When life hands you lemons -- make trifle!

Last Tuesday, January 5th my nieces (The Iongi triplets) turned 6. This past Saturday, their parents threw them a party over at my parents' home. A few weeks ago I volunteered to bring Melenaite's cake. She wanted a Dora cake. I was planning on buying this cake pan:



and making her a cake out of it. But being the procrastinator that I am...didn't get around to buying it. Instead figured I could just bake a regular cake and buy the cake kit from the store. Little did I know, it was going to be a busy weekend.

Friday night I had a funeral to attend. Then after the funeral had to stop by work. Then Saturday morning, we had early morning baptisms for the youth. Followed by the burial and then the birthday party.

When I got home from work on Friday night, I debated whether or not to stay up and bake the cake or bake it after the temple, or after the burial. I didn't want to chance it, so I stayed up and baked it. It was 2 am and here I was trying to bake two 9X13 cakes. Big mistake I made: I used "I can't believe it's not butter" spray to coat my pans. We had no cooking spray or butter to grease the pans. Well, this is what happened:




The cakes would not come out of the pan. Ruined. I tried not to think about it. Went to bed. Woke up late. Made it to the baptisms, pigged out at Golden Corral. Then begged Haloti to buy me two more cake mixes, cooking spray and my cake kit. He ended up buying 4 cakes mixes and two cooking sprays plus the cake kit (basically the 3 Dora figures). Guess he bought extra just in case I messed up again.

I didn't make it to the burial, instead stayed home and baked two more cakes. Held my breath until they were done. This time they baked up nice. Thank goodness!!! Got it decorated. Here's the finall outcome. Nothing extravagant, but just relieved it looked like a cake.





My niece was happy and that was all that mattered!!!

Melenaite



Morena



Ruby and I



As for the cake mess -- I ended up making a chocolate trifle out of it yesterday. Everyone that ate it loved it -- so all in all--the cake disaster was not really a disaster!