Have your cake and eat it, two

Have you ever had an idea pop in your head that was so perfect and got you so excited that you nearly wet your pantaloons and somewhere amidst the swooning at your own cleverness you neglected to care about things that normally would alarm you, like a leaking poopie diaper or the fact that you're in your underwear while the apartment complex gardening company is outside your sliding glass door mowing your lawn whilst you stand there in raptured glee among poo fumes?

That happened to me.

The grand idea popped into my head after much deliberation and pondering upon the subject, so the moral of the story is to always ponder and you will be considered wonderful by any and all.

The subject? Upcoming baby shower for a friend.

The deliberation? I volunteered to help with the shower, so what cake to make? What flavor? Frosting or ganache? Which frosting? What decoration? Why is her favorite color blue when she's having a girl?

Further deliberation? What do I do for a gift? I've always been the practical type who gives diapers and wipes and boobie pads because EVERY MOM NEEDS THOSE and we all hate paying for them, but they're necessities of life, like Diet Coke and Peanut M&Ms. And bacon.

The pondering? I have recently become....obsessed? no. Addicted? no...Curiously engaged in pursuing acts of craftiness as long as 1) it can be perfect the first time I make it, 2) it's not something someone would throw away after looking at it and moving it around your dining room table for a week, hoping it will find its own niche in your home (sorry, papercrafters), and 3) it doesn't cost me more money to make than it would take to just buy a completed and better version of it.

Further pondering. I went through a gamut of ideas to hopefully fulfill the "what can I make to add to the diapers and boobie pads?" conundrum. Dyed and appliqued onesies? Never done them before. Freezer paper onesies? Still haven't purchased my own fabric paint and I remember the good designs being tedious. Sew a skirt? Maybe I could swing it, but there are a lot of women who could do it way better and might try, thereby making my skirt look like something a hobo would wear. Bead a few bracelets? Done that - have the materials, but want to try something different.

And that's when the almost-pantaloons-wetting and poo-fume-ignoring and Mexican-gardeners-getting-a-free-PG-13-rated-peep-show-cluelessness kicked in.

The cake would be chocolate chunk raspberry because she's had it before and couldn't stop foogasming over it (which is the basis of our friendship). That was the only given in this scenario. Everything else came together in a flurry of converging neural synapses that almost exploded my brain. The convergence went something like this:

Cream cheese frosting won't hold up as well as a buttercream so I'll do the buttercream even though I haven't made it as often OOH! and since the cake has a hint of raspberry the buttercream should too and I suppose I could decorate it with raspberries but I had such a bad experience relying on that last time because when we bought them the day of the party all the good raspberries were gone so we had to pay a dollar more per box for the last two organic boxes where half of them were already beginning to mold or mush under the weight of the others God bless pesticides screw the raspberries strawberries are looking gorgeous right now and huge so I'll use those does that mean I should try to find a strawberry extract? maybe I can if not I can soften the raspberry extract with some vanilla after all I only want a hint and I don't care if her favorite color is blue she's having a girl so she's just gonna have to get used to pink dammit we all do so the frosting will be pink which will be perfect since it's going to be raspberry buttercream anyway besides who wants a blue frosting that tastes like raspberries it's not like I'm running an Icee machine out of a 7-11 so pink it is with strawberries and OOH! there's a pattern for a crocheted slice of cake in that book Ted gave me and it's easy enough to change the frosting color from white to pink yarn but that pattern only has it as a two-layer cake and this one will most definitely be four layers with berry bits between because that's just what I do so I can't settle for a two-layer slice of cake but the rest of it looks pretty cute so maybe I can adapt it to three layers instead because if I try to do four layers it will be monstrous and this is supposed to be a little crawling baby's toy and OOH! I can put jingle bells in it so it's like a little rattle but would that be too much like a cat's toy I don't want this thing to look like it came straight out of PetSmart so OOH! I'll crochet a few strawberries to go with it since that's what's going to be on the real cake and then it'll look even more like food and I'll add bells to those too so when she opens it and shakes it around I'll say it's CAKE AND JINGLEBERRIES!

Here was the cake:

Here's the inside, which we'd already cut into before the present-opening (all part of the master plan):

And after pulling out the diapers and boobie pads, she saw this:

And she promptly freaked out. So much that I forgot to say "CAKE AND JINGLEBERRIES!" And here's the side-by-side:

PS - thank you to Ted for buying me the book that prompted the fun in enough time to have it ready for the shower and for coming up with the "two" pun in the post title. You didn't really think I was that much of a grammar idiot, did you?