I Tried.

I just not domesticated. I’m bad at decorating. Everything. Especially cakes, it turns out. And I knew this before I started. I have always said that I will not make decorated cakes for my kids. My mom is terrific at decorating cakes, and I have had absolutely no desire to walk in her footsteps in that department. But, Ms. Crazy Preschooler saw a picture of a 3D princess castle cake in a cookbook, and begged, and pleaded with puppy dog eyes for me to at least TRY.

So, I gave in, telling her all the time we were buying cake supplies at the grocery store that my efforts wouldn’t look like the picture. I called my mom at work, long distance, before I started for some last minute tips concerning how to remove cakes from the pan and what kind of frosting I should use. It turns out that I didn’t read the directions about the frosting very carefully before I went to the grocery store, and I needed to make a special stiff frosting with Crisco. I never buy Crisco (yucky stuff), and when I was at the store I thought I could use canned frosting, so that’s what I did. I knew from watching my mom that the frosting had to be special, so I don’t really know what I was thinking other than the fact that I was in a hurry to get all the groceries for Christmas dinner and that I had left my very bleary eyed husband at home with an infants and a toddler, and I never liked the taste of that shortening frosting anyway.

And the frosting didn’t exactly work out. It didn’t exactly stick to the cake. It was a catastrophic mess, and the whole entire time I was working on it either The Banana or Destructoman was screaming. Sometimes they were both screaming at the same time. The Banana wanted me to hold her, and Destructoman couldn’t grasp why I wasn’t feeding him the cake instead of frosting it.

So this is the result, after a good two hours of being up to my elbows in cake and frosting. I’ve been informed many times that it really doesn’t look like the picture, but I knew that before I started, and Ms. Crazy Preschooler liked it anyway. I guess that the gumdrops are good, because everytime I walk past the cake, several more windows have disappeared.