Betty Crocker is your friend

This weekend was cause for celebration since not only was it Valentine's Day on Saturday, but it was Erik's birthday on Sunday. Our Valentine's Day was spent with the gang at the Coppermill for an amazing buffet of prime rib, a pasta bar, salads, pot roast, chicken, and desserts galore. It's been a long time since I've left a restaurant so stuffed, but it was totally worth it. On Sunday, we were able to enjoy my Valentine's present:

He did a great job this year, but I told him this doesn't get us out of going to the Melting Pot for my birthday!

On Sunday, we had our parents up to celebrate Erik's 28th birthday, and after snowmobiling the day before, he was definitely feeling his age. :) Since he had to work - and it was his birthday, after all - I was in charge of getting dinner together. Although I made sure everyone knew I slaved all day in a hot kitchen to get things ready, it was really just putting a roast in the crockpot before church and letting it do its thing.

But there was a bit of a fiasco with the cake. Erik didn't commit on whether he wanted a cake until Friday night. I don't usually keep cake mix in the house, so Saturday we ran to the store to get it along with a couple more things for dinner and the frosting makings. When we got home, we realized the cake mix was no where to be found. We finally found the receipt and discovered we never paid for it even though I know we put it on the counter at the checkout. Rather than go back to the store after our fabulous dinner, I decided I could handle making a cake on my own. I actually like to bake, so I didn't mind. So Sunday morning, I get going on my cake...just a simple two layer white cake. The recipe wasn't complicated and it looked great when I put it in the oven. About half way through cooking, I peeked through my oven's window and realized the cake was going to overflow the pan any second. And it did. I hoped that even though it overflowed a little, it would come out decent enough to frost and hide the imperfections. No one would know, right? This is how it looked once I turned it out of the pans (yes, this is both layers):

No amount of frosting was going to fix this disaster. So I had to start over, using a different recipe of course. Since the first cake had almost wiped me out of milk and eggs, I went for a single layer that didn't use as much of either. It came out ok...definitely not Betty Crocker, but at least it was frostable with the requested whipped cream frosting:

And that was our weekend in a nutshell, which seemed to center mostly around food. So back to the gym this week for me...