Birthdays! Well, One Birthday, But a Special One

I ran out of steam during my last post, so I haven't written about Wilson's birthday yet. Think way back to Wednesday, August 19th.

First, I set up Wilson's group birthday present. I collected money from a bunch of our friends, and I am so happy with everyone who helped out. Andrew especially, since he threw in a sustain pedal and helped make sure than my choice of keyboard was a good one.


As you can see, I made a collage of everyone who helped out. The cat photo says, "Astro Cat will play for you / the Symphony of Space." The books on the far right are songbooks I found at choir camp (which is on the Interlochen campus). The one on top is Michael Bublé and underneath that is "Maltshop Memories," which has some great oldies.

Once I had this set up, I brought Wilson downstairs. I made him close his eyes and led him to stand in front of his present, which I said he had to listen to. I pressed a few buttons, and it played back the one-note-at-a-time Happy Birthday I had recorded. Wilson had a perplexed look on his face. Obviously a keyboard was not even on his radar, so the song wasn't giving him any help. :D I had him open his eyes, and he was shocked! It was fabulous, and all thanks to everyone who helped out or knew about the gift and didn't say anything.


My private surprise for Wilson wasn't a surprise, unfortunately, because he looked in the fridge and saw his cake topper.

I still decorated the cake while he wasn't looking though, and he still really liked the pirate.


Yarr!

Note: I do recommend making modeling chocolate; it's just corn syrup and melted chocolate. However, when coloring white modeling chocolate, mold it first, then paint the color on. I found that the food coloring changed the consistency of the chocolate and made it hard to work with.

Anyway, later on Andrew, Evan and Alex came over! We all walked around getting free things for the birthday boy and went to Pizza House and Meg's House and I can't remember what we did when we were back at My House. All in all, I think we made this a good birthday for Wilson. In fact, his birthday celebrations weren't even over, since the next day the guys played laser tag, Friday Lizzie took him to an Our Lady Peace concert, and Saturday we went to the zoo with the high school crowd to celebrate birthdays and an engagement.

I do have a few pictures from the zoo, but this post is already long, so I'll save them.

-Brianne

Sick, but Happy

Today was an under-the-weather day. Fortunately, as soon as Wilson learned I wasn't feeling well he offered to make me soup, and it is yummy and has agreed with my stomach when other foods have not. So, yay for boyfriends! Boo for sinus infections.

Another plus: Pretty Woman was one of the on demand movies on our TV, and it just might be my favorite movie of all time, so I got to curl up on the couch with some ginger ale and smile at everyone's favorite red-haired prostitute-turned-fancy lady. I'm still all phlegmy and achy, and I'm sure falling asleep will be a pain because my sinuses are mean. However, I continue to feel quite content with life.

I'm back on track in the search for an additional job. I love living at home, but I may feel the need to move out in the (relatively) near future, and I want to have already saved up enough money to do that. I do hope to have time aside from Sopranos and two jobs for baking; there are so many more recipes I want to try. I want to branch out to meals made in the oven, like casseroles, pot pies, lasagnas, chickens, etc.

Although I will never abandon desserts:


I made cookies for the counselors at choir camp. This was only one of several types of dessert I made (I only have pictures of these though; silly me).

Only one general observation for today: Simple things, like soup and cookies, make me happy. Sharing those things with others makes my life perfect.

Even when my snot is orange.

-Brianne

Best Cake Yet!

I recently made a cake for Andrew's birthday. This cake took me quite a while to complete. The steps:
1. Cut a hole in a box (just kidding. I made a 9x13 inch chocolate cake).
2. Baked a 9x13 inch yellow cake.
3. While those cooled, I made a double batch of buttercream (and panicked because I forgot to put the applesauce in the yellow cake, but it turned out fine).
4. Made a half batch of white frosting, piped it around the edge of the top of the chocolate cake.
5. Spread raspberry jam on top of the chocolate cake.
6. Spread buttercream over the jelly, put cake in fridge.
7. Spread more raspberry jam over the buttercream, set yellow cake on top of chocolate cake.
8. Chilled cake again while I made a big batch of white frosting.
9. Had the most difficult time in the world frosting this damn cake. I will never use this recipe for white frosting again.
10. Chilled the cake again. While waiting for it to cool, I mixed the colors I needed for the design, which reminds me, I forgot to explain the stencils for this:
A. I made a drawing on graph paper to get the pixels right.
B. Drew an outline of the border, cut it out.
C. Drew an outline for light blue and whites of eyes, cut it out.
D. Drew an outline for dark blue, cut it out.
E. Drew an outline for face color, cut it out.
F. Labeled the order I needed to use the stencils in and what colors should go in them.
11. Took the cake out of the fridge, spread gray buttercream through the first stencil, then chilled again.
12. Spread white and light blue buttercream through the second stencil, fixed mistakes (carefully!) with a toothpick (I had to do that with the other layers too). Chilled again while making the blue darker.
13. Spread dark blue through the third stencil. Chilled again.
14. Spread yellowish color through the face stencil. Chilled again.
15. Using more gray, redid some background pixels to bring them up to foreground height, then wrote birthday message. Chilled cake overnight.
16. In the morning, I put black food coloring in the remaining white frosting to make it gray. As horrible as it was to frost with this stuff, it did okay in the bag while I made a shell border.

Anyway, here's my creation:

It went over quite well, and I'm quite pleased. I would say it'll be quite a while before I make a cake this involved again, but Wilson's birthday is coming up fast. :P

-Brianne