When I said I like Cake Wrecks, that isn't what I meant!

First, an update on the Christmas tree. Here is what rational people see when they look at our Christmas tree:

This, on the other hand, is what I see when I look at our tree:

My spiderphobia has reached new levels.

Thursday was Ethan's magical birthday--he turned 10 on Dec. 10th. He asked for a 40 lb. cake, and a 40 lb. cake is what he got.

Mom and Elise make baking multilayer cakes look easy. With their blase' attitude, THEY LIE. This experience made me long for the days when I was an engineering major at Utah State.

This is the 40 pounder before Ethan decorated it:

Cylindrical poo, anyone?

Then Ethan and his friend Jonathan got their hands on it, and it looked like this:

It's a cake AND a word puzzle! Can you guess what the random splattering of letters spells? Hint: it was his birthday, and he was very happy about the way he decorated his cake.

And then...we served it. As it turns out, there is an art to serving an oversized cake, and that art is NOT to cut it like a pizza. When you cut it like a pizza (which is considerably less vertically endowed than this behemoth of a cake), your average 40 pounder cake will do this:

Think of the amazing chocolate orange. Or the delightful bloomin' onion. They, like Ethan's 40 pounder, open up like a rose. Although seeing a chocolate orange or a bloomin' onion or a rose doesn't make me want to yell,

TIMBER!!!

and that's what crossed my mind as I watched Jon try to save half of the cake from the backwards swan dive it was making (he ended up with cake all over his hands. heh heh heh).

Before I leave, one last note. Ethan's favorite present: the mail he got. The kid is obsessed about getting mail, so getting two letters and one package was heaven on earth for him. I love that kid...