former teammates from last year's Giants were on the Rangers team this year. Smunch was the only former Giant in Pirates uniform...the only kid in the whole league with consecutive 2013 and 2014 first place trophies.

He took it all in stride. Apparently, it's less of a big deal to win the championship if you just did it the previous year. Spoiled any?

And what did I do to celebrate? Well, the kids went home with their dad and I did the kind of thing you'd expect me to do when there's a team party the next day. I made a cake. And I had a lot of fun doing it too.

We had a wonderful picnic in the park late Sunday afternoon. The kids, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, played wiffle ball while the adults chatted and snacked. It was roasting hot, which made the cake a tad melty, but nobody seemed to care.

And there it was. Another successful season in the bag. No big deal. Looking forward to doing it all again next year!

Hasta, Killer Penguins

According to our schedule, last Saturday was the final stand for the undefeated Killer Penguins. I'd offered to make a cake for their celebratory end-of-season party. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the end of season party would be scheduled on Mam's birthday. It prompted us to have her party the previous day. And it prompted me to take the entire week off work to complete two cakes at once.

In typical Killer Penguins fashion, they vanquished the competition.Mam scored three baskets and her teammates scored many more. The other team might have scored three total. I was glad they scored, at least.This basketball season was so much fun. The coaches were great, the girls really enjoyed each other and played really well. Not surprisingly, that meant I wanted to make a really special cake for them.

I started experimenting with making fondant figurines. I'd never tried that before and wasn't the least bit sure I could pull it off. I liked my killer penguins though...and judging by the number of people who asked me where I'd found them, I'd say other people did too.I wanted an "icy" look to the cake, so I chose not to blend all the color into the fondant and make it marble-y. And knowing I had a team and siblings to feed, I put it together just like Mam's ladybug cake.It sat like that for a couple of days, which was a pity because it didn't look nearly as marble-y by the time I got to decorating it. We had to go to several stores before we found an appropriate basketball hoop. I just couldn't imagine making an edible one of those. Store #3, which was out of them, called store #4 and put it on hold for us. I made a little lake and piped on some snow.I added borders to both layers and carefully started placing penguins. Note to self...it's much easier to have a consistent border if your cake is in the middle of the plate.As a final touch, Daddy helped me engineer a dunking penguin.Somewhere along the line, I got an e-mail saying the reservation at the restaurant was for 46 people. I briefly panicked and made a quick sheet cake...which was, um, not particularly attractive, but functional.

Driving the cake over to the pizzeria was a little dicey and dunking penguin didn't show up entirely intact, but it was easy to fix and the cake went over well. The crowd sang "Happy Birthday" to Mam and most important, she got her trophy, as the coaches described her as a "little fireball". Ah, yes. Fireball, indeed.Naturally, it turns out that the coach's schedule was wrong. The Penguin's last game is this coming Saturday, overlapping with Mam's first softball game. There won't be any more cake.

Going Overboard on a Retirement Cake

It all started with a simple, but silly comment I made at a PTA board meeting. One of the other moms there mentioned ordering a bridge for our new teaching garden...right after my update on the "Spring Celebration", which was a low-key retirement party for our principal in addition to a garden dedication. I chirped up, "We could call it the Bridge to Retirement!" I was kinda kidding, but the PTA president loved the idea and so it happened.

Of course, being a cakey kind of person, I volunteered to make a cake for said Spring Celebration, which I was also co-chairing. Silly me. 'Cause you know what happened, right? Well, actually you probably couldn't imagine the insanity that occurred after that, which included having to reschedule the whole event because of the swine flu...rescheduling it to the weekend Daddy and I were supposed to go away without the children for the first time ever! For a minute, I was off the hook for the cake because suddenly no one was interested in eating home-baked goods. But that was when the swine flu panic was still going full force. If you didn't notice, it became a back-burner issue very quickly.

And then I made the mistake of suggesting that I make a replica of the Bridge to Retirement for the cake. Then I went and visited a bunch of aquarium stores hoping to make my job little easier. No simple aquarium bridges to be found. Turns out I should've gone this route to begin with:Not bad and not altogether difficult. It was a passable chocolate replica of the sturdy redwood bridge they'd installed.

Next, I needed to try and replicate the dry creek bed that runs under the bridge. A trip to my favorite cake supplies store provided not only some really killer cake mix for the 16" cake, but some fantastic "chocolate rocks" that were just what I needed.As soon as I got all the creekbed done, I knew I'd made a mistake frosting the whole thing white. It's a garden. It's dirt! Nothing a package of Oreos (stuffing removed) and a rolling pin couldn't handle!

I had a little bit of white fondant left over from Smunch's birthday cake and used that to fashion a green water pump. I also had some colored fondant I used to make more flowers to make everything more garden like.In a final act of decorating inspiration, I decided to try and make it look like water was coming out of the pump. To my astonishment, it worked...really well!I also used the green fondant for the stars on the side of the cake. I know they look kind of odd on this garden cake, but they are a take on the school logo and were actually more appropriate than you'd think.

The worst part of this cake was trying to write on top of Oreo crumbs. They're somewhat loose, so it's crazy difficult to pipe letters onto the top and make them look neat. In a way, that was good. It meant I couldn't get too creative with the message. It had to be short and simple. Now you have to imagine that I took this giant cake to a school-wide event. The kids were very impressed...so impressed that I ended up having to post Daddy as a sentry to make sure no fingers ended up in the frosting before it was presented to the honoree. He fielded a number of questions. Who made that? Are those real rocks? Is that real dirt? What did you use for the water? And he did it all with good humor...especially considering we'd had to reschedule our trip for this shindig.I'd say it was a grand success. Of course, it wasn't big enough for everyone. And the potluck portion of the event didn't go particularly well. We totally ran out of food. I hid the cake away until the end and those whole helped out or stuck around for a long time got to eat it. That seemed fair, considering. I sent the bridge and a big chunk of cake home with Mr. Celeste. It was yummy...which was fortunate since I never got any dinner!

Today's Offering

So, I finished my cake decorating class, but why stop there? It's hard to impress anyone in my family with a cake anymore, so I have to foist them on a hungry blogsphere instead. This one looked lovely, but there were no gasps of admiration...except for those from our dinner guests who probably went overboard in their compliments. They're automatically forgiven for that because they took some cake home with them.It turns out that while whipped chocolate ganache makes a scrumptious filling for cake, it makes a seriously unattractive frosting. And I'd meant to put the flowers in the middle since I wasn't going to write anything, but I totally spaced and put them on the side. Still, this turned out rather pretty, don't you think?

And, "they call me mama", I guess you're wishing you'd made good on your threat not to visit again, huh?

Who needs Whole Foods and Draegers anyway?

Stating the Obvious

Remember the rainbow cake? Yeah, I know. It wasn't that long ago, but I've done a pretty good job of forgetting already.

Anyway, you may recall that I mentioned needing to bake two cakes to succeed with that one. That means I had a whole extra cake...which was three cake mixes worth. It was a really funny looking cake too. It was pretty and swirly on the top, but it didn't swirl all the way through. It mostly looked like a bizarrely mixed red and black cake. And, after the emergency frosting I made for the clouds, I had a whole lot of that left too. So at the end of the week, I got out all my extras and frosted my gigantic, extra, half dome of a cake. I even had some colored frosting left to decorate with.

I've eaten quite enough birthday cake, so this one was sent directly to work with Daddy. I figured it couldn't hurt to make the purpose of said cake patently obvious.

Daddy left me a message at 10am saying he was going into a meeting, but that the cake (which arrived around 9) was half gone already. By the end of his meeting at noon, the whole thing was polished off. Awesome.

Disaster Averted

Have I mentioned that when it comes to cakes I'm kind of a psycho? I've never taken a class. I'm certainly no professional baker. But I really like cakes and I like them to taste fantastic and look great. All in all, I'd call it a weakness of mine. Daddy suggested that I had enough going on and that I really didn't need to make a cake for his birthday. A store-bought cake would suffice. I even did that last year, but I just couldn't do it again...and with that Space Mountain Cake coming up next week, I need to start getting my cake-making skills honed again.

So, I scoured Epicurious for a recipe that sounded yummy, but didn't require a ridiculous number of ingredients I didn't have. I came up with a Lemon Lattice White Chocolate Cake. It's white chocolate cake with white chocolate/whipped cream frosting and a lemon curd filling. Based on another recipe I'd seen, I decided to add fresh raspberries to the filling too. It was a great idea, but I think I tried too hard to do things in phases. Certain bits didn't hold up all that well over time.

I baked the cake on Thursday, made lemon curd and started the frosting on Friday. Frosted the cake on Friday...discovering 1) I didn't have enough raspberries and 2) the recipe didn't make enough frosting for my towering cake. I used some raspberries from the freezer and put together some more frosting, which had to sit overnight before I could use it. I tried to pipe a lemon curd lattice on the top, but the lemon peel kept getting stuck in the frosting tip. In the end, I decided a nice layer of lemon on the top would look better.

But after a night in the fridge, I learned some things about this particular cake. It sorta settles. And frozen raspberries are kinda juicy...even though I froze them myself a week earlier, so they weren't at all mushy. When I got my cake out on Sunday to put the finishing touches on it, it was sitting in a pool of blood...or at least raspberry juice. I didn't think to take a picture earlier, but this is what it looked like with the juice sopped up from the sides.Not quite what I had in mind. And not so pretty.

I whipped up the last portion of frosting and set about fixing this monstrosity. And it didn't turn out too poorly, if I do say so myself.It even tasted great. And Daddy had a nice birthday - playing soccer with the kids at the school, playing four square in the driveway, going on the little rhyming treasure hunt I put together for him to find his new hanging chair for the porch, having a quiet dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and even getting a few straggler presents today.

His dad got him a new camera for his birthday. What do you think that means? New camera for the blog!

The Birthday

Well...one of the birthdays. Birthday season 2008 has officially started in our house. My father-in-law has the distinction of the first birthday of the year. His wife threw a big party in Fresno, as you may remember. My very low profile birthday was next, but it's rapidly followed by Smunch's birthday, which is far more exciting for everyone in the family.

We started the celebration by having Gram and Grandpa pick Aunt Karen and Spencer up at the airport, so they could join in the fun. They arrived on Friday while Smunch was at school, but Aunt Karen made a surprise guest appearance in the kindergarten room as the storytime reader for Friday. Smunch wasn't sure what to make of that exactly, but he seemed happy and the kids liked the book she brought.

The party continued on the real big day, Saturday, with breakfast at the restaurant of Smunch's choice. He chose a nearby coffee shop-style place that worked well for everyone. Karen, Spencer, Gram and Grandpa joined us. Grandpa even brought a candle and matches for Smuch's waffle. Cute!
The birthday party didn't start until afternoon, so all the kids went over to Gram and Grandpa's to play while Daddy, Karen and I set up for the party. Fruit salad, check. Cheese cubes, check, Balloons, check. Green table cloth with soccer field markings in masking tape, check. Hidden treasures in the yard, check. Spoons and plastic eggs, check. Pinata filled with candy and such, check. Yikes. These are a bunch of kindergarteners!

In a way, this was a strange birthday party...in a good way, I guess. It's the first time I felt like Smuch really created the guest list. He had some definite opinions. I had some opinions too, like I didn't want to spend a bucketload of money and rent out a big place to invite everyone he knows. So, the guest list was limited to a number I was comfortable having in my house. It meant that a lot of kids I really like weren't invited. It also meant I invited kids I don't really like a whole lot. I didn't necessarily know their parents and for the first time, most of the parents didn't stick around.

In another first, Smunch's NICU buddy, Austin, wasn't able to join us this year since his family recently moved to Alabama (Alabama?!?!), but Austin called on the phone to wish Smunch a happy birthday. It probably didn't come through on the other end, but he was really thrilled with his first phone call from a friend.






We got lucky with a really beautiful, sunny February day. Smunch wanted a soccer party...or just a sports party. I was unclear, so it was a sports party with a soccer emphasis. And, as usual, I put most of my effort into making a cake I thought was really cool. It was almost exactly what I'd set out to create, so I was very pleased.

The kids arrived in their own sports jerseys (as requested) or approximations of them. I wore one of Daddy's old orange jerseys from some college reunion. It wasn't pretty, but it was festive. I borrowed a real whistle from my dad and taught the kids that when they heard the whistle, it was time to "huddle" and receive instructions.

We had the kids hunt for hidden treasure (different types of sports balls - pencil sharpeners, erasers, bouncy balls, soccer player figurines, chocolate soccer balls, etc.) in the backyard as our first activity. Mam screamed and cried through much of this since most of the kids were bigger and faster than she is and she wanted all the treasure for herself, of course.


We sat them down for cheese, fruit salad and drinks.
















We did the pinata...definitely a hit.
We attempted an egg and spoon race, but it turned out that Daddy and I didn't know what the heck we were doing and we were all confused. There were no winners. There were no prizes regardless. However, picking up the ropes Daddy had used as a finish line turned into an excellent excuse for an impromptu game of tug-of-war and all the kids pitched in. Pretty hysterical. Daddy was pretty surprised at just how strong 10 kindergarteners and one Mam can be!

We did cake.
And I realized there was still about half an hour of the party left. Yikes. Clearly I need to plan a lot more games for future parties. But the kids seemed anxious for some free play in the yard, so I let them do that for a bit. And then I took the unusual step of having Smunch open his presents. We usually wait 'til the party's over, but I have to admit that the kids were enthralled with Smunch opening his presents right there and then. And the ones who weren't enthralled could still play.

The party over, we wrapped up the big day with dinner at Smunch's favorite restaurant, TGI Fridays. Because, somehow, plain spaghetti with no sauce always tastes better when it costs $6 and has a side of canned mandarin oranges. He got a birthday song and one last birthday candle to blow out on top of his "Cup of Dirt".





Even Smunch agreed at the end of the day that it was a good birthday. "I think it was the greatest one," he said. Better be even greater next year, huh?