A Relaxing Weekend

Sunday night in the Judge household:

Adam: "Did you have a nice weekend?"
Mel: "Sure, you?"
Adam: "Yea, it was relaxing. Don't you think?"
Mel: "Um...[giving Adam a confused look] if by "relaxing" you mean slaving in the kitchen over cakes all weekend...then, yes! It was definitely relaxing!"

Yea, it's true. But if I can't completely relax and vegetate, my next favorite thing would be to spend the weekend caking - and that's exactly what I did!

By the way, as of right now, cake and it's many conjugate forms will be used as a verb on this blog. To "cake" involves the entire process of baking, leveling, filling, and decorating a cake - start to finish! I'll use it in a sentence for you: Caking is one of my favorite hobbies. Get it? Great, let's move on.

On Saturday, Elise and I ran 3 miles at 9am (yes, we're still training for the Princess Half-Marathon...are you??). By 11am, I was at Elise's house for a cake tutorial photo shoot. That's right, folks! Yours truly will be featured in the December issue of American Cake Decorating Magazine. So exciting!

Last year, I entered the 2008 American Style Cake Decorating Competition sponsored by the magazine. The idea is to create 2 cute, but very simple cakes that even someone with no decorating experience can complete. As a finalist in the competition, the cakes and their instructions will be published in the magazine.

Elise is an amazing photographer so I asked her to shoot the tutorial. We worked on the cakes until 5pm, but it was fun! Here are the cakes you'll see in the December issue:

Oops! They're top secret! I can't post them on the blog until they've been printed in the magazine so you'll just have to wait. I know, the anticipation will probably kill us all. Well, it'll kill me...I've already started checking the mail every day, anxiously awaiting the December issue...and it's only October!

Later Saturday night, we had some friends over to watch the UF and FSU football games. I won't go into details, but let's just say that UF won and FSU didn't. Every team has their bad games...or bad season...or bad set of years... Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say. Oh, except that I love Bobby Bowden. Yes, he's ripe for retirement, but I still love him. He's done amazing things for my 'Noles! Ok, that's it. End of discussion.

On Sunday, I made this cake for my friend Casie:


Her sorority is celebrating Founders' Day this week and they wanted a cake in the shape of one of their badges.

I carved the cake out of two 13x9-inch cakes, iced it in chocolate buttercream, and covered it with fondant. Then, I airbrushed the whole thing with bronze and gold coloring. The gems and pearls were made of fondant and painted with the new Americolor sheen colors.

I finished this cake around 8pm Sunday night. If you allow for 1 hour of clean-up and dishes, that's a full day of work. Ok, I'll admit that I took lots of breaks - ate lunch, walked Nani, picked up a Slurpee (yum!), etc. After all, it was a "relaxing" weekend, wasn't it?