The day of the party!

I've done about 34 things so far and seem to have 73 to go in order to be ready for tonight.

It has been a long time since I frequently decorated cakes for family occasions. This past year, I've done three cakes for young children's birthday parties. Visits to the cake decorating store rekindled interests that perhaps should have remained dormant. Decades ago (although it seems like last week), I decorated rice paper with edible gel to make characters and designs that were traced, often from coloring books, onto the rice paper. My sons found it wasn't the tastiest thing to eat, and it wasn't easy to cut through when serving, but the paper was easy enough to work with and the cakes were cute.

Now designs are made on edible paper. The supply store near me will scan an image for you and print it on edible paper with edible ink. Hmmmm, this sounded like a great idea a few days ago. I had the store scan the Money Pit house image and attempted to decorate a sheet cake this morning. Peeling the very fragile image from the backing paper caused me to utter some words that used to make me blush. My, how times have changed. The design ripped in the white background and in the green of the lawn. I trimmed the background, cut off the words to add to the cake separately, and will call the rips in the green area dead patches of lawn should anyone ask. The green sprinkles are to divert attention from the edges of the paper design. The plastic tools are from the cake supply store too. Just because they were cute.

The Happy Birthday design was commercially made and released from its backing much more easily. Size could have a lot to do with it too. If I had trimmed the round cake flat, I could have avoided the wrinkles but I hate to cut the crowned part of a layer cake. It seems wasteful. If I do cut it, I feel obliged to eat it and than it becomes waist-full. The wrinkles won't matter to my brother-in-law. He likes me and his wife doesn't bake. I can tell him they are supposed to be there.

Here are the personalized candies, five varieties, all together in one container, 150 of them.