tired and ouchy.

soooooo sore from yesterday. i was on my feet non-stop from 8am to about 10pm. ack. J is moving to california for law school, and is only in town for a few days (he's been travelling for the last month), so a few of us decided to try to throw him a last-minute surprise party. so saturday night, D and i were talking about it, and D says, "are you gonna make him that barbie cake?" dammit. for years, J has wanted a barbie cake... the thing where the cake is a dome that acts like a skirt, and you stick a naked barbie down into it waist-deep, and then decorate the whole thing so that her top is icing and the bottom is cake and the whole thing looks like a dress. it was my last chance to do this for him, so i HAD to try. (and yes, he only wants the darn thing so that he can lick icing off a naked barbie.)

so yesterday first thing in the morning, i was out running errands... bought a "california girl" barbie at target, then off to the crafts store to get cake pans, food coloring, fondant, edible sparkles, etc. etc. then to the supermarket for cake mix, all the ingredients for buttercream frosting, etc. spent from 10am-2pm baking cakes and making frosting and constructing the darn thing (i'll put directions in another post in case anyone's interested, it's kind of involved), only to find out that the cake wasn't high enough, so i needed to bake another cake so it'd be barbie-waist-high. grrrrr. went to a BBQ for a few hours, then back at 6pm to work on the cake some more... by the time i finished for the evening (and it's not done yet!), it was 10pm and i still hadn't done my weekly report for work. eek. so no bed for me until midnight... at least i got to catch some of the boston fireworks out my window while i worked.

the rest of the weekend was laid back... BBQs on sunday and monday (one his friends, one mine)... at his, several of his friends pulled me aside and said how glad they were that D had met me. at mine, several of my friends pulled me aside to say how great and funny he was. *sigh*. just makes me even more torn about what to do down the road.

*whew*!

barbie cake is all done... spent another 2 hours on it this morning, and dropped it off at the restaurant after work. i was trying to figure out how to decorate the "dress", 'cause he's a guy and i didn't want it to be too foo-foo... so i combined the cake with his love of dance dance revolution:

the front


the back (in-joke for DDR fans)


so that's what $125 and 10 hours of work gets ya. :) it was an accomplishment, and a labor of love, but i hope i never have to make one again. i have taste-tested enough buttercream and cake mix in the last 2 days to give a kid a sugar seizure. *gag*