Epic Fail

So we had our boy's 1st Birthday Party almost....  let me explain.

I had it planned.  That was the first thing I did wrong.  I had the cake picture-perfect in my head, with the amazing icing work I'd do to make it look like a lion's head.  I baked a cake, and bought a sponge (way easier to buy one) to layer them, stuck them together with hazelnut spread and began preparing the icing.

There was this really cheap, I mean $4-cheap, piping tube and a bunch of nozzles I bought for the occasion.  Possibly not such a good idea getting something really cheap, but in hindsight, I think it probably wouldn't have mattered and in this case, cheap was good.

I used an icing mixture from the good ol' Edmonds cook book.  I've known cakes to be covered with the same recipe all my life - thanks to Mumsy.  I didn't think much more about it.  I didn't know that to pipe properly and perfectly, you need to know a few secrets.  Secrets that my husband told me about after the Epic Fail.  Secrets he'd learnt from his Mom.  Yes, I write Mom and not Mum because his Mom is American.  And that he reminds me of allthetime.  He is very proud to be officially half American.  And he reminded me a billion times after the Epic Fail that it's 'frosting' and not 'icing'.  Frosting, it's American.  Or so he tells me.

This 'icing' I had made, [I forgot] goes smooth.  No matter how thick you make it, no matter how cool the cake is, no matter how much you pipe that stuff through a fancy piping nozzle, it'll smooth off and make you want to scream your head off.  Then it'll burst that $4 bag you cherished.  "Hey, look at this cool pattern I made.... oh wait, where did it go?"  It melted like lava down the side of a mountain, going ever so slowly that you don't notice that it's still going and it's about to drool all over your jungle animals and peel off the sides of the sponge.  Literally.

And when I look back to the first pic, I remember that the cake was laughing at me the WHOLE time.

And that was just the cake.

But we still ate it and it was ridiculously sweet.  Poor little guy was running around like a headless chicken.

Opening up his prezzie from Uncle.  I particularly like my hair in this shot.... just sayin.  This is how I cut it.

The day before the little boy wasn't very well, sick with a cold, cough and all that.  We cancelled the 'party' of little baby friends so no one would get sick.  But it was a necessity that his Uncle came over anyway, and a couple of our friends (Amy made this for our lucky little boy ) who couldn't make it to the postponement date came too.

Then, I was catching the cold by the next day so I wasn't doing very well either.

And by the end of the day, after Birthday Boy finally went to bed, Mummy and Daddy were exhausted.

Sugar-rush beginning to hit after eating cake...

Happy 1st Birthday, my awesome, cute, awesome son!