Jason's Birthday

Yesterday was Jason's birthday.  Work really puts a damper in birthday celebrations but we managed to have a fun evening celebrating with our friends, Kelly, Tripp, and Caroline.

We went to dinner at our favorite local Mexican restaurant and enjoyed great food and wonderful company!  With two little girls dinners aren't the quiet, drawn out affairs that they used to be, but we wouldn't have them any other way! It's much more fun with little girls than without!

 

Here is our family.  Excuse Charlotte's expression, she was enjoying her tortilla's too much to smile for the camera!

 

Jason and Tripp

 

Me with Kelly and Caroline

 

 With my little munchkin.  Again, not happy to have to pause eating to take a picture. :)

 

Our girls.  Cracks me up that they're both looking at me kind of like I'm a stalker!  I can't wait until Charlotte gets big enough to really play with Caroline.  Dinners will REALLY be fun then!

If you follow my tweets you saw that yesterday during Charlotte's afternoon nap time I made Jason's birthday cake.  If you kept following me you would have seen that I said it was my worst kitchen failure of all time.  I'm pretty sure nothing could top the 12 layer cake that I made last year, but I was determined to make a good cake even though I didn't have all day to spend on it and we're not eating chocolate for Lent.

I asked Jason a few weeks ago what kind of cake he wanted since the typical yellow cake with chocolate icing wasn't going to cut it.  I suggested a cobbler or a pie since he is frequently telling me how much he loves them.  But he decided he wanted a traditional cake so he asked for a caramel cake.  I've never made a caramel cake so I started scrounging my typical recipe sites to find a recipe.  The Pioneer Woman came up empty and the recipes on Tasty Kitchen weren't the type of caramel cake that I was looking for.  So I went googling and I ended up with two recipes and I chose to stick with the safe bet -- the Paula Deen recipe.  

This was pretty much the perfect storm in the kitchen.  I followed all of the instructions exactly and was really excited about the cake.  It looked like I was going to time it perfectly and get done right before naptime was over.  My kitchen was a wreck but that's expected when your baking.  Then I pulled the cakes out of the oven and started to assemble the cake.  Train wreck.  The middle part of the bottoms of the cakes stuck to the pans even though I had thoroughly greased the pans.  Therefore my cake was sagging in the middle and the top two layers edges ripped when I tried to put them on the cake.  I ended up with a leaning tower of caramel cake.  I gave up on the icing looking pretty since the cake was a disaster anyway.  Here's my -- disastrous -- finished product.

By the time we got home from dinner to cut the cake parts of the top layer had fallen off in addition to the sunken middle! The good news is that it does taste good, but I'm very glad I was only making this for our family and not for guests.  I doubt I'll try this recipe again because the part of cake that doesn't have the caramel filling seeped through is pretty dry and I don't know how to get the cakes to not stick to the pan if what I did before didn't work.  But, it was a valiant effort for a birthday cake that wasn't chocolate.  Sorry, honey! I hope you still enjoyed it! :)