The Worst Birthday Present I've Ever Given

A few months ago I spotted a Groupon for an "all-day cake-design workshop." This was the description:

Before cakes, the only vehicle for frosting consumption was the bare hand, and the only place to load frosting onto that vehicle was the neighborhood frosting bucket. Eat frosting the evolved way with today's Groupon: for $110, you get a spot in an all-day cake-decorating workshop from Cafe Liardi (a $250 value). The workshop will be held at Marbles Kids Museum on Saturday, June 11 from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Cafe Liardi’s cake-decorating workshops fulfill frosting fantasies with explicit instructions for turning humdrum baked goods into towering masterpieces. Throughout the six-hour Saturday session, owner and Chef Gailyn Gagliardi walks students through the basics of design, such as forging fondant adornments, gum-paste flowers, and icing subliminal messages, as they design their own three-tier cake. After production, each student leaves with a recipe booklet crammed full of Chef Gagliardi’s confectionary secrets, as well as their completed cake in a complimentary carrying case. In addition to a wealth of sweet knowledge, Cafe Liardi supplies a continental breakfast, gourmet lunch buffet, and in-between snacks to keep charges' energy up and ensure steady-handed misspelling of frosting-scrawled congratulations. Call or email Cafe Liardi to confirm dates and reserve a spot.

(By the way, while some people love them, Groupon's descriptions infuriate me. No need for all of the fancy copywriting, just tell me what I'm getting.)

Anyway, I thought this sounded awesome. Something fun that my mom and I could do together. I ran it by her and she was in. Her birthday was right around the date of the class, so I purchased one for each of us.

The day of the workshop rolled around and we arrived at Marbles Kid's Museum ready to get our cake on.

There were early warning signs that this might not be the magical cake decorating experience we were hoping for:

• We were crammed in 6 to a round table -- how are we going to roll out our fondant with no work space?! (yeah, no rolling of fondant was going to be happening)
• There were over 100 people in attendance -- how can you get the instruction and interaction you need to learn a new skill with this many people? (answer: you can't)
• The "supplies" we were provided with to cut, stack and frost our sheet cake? Styrofoam plates, a huge tub of buttercream icing from Sam's Club and a plastic picnic knife. (I kid you not.)

We trudged through the morning session, cutting, stacking and "dirty icing" our cakes. Some people were already starting to complain that this wasn't what they were expecting out of the class. I tried to be optimistic and give the instructor the benefit of the doubt.

Then lunchtime came around. I was looking forward to the "gourmet lunch buffet" we had been promised -- it was one of the reasons I was willing to pay $110 each for this workshop, because we'd be getting a yummy breakfast and lunch out of it (the workshop was put on by a catering company after all). But this lunch was "gourmet" only if you consider mixed greens with store-bought bottled salad dressing (Wish Bone brand, if you're wondering), bland flavorless pasta salad, and chicken with an unidentifiable sauce to be gourmet. I, my friends, do not.

We had been promised that after lunch we'd be able to go back over our cakes with another layer of frosting that would clean them up and make them look great. Yeah, not so much. As everyone tried to slather on more icing with a serrated plastic picnic knife in an attempt to salvage the cakes, the instructor moved on to fondant and gum paste decorations.

We were given packages of white pre-made fondant and gum paste. We were to use food coloring to color the fondant and gum paste -- except they provided writing icing (the tubes you buy in the grocery store) to "color" our fondant and gum paste instead of actual food coloring.

And the gum paste bow that the instructor demonstrated for us? It looked like this:

I'm pretty sure I could have done better at seven years old.

By this point there is a room of 120 creative, crafty, pissed off women who have paid $110 to make a cake that they could have done a much better job on at home with the proper tools and absolutely no instruction. Women are yelling at the instructor, the instructor and her assistants are getting flustered, and the conference room is a mess of powdered sugar and frosting.

All of the attendees are complaining amongst themselves and discussing how to get their money back. People start leaving, trying to salvage what's left of their wasted Saturday. There are abandoned cakes lying around everywhere:

There were some very talented women at this workshop (some who decorate cakes for a living and just came for fun) and NO ONE was able to leave with a presentable cake. The resources were just not there.

My "finished" product:

The "recipe booklet crammed full of Chef Gagliardi's confectionary secrets" were these pitiful cards:

And the "complimentary carrying case" was a cardboard box:

The workshop was meant to last until 4:30. We only made it to 1:30.

So, you live and you learn. If you ever hear the name Chef Gailyn Gagliardi or Cafe Liardi in Burgaw, NC, run as far as possible in the opposite direction. I think she meant well, but she was totally unprepared and in over her head.

However, I have to give Groupon props. I emailed them at 5:00 that Saturday afternoon and had a response within 20 minutes saying "no problem" and that my money would be refunded in full.

Mom, I am sorry your birthday present was such a bust. But at least we have a good story to tell now and we got some cake out of it (the cake actually was pretty delicious).

To My Dad

Dad, on this Father's Day, here are a few of the reasons I'm thankful for you:

• For responding to every question, every favor, big or small with your signature "sure!" reply.
• For Saturday morning breakfasts of Mt. Dew and a Ring Pop from the Hasty Mart, followed by a driving lesson on the farm (where you had to work the pedals, since I couldn't reach).
• For reading me The House That Had Enough so many times that you knew the words by heart, and I did too.
• For weekend wakeup calls of the "I Cain't Get 'Em Up" song and flickering our light switches.
• For teaching us all of your silly sayings and songs, but replacing the cuss words.
• For giving up your dream of farming when I came along, because you just couldn't make it work now that I was in the picture.
• And for working your way in road construction from the man who turns the Stop/Slow sign all the way up to where you are now.
• Yet always encouraging us to do good in school and get a good degree so we wouldn't have to work as hard and overcome as many obstacles as you did.
• For being my #1 blog reader.
• For walking me down the aisle, giving the most perfect wedding speech and lifting me up on your shoulders before the night was through.
• For loving my husband, and accepting him as the son you never had.

For all of these reasons and about 8,000 more, I love you. You are truly the best. Happy Father's Day.

Memorial Day 2011

Our Memorial Day weekend involved:

• Lazy days on the island
• Lots of visitors (Missy, Tammy & Rachel on Saturday, the Fussell clan on Sunday)
• Lots of beverages
• A steak dinner, a low country boil and the best homemade ice cream ever (cookies 'n cream, made in our new old-fashioned ice cream maker)
• Lunch with girlfriends at Beaufort Grocery (including the BEST ham and pimiento cheese sandwich, mimosas and, of course, lots of gossip)
• A sprained ankle (Lee) and early morning trip to Walgreens to procure crutches and an ankle brace
• Drinks in Morehead with friends at Chefs 105 and the swanky Arendell Room
• Fun times lounging on (and then destroying) the Funstation (this now makes two that we've destroyed)
• A shiny new Jarrett Bay collar for Sugar

Taylor and Macy rocking out with the boat paddles:

A pregnant crab:

Hope you had a great Memorial Day like we did!

Pinwheel Baby Shower

I'm finally getting around to telling you about the baby shower I hosted last month for my coworker Melissa.

She's having a girl, but we (we being my coworker Carmen and I, who helped plan the shower) wanted to go with bright gender-neutral colors, instead of a baby pink affair. I started with a simple orange invitation, and we settled on a color scheme of orange, yellow, blue and green.

(Invite from etsy seller mink cards)

Inspired by a baby shower on Hostess with the Mostess, I went with a pinwheel theme, and also added in some tissue paper pom poms. I made the pinwheels myself -- about 16 large and 20 small -- using these instructions. The tissue poms were made using Martha's tried and true method.

For the mantle, I DIY'ed a pennant banner and a bed of wheatgrass with pinwheels.

Growing wheatgrass in galvanized containers is still my go-to party trick. As long as you time the planting right (about 7 days ahead of your party), it's super easy. I buy my wheatgrass seeds from Whole Foods (located with the other herb/flower seed packets).

The food table included more wheatgrass and pinwheels. I also hung poms from the ceiling above the table but forgot to get a picture (gah!!).

Carmen took charge of the food and we had delicious tomato bruschetta, homemade parmesan and thyme crackers, pinwheel (get it?!) sandwiches, vegetable crudite, fruit salad and cupcakes. Being the anal retentive person that I am, I made little labels for each item.

Would you have ever guessed that these cupcakes came from Wal-Mart? No, they are not $2 a piece cupcakes from a fancy bakery. They are $6/dozen cupcakes from Wal-Mart with plain yellow cake and white icing that I fancied up with cupcake liners and pinwheels. (I did specify when I ordered them that I wanted them iced with a round icing tip and not a star tip, because I thought they'd look less grocery-store-esque that way. Again with the anal retentiveness.) And by the way, they tasted delicious!

As for beverages, we served "Melissa's favorite Chic-fil-A lemonade," Izze bottled sodas and cucumber-mint water.

Fun striped straws made for pretty beverages.

The table in the hallway held the "activities packet," pencils and the shower favors, decorated with pinwheels in a Ball jar and a onesie clothesline.

A nod to the mother and father-to-be's techie backgrounds:

I made homemade sugar scrub for favors, just because I loved the "from our shower to yours" line so much.

Here's the recipe I ended up using: regular granulated sugar, safflower oil (there are lots of different types of carrier oils you can use, like avocado oil, sweet almond oil and vegetable glycerin, but the cheapest solution I found was safflower oil from Whole Foods, found with the cooking oils), and a few drops of essentials oils to make it smell good (I used Sweet Orange and Lemon essential oils, also found at Whole Foods). The canisters were from Michael's. Definitely a nice alternative to the $20 tub of sugar scrub I used to buy from Bath & Body Works in my college days.

For our activities, I DIY'ed a little packet of games. There were 3 games, each just sort of cobbled together from ideas around the Internets. The first was a celebrity baby name game, where you had to match the baby name with the celebrity parents.

The second was Baby Price is Right. I had gone to Wal-Mart and researched prices of some common baby items, like diapers, formula and baby food. Everyone wrote down what they thought each item cost and totaled up their numbers. Whoever was closest to the total (without going over of course) won.

And game number three was the baby animal game, with a list of adult animals where everyone wrote down the corresponding baby name (cow=calf, kangaroo=joey, for example). It gets pretty hard when you get down to things like swan (cygnet) and turkey (poult).

I think everyone had fun working away on their packets.

Prizes were kits for growing basil and daisies (from Target), wrapped in strips of tobacco sack.

Finally, it was present time.

Isn't she just glowing?!

Baby showers are always fun, and I loved having an excuse to throw a party and have all my coworkers over.

Best wishes Melissa!