Happy Birthday dear Issa

Mandy is getting ready for Issa's party on Saturday. Busy mommy is working so I volunteered to make the cake for her little family dinner tonight. In my mind, this is what my birthday cake for issa will look like. Colorful and fun! Fairly symetrical! Festive! No gaps or holes! She will love it!

Now this vintage cake keeper is hiding Issa's birthday cake. I bought it many years ago at Lakewood, and I have always loved the little acorn on top. Through the years it has kept many pound cakes, and I appreciate the fact that I am not haunted by the image of cake every time I pass through the kitchen, like I would be if it were glass! Mandy wants the birthday party guests to decorate aprons with fabric paint, so I put names on them in a variety of colors and fonts. I don't know what happended to little Amelia's apron. Puckers. I used the same stabilizer, same thread, but something about the font, I guess, made the stitches pull. The white aprons are a little more lightweight so they are not as smooth as the cream ones. Marion's rule of 2 layers of stabilizer would have fixed this, I am sure, but I did it the easy way and just used one. Live and learn!

This would be the birthday cake. Why oh why can't I make a pretty birthday cake? Why is one side a full 2 inches shorter than the other? It is a vast improvement on Birthday Cakes Past, and it is not leaning the way mine tend to do, but it is a very strange shape. I can usually bake a cake, but if I put the word birthday in front of it....forget it. It is going to be wop sided. Just like this one! But Issa likes chocolate, and this frosting has a bag of chocolate chips and half a stick of butter in it, so (as Ina Garten says) how can that be bad? Maybe some sprinkles will help...