Is is just me or does everyone have one month so jammed full of birthdays you end up broke and sick of cake by the end of it?
Welcome to September.
Actually, wave goodbye to it in the rearview mirror because it’s finally over, but not without my being talked into making cake balls…again. This time for my niece Ashley’s 14th birthday.
As you may have guessed, I’m not a planner. Cake ball inspiration never hits me until I’m staring at a bowl of melted candy and a half-empty box of food coloring, which ultimately makes the decision on what the finished product will look like.
This is the end result:
The only explanation I can give you for it looking like a gaggle of demented baby chicks is that I needed to make yellow coconut make sense and I didn’t do a good job of matching the pupil size on the sugar googly eyes.
Well, all there is left to do is…light them on fire!
As if they didn’t look disturbing enough already, right?
Oh, don’t worry, they went quick. And besides, they were all girls and we caught them doing math under the cake cover. I’m fairly certain they were witches. Consider their demise a sugary public service.
Anyway, I agreed to make this laborious monstrosity under the condition that when my youngest niece’s birthday rolls around at the end of this month I won’t be the one washing candy and coconut out of their hair after spending all morning crafting ill-formed cake balls into something more suited for Easter than the Fall equinox.
Seriously, I mean it this time. I’m all cake-balled out!
The tricky part, other than not folding on the deal like I’m known to do, is to get my soon to be 7-year-old niece to request a birthday cake that requires more effort than it takes to mix eggs, water, oil and the contents of a Pillsbury box together!
I’m thinking of suggesting she’d like something motorized and requires welding certification to pull off. A rollercoaster perhaps? One operated by gingerbread carnies and leaves raspberry flavored rainbow unicorn sprinkles in its wake.
Is it wrong of me to want the next baker on deck to have to toil a little?
Probably.
But I just baked through the busiest birthday month of the year!
That’ll make anyone a little sinister.
And broke.
And sick of cake.