With my son's birthday party rapidly approaching, I am down to the wire to make the Last Airbender Avatar cake I was supposed to, not to mention the Appa cake he requested.
I'm even hard-pressed to make the Aang cake he said he'd settle for.
In the end, I just may opt for cupcakes with blue arrows and call it a day.
I may even buy the cupcakes.
I'm seeing a shift in my cookbook development.
Ok, new plan! It will be a cookbook of 'cheats', so that even though I'm the laziest person God has yet to create, I still look fabulous and amazing.
This would be easier to accomplish if I had maids, and caterers, and a team of nannies. But with little to no money, I'll have to improvise, while expending as little effort as possible.
The first step is cleaning the house for the party. Seriously, no one can know we live like this.
I could hire a cleaning service, but look at all the money I save by using slave labor teaching my kids responsibility.
Of course, the kids don't want to do the cleaning and go on strike, disappear, and roll around on the floor whining. Some mothers might say, "This party is for you. If you don't want to clean, no party.".
However, while the invitation reads that it is a party for my son, it's really a party for all the parents, and an excuse to get together and relax for a few hours. I don't want to give that up! So I crack the whip emphasize the importance of cleanliness when we have guests coming over.
Step two is making the cake. The first cake I made, I made from an off-brand mix, and it didn't turn out so well.
Well, blue blobs. No one seemed to notice, complain, or even care that the arrows were Rorschach tests.
I bought most every pizza topping known to mom.
I mixed up pizza crust with a recipe that called for 12 cups of flour- twice!
I had several parents and kids in my kitchen, all creating personal pizza masterpieces.
Masterpizzas!
I was in party heaven.
The moms pitched in and helped with everything, so the work was light. I decided to make a cookie pizza, a dessert that looks like a pizza and is actually made from cookie dough and other things that resemble pizza toppings.
Charlene outdid herself, creating mushrooms from marshmallows, black olives from twizzlers, peppers from swedish fish, and pepperoni from fruit roll-ups.
I managed to set the smoke alarm off countless times when the sugar cookie crust liquefied and dripped all over the oven floor. Smoke from the oven filled the whole house, and we were forced to open windows and turn on the whole-house fan. It was 34 degrees out, so before long, it was freezing in the house, and the smoke just kept rolling out of the oven!
An added perk is that our smoke detectors are all hard-wired together, so if one goes off, they all go off, so that no matter where one went in the house, they were screaming next to one's head.
After a couple hours of this, we ran out of pizza cheese, and it became clear as an empty bottle of American Honey that a liquor run was also in order. I had my purse on my shoulder and my keys a-jangle before you could say, "escape route" and as I walked to the car I could hear the smoke alarm going off again.
I bought all the staples, plus the ingredients to make a drink called a Water Moccasin.
However, once I got home, I couldn't remember the right amounts of each, so I winged it. Also, I'd forgotten to buy whiskey. So I substituted Cap'n Morgan Tattoo rum for that.
And it was still amazing!
So my son turned 10 with a pizza party and smoke detector that had the effect of a car alarm going off every five minutes.
The cookie pizza that caused all the trouble?
Fabulous!!
Even so, I'm going to hold off on that book for a while, until I can find success stories to illustrate that I actually know how to host a party, instead of stories where I turn into a middle-aged dipsomaniac.
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