Mixins N Fixins: Dad's party

If I can sum this party up with one word it would be..... success! Seriously, everything went smoothly and perfectly and I couldn't ask for anything more. Here are some of the details leading up to the day as well as the day of.

So, Thursday after work I met my mom at Sams to get chips, salsa, 7 layer dip, you know the last minute stuff. We also had to go to Walmart to get some other items too...I think I got home around 7:30ish that night. This was such a long day....Jes had ordered a pizza for us to eat, thank goodness! I ate some dinner and started baking cakes. I had decided that I could do this myself instead of paying someone to do it. Here is a picture of my inspiration, you could say.

I found this picture on cakecentral.com

Back to Thursday night. At the time I thought I only had 4 cakes to do. Well I have one 13x9 inch pan and my mom let me borrow hers. Her pan has to be 20 something years old...I NOW know what to get her for Christmas!! So anyway, I mix up 2 batches of cake in my nifty Kitchen Aid (my baby) and put those cakes in the oven...30 minutes later, I take them out let them cool some (later to be my demise), and then flipped them. Both cakes cracked in half upon flippage...and the one that was in my mother's pan looked like this.

Jesse called this the ramp cake! You can somewhat see the crack there in the middle and as time went on it was a full fledged 2 piece cake! He then compared it to the San Andres Fault! Thanks Jes! lol!! So at this point I'm kinda panicky but not terribly much because I figured well tomorrow I will do will these 2 over. No biggie...So I bake one more cake, let it cool COMPLETELY and then go to bed. I would have 3 cakes to do Friday.

Friday my friend Marie (she helped me with this cake) and I were talking at lunch about all of this and she tells me "You know Ash, we should probably do 6 total layers of cake". Great!! Uggh!! So I'm freakin out at this point, because I wasn't going to leave work until 4 and she was supposed to be come over around 7. Baking 3 more cakes was doable...baking 5 more cakes made me sooo nervous! So I call Jesse and asked him to run to the store to pick up 4 more boxes of cake mix, more eggs and 2 aluminum pans. After lunch my boss and I were talking and I was able to leave at 2. Whew, what a life saver this was!

My mom came over to help me finish the stuff that had to be done while I did the cakes. I finished all 6 of them, cleaned my kitchen and just waited for Marie to get to my house. She came over and we did the cake. Didn't have any major problems, other than running out of fondant at 11:30pm, which Jesse came to the rescue and willingly went to Walmart to get more. This cake took a lot of time and after 6 batches of icing we finished it at 2:30am!!! Here is a picture minutes after completion.

Saturday morning I was able to sleep in and I took my time getting ready. My brother came over around 1:30 to help us load up the cars and I needed him to drive me so I could hold on to the cake. We get to the place and my friends Steven, Anna, and Brandi helped us set up. I am so thankful for their help, there would be no way I could have done this without them. Here a few pictures of the set up once we were finished.