HA(choo)NIVERSARY!

That's what happens when you cross Happy Anniversary with a family full of sickies!

Today is our wedding anniversary and all four of us are celebrating with stuffed up noses, sore throats, and exhaustion.  Not exactly the way it went down 9 years ago!

I did manage to make one of Roy's favorite meals (hoisin beer braised short ribs) and bake a cake for us to have tonight though since the kids and I are mostly staying home this week in an attempt to contain our germs.

The cake is one I've been wanting to try for a while.  First I had been shown this one and I loved the roses icing.  Then I saw this purple ombre one and knew I had to give the rose icing a shot!  I haven't taken the cake decorating classes that I hope to one day, but I had heard this was a pretty simple technique, so I got brave and tried it today finally.

I used a mish mash of icing recipes for inspiration (ended up using 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup crisco, 1/4 cup cream cheese, 6ish cups of powdered sugar, about 1 tsp of vanilla, and some milk to get desired consistency - the reason I don't know exactly how much sugar is because I measured the first 4 cups with Leighton's help and then had Riley in my arms the rest of the time and we just kind of winged it from there!) and a boxed white cake mix.  I really wanted to make my own white cake from scratch because they are so so SO much better and I very rarely bake anything from a mix anymore.  But with me & the kids sick and low on energy, I had to limit our shopping to one location this morning, and Target didn't have the cake flour I wanted to make my own cake, so we brought Betty Crocker home with us instead.

I used a 1M Wilton tip for piping and varying amounts of Wilton Violet gel food coloring for the three cake layers and two colors of icing.  The cake turntable my parents got me for Christmas was fantastic to have as I piped the roses.

The roses on the top were a great size and consistency.  The roses on the side seemed a bit big and the consistency wasn't as stiff (I was running short on icing by a bit so had to make some more quickly).  But, the overall effect was enough to make Riley say, "Wowwww, pretty" and Leighton to say, "Mom!  Wow!  Did you think you'd even be able to do that?" so I consider it a successful first attempt!