Birthday Cake

It's been a while since we've blogged, mostly because of school. This year I'm coordinating a class at ISU and doing research. It's going to be a crazy semester. Last week and next week, Julie has been on a pathology elective looking at lots of tissue and cutting stuff up and looking at slides under microscopes and all that fun stuff. My birthday was Thursday, so we made some delicious food - red curry chicken and potatoes and mushrooms in a yummy yogurt sauce. But no pictures of that because it's kinda hard to take good pictures of a curry that has a lot of sauce. Instead, you get pictures of the cake that Julie baked for me.As you can see, she made a rocket cake! And it is standing up! She made a full recipe of "Aunt Marge's Three Layer Chocolate Cake" in a 9 by 13 pan and used circular cookie cutters to cut ot the body of the rocket. The booster rockets are ding-dongs or ho-hos or whatever. And the smoke is cotton candy. Pretty clever, huh? Finally, the nose of the rocket was supposed to be a waffle cone, but apparently when you buy waffle cones from the grocery store you get waffle cone crumbs instead of actual waffle cones. Oh, and if you ever try to ice over a "cut" cake surface, make sure that you are using air conditioning - 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 percent humidity is just not appropriate for icing.