ow.

been sick since thursday night. ugh. awful cold that morphed into a cold AND an asthma exacerbation. it feels like someone is sandpapering my lungs. i barely slept last night, the few hours i did were because monkey snuggled up next to my head and purred (knocks me out every time).

i had so much fun stuff i wanted to do today... dammit.

cake crusader

i tried a dry run of my birthday cake tonight. i'm certainly glad i did, because otherwise i'd be running out to the local star market on the night of my party. *chuckle* actually, it tastes amazing... i found a recipe for "champagne cake", a white cake made with champagne in the batter, and then filled it with a marshmallow-coconut-champagne filling and coated it in pink fondant. the cake is to-die-for, it's really really nummy (although it's very time-consuming)... but the fondant is what killed me.

fondant is a pain in the ass. you can buy blocks of it to use in decorating cakes, but to cover one you really need to cook it from scratch and then coat the cake with it. the problem is, if the mixture is too hot, it pours down the sides of the cake and puddles around it. if it's too cool, you get big bumps and swirls from where it was drizzled, so you don't get that nice porcelain finish. and literally, there is a one-degree temperature difference between the two. by the time i finished pouring the fondant over my cake, it had pooled around the sides of the platter, but the top was all lumpy because it had cooled too much before i was finished pouring. meh!!!! so, it tastes great... but looks like a blob of pink crap. it was gonna be cute, too -- i was going to mold these white chocolate circles of all different sizes, and cover the cake in them... so it'd be like champagne bubbles on a pink cake. too cute.

so, now i have to re-think my cake strategy. i'm actually thinking i might take the easier route -- a cupcake for each person, frosted in pink icing, and then brushing the icing with edible gold dust. not quite the grand birthday cake i was hoping to do, but cute and festive nonetheless.

or, i could keep making batches of fondant and baking cakes to practice. yeah, right.