Relief Society Birthday

Yesterday was our Relief Society Birthday Enrichment night. (The Relief Society is the women's organization in our church for those who don't know.) We had a service auction for our activity and decorated the room like a birthday party, streamers and ballons everywhere. Not only was I in charge of the activity, but I also decided it would be fun to make a birthday cake for it too. So while trying to get all the last-minute details in order, I was also baking a cake.

I had the cake gods working against me on this one. First of all, the bottom layer of the cake was in the oven for almost 2 hours and still wouldn't cook all the way through. Finally I deemed it cooked enough and just chopped the uncooked top off. Then when I was taking that layer out of the pan and layering it, it was cracking like crazy. Then I made a new type of frosting, and while it was a super smooth frosting, it tasted like Crisco. So double the amount of sugar later and it was finally passable. Then it was time to make the filling. Instead of boiling down raspberries to make this filling like I normally do, I decided to just mix some seedless raspberry jelly into some of the frosting to make a raspberry cream type filling. I mixed and mixed and mixed and mixed, and no matter how nice it looked while I was mixing, as soon as I stopped it seperated. It looked like pink cottage cheese. Not good. So no raspberry filling.

After all of this I was ready to head to the grocery store bakery and call it good. But I gave it one last go, threw it all together, and managed to make it work out in the end.

The bottom layer was bright pink in my kitchen, but under the gym lights of the church it looked salmon. Oh well.

It was the 167th birthday. It's not everyday you get to put that large of a number on a cake and I couldn't pass up the opportunity.

And since we couldn't have real candles in the church, I made them out of chocolate. Those were my favorite part. Yum.

As far as the rest of the activity, it seemed to go well. I was too busy running around arranging things to even notice much that was going on. People gave good feedback, and someone even said it was the best Enrichment they had ever been to. This was huge since it had been a bit of a struggle to get the powers that be to even let me do the activity. So all in all everything worked out in the end. And now I can take a week break before starting to plan the next one.