For some reason, Ruby decided to have a Cars themed birthday party this year. I say “for some reason,” not because I am sexist and think that girls cannot have Cars themed birthday parties, but rather because she has never shown any interest in cars before. She does not play with cars, she has not expressed a fascination with cars, and she seemed confused by the movie Cars 2. Be that as it may, we were still determined to give her the best Cars themed birthday party ever.
We got Cars 2 invitations. We got Cars 2 goodie bags to hand out to the other children. We hid cars with the kids’ names on them around the house for a scavenger hunt. And of course, there needed to be a Car on the cake. Since I am in charge of cake decorating, I decided to go with Lightning McQueen, as he is smaller and less complicated to draw than Mater.
Now I have to let you in on a little secret failing of mine. I always misjudge the amount of frosting it will take to do anything. Always. And it could go either way. For instance, after I had frosted the cake completely with the white base coat of frosting, I had to run to the store to get more frosting, because I ran out. Then I bought 4 times as much as I needed and brought it home to put into little bowls for coloring. In each bowl I put roughly 10 times as much frosting as I actually needed for each color. If I needed a smidge of yellow for the lightning bolt, in went two heaping spoonfuls. And if I figured I would need a lot of red because he is, you know, red? Yeah, half a bowl full should do it…
The problem with this method of frosting distribution is that when I squirted my red dye into the white frosting, I ended up with pink. And when I put ALL of my red food coloring in there, I ended up with deep pink. Had I put in an appropriate amount of white frosting to begin with, there would have been a slight chance that I could have achieved a nice red, but alas, this was not to be. In fact, all of my colors ended up very, shall we say, pastel.
When I had finished decorating the cake, a full three minutes before the party was to start thank you very much, I asked my wife how it looked. She said it looked like a girl Lightning McQueen. Now, she did not say this in a bad way. She said it in a supportive, “Oh, well it is a girl’s party after all, and it is possible that you intended this,” sort of way. And as the three remaining minutes slipped away, I really had no choice but to put it out there anyway, even with him looking like Lightning The Queen.
The party was a huge success. The weather was awesome, so we sent them all outside where two kids immediately fell down the steps of our deck and started crying. We banned the stairs, so they all decided to climb trees instead. When we got them out of the trees, they decided to go stand as close as possible to edge of the stream that runs through our backyard and lean way way over to throw rocks in. It’s a miracle that everyone survived until cake.
But survive they did, and nobody commented on the pinkness of the character on the cake. Really, when a bunch of five year olds see cake, it doesn’t really matter who is on it, except to know that you want a piece with him on it because that will ensure that you get the most frosting.
Ruby said it was the best party ever, and my wife and I agreed that it probably was the best party ever, so we feel pretty good about it. I just have to remember in two weeks not to put a pink Elmo on Edward’s cake. And to buy more red food coloring…