Birthday Date Tonight

So, it’s my husband’s birthday today.  I managed to score a babysitter, but we still haven’t decided what we’re doing.  Of course, there’s stuff going on. . .

There’s an event called Fat Saturday for the Arts at Revolution Hall in Troy.  There’s also  a Salsa Social at the Troy Masonic Temple tonight.

Proctors is showing both 13 and Spring Awakening.

We might not have the energy for any of these, and no movies are calling out to us.  I’m a little stumped, and frankly, it hasn’t been my most stellar birthday effort so far.

Remember I said that I was ready for bed at about 5 o’clock yesterday?  Well, I hadn’t managed to make a cake yet, and I knew we’d be eating by midday since we have our date, so last night I started the cake after all 3 of them were tucked into bed by 8:30 pm (W was up and out at 4 am one day this week for work).  Anyway, I’m generally a decent cook.  I can make many things that people eat eagerly.  Baking is not my greatest talent.  And, I was sleepy.  So I popped those chocolate cakes in the oven and was washing dishes when I realized that I hadn’t ever set the timer.  So I made my best guess.  Sometimes one’s best. . . just isn’t good enough.  They looked done and I even put a toothpick into the center of one of them–done!  Alas, my entire kitchen is settled into a slant (it’s an old house), so even though the center of the pan was finished, left of center was raw, and I just didn’t notice.  And that pan was the more well-done one.  All of which I didn’t notice until after they’d been cooling on their racks for 15 minutes.  If you’ve ever wondered if you can put your underdone cakes back into the oven later. . . well, it turns out that that doesn’t work.

So today I just heaped a pile of the half-cake-half-batter slop onto a plate, added a ginormous gob of freshly whipped cream, heaped the rest of the cake pieces, and carefully plastered it all over with chocolate buttercream.  M walked in and said, “Hey, that doesn’t look so bad!”  A high compliment, indeed.  I successfully balanced the crumbling pieces and then handed over the spreader for the girls to do finishing touches.  It was not my prettiest cake ever–come to think of it, I’ve made a fabulous princess castle, Elmo cupcakes, and a dog cake, so it’s not like I completely suck–but it still tasted good.

Part of the reason why I didn’t notice my collapsing cooling cakes is that I was working on another birthday project.  On Valentine’s Day I’d tardily come up with a clever plan to get MP3 versions of the songs on W’s very first mix tape for me.  Yes, I’m dating myself–we started going out back when we made mix tapes instead of burning CDs or loading MP3s.  Anyway, W is usually the music-obtainer in our family, so it took me quite a while to even figure out what I was doing, and then the computer got irritated with me and various programs went into passive-aggressive mode and decided that they wouldn’t respond.  And then, to make matters worse, W received emails about my purchases and it totally spoiled the surprise.  So the birthday has been a teensy bit of a bust, I’m afraid.  Anyway, I do still think that it was a good idea-right?  I hadn’t listened to the cassette tape in forever.  I can still remember making one of my sisters listen to Dela and gushing, “You realize that I’m the moon in this scenario!?!”

Anyway, we’re likely to just go for dinner tonight at this rate.  I might be too sleepy for wine, even.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the weekend.

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