The Elenbaas Family: Happy Birthday Erin!

Yesterday was Erin's special day. Her birthday week is always comical. Whenever she wants something she just says "It's my birthday, it's my birthday!" And of course, I'm expected to comply.

We had a nice evening with Josh, Josh, Jenny, and Sarah and Erin beat everyone in Settlers of Catan.

Year 3 of my cake creations for Erin was once again very comical. Every year I've made a fatal mistake, but at least I've never made the same mistake twice. The first year I tried to take the cake out of the pan before it cooled down so it fell apart. The second year I put the chocolate chips and M&M's in too early so they settled to the bottom and stuck to the pan and again it fell apart.

This year I got a "checkerboard" cake kit. In theory, you make three layers with circles of different colors. When you stack them and cut into the cake it is supposed to look like a checkerboard (not possible in reality).

The kit has directions for making the cake mix from scratch. I thought I'd speed the process by using chocolate and vanilla cake from a box. What I didn't take into consideration early enough was how much to make. I used 3 whole boxes. After mixing up the batter I realized 3 boxes should make about 6 layers of cake, and I only wanted to make 3. Being me, I didn't want to waste any batter so I tried my hardest to stuff it all in the 3 cake pans. They were quite full.

I succeeded, but upon heating cake batter rises...a lot. After 10 minutes I peeked into the oven to see all 3 pans dripping over into the bottom of the oven, and then burning on the bottom of the oven.

I spent the next half hour doing damage control to limit the burned smell in the oven and also snack on the batter that overflowed and baked on the base of the oven. In the end I didn't ruin the 3 pans and kept the burned odor away. However, each layer was ginormous (by the way, ginormous was added to the dictionary this year) so I had my work cut out for me to stack them without destroying the cake.