My parents just celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary on January 3rd. I am so thankful for their example of a good relationship not only as husband and wife but as best friends and parents. They truly are the worlds greatest parents, I don't care what anybody else says. If you've got a mug that says "World's Greatest Mom/Dad" that mug is lying to you. ;) I love my Mom and Dad so much and cannot think of anyone else I would rather have as parents.
So, back story with this next cake. I was scheduled to leave in the morning on Saturday January 4th to go back to school. My parents got up with me and both came to the airport to drop me off and make sure I got there safely. I'm sitting at the gate, an hour before my flight leaves like I'm supposed to, surrounded by other returning college students. Around the time I would assume we would begin boarding to have the flight leave on time, someone gets on the intercom and announces that our flight is delayed and they do not have a time for departure yet. I think, "Alright that's fine. There are delays all the time with flights. I'll still make it to school sometime this afternoon." About a half hour later, another announcement: The flight is still delayed and they will let us know when we can begin boarding, they don't have an estimated time yet. Then after a few more minutes, the person next to me gets a text on their fancy smartphone and they tell their buddy "Hey the flight's been cancelled." Not even two minutes later, I get a call from my mom. My dad got a text on his fancy smartphone with the same message: My flight has been cancelled. Great. So I wait a few minutes, and sure enough, an announcement is broadcast saying our flight has been cancelled and rescheduled. I call Mom back and she says Dad is on his way to get me. So that's basically how I ended up doing this cake for my parents, because I got an extra day with my family, which I really enjoyed. While Mom and Dad were out celebrating, I hurried and made them a cake because they didn't know it was coming and I wanted it to be all done before they got home. It's not the best cake I've done so far but I feel it's pretty good for having left all of my cake tools at school. I seriously had nothing to work with, not even frosting spatulas. Luckily Mom had some tips in the pantry that her mom had given her and I had just gotten some more frosting bags for Christmas. All of my cake pans were still at home, so I had those. But I didn't have a hand mixer to mix the frosting together with. I found a hand-hand mixer in my Mom's utensil drawer, two beater things that you had to crank by hand. The food coloring I found up in the spice cabinet worked out really well because it was a really similar shade to the green my mom had picked out for wedding colors. I still need to work on writing with frosting, but I gave it my best shot!
Dad got Mom some beautiful tulips for their anniversary. He really is the world's greatest example on how a man should treat a woman. And she is also the world's greatest example for how a woman should treat a man.
There's a reason this cake is on the large side for my family, who doesn't eat tons of cake. My cousin will be getting married in April and I convinced her to let me do their wedding cake. She wants a strawberry marbled cake with fondant flowers and it's going to be so fun to make and I'm really hoping it will turn out great. I basically used my parent's wedding anniversary as an excuse to experiment with her cake. I used two cake mixes to get the marbled effect and subsequently filled three cake pans, which will feed my family that's down to two kids at home, weeks to eat. But even if they end up tossing it out, it was a great learning experience for me. Every time I do a cake, I learn something new. I'm loving the experiences that I'm having with this whole process. Hopefully I'll be close to flawless one day.
