Birthday Cake Blunders

From time to time I get an email in my mailbox that is a picture of a cake someone ordered from their local Wal-Mart. I've you've never seen the picture, I just happen to have it handy.

I think you can hear what the phone conversation was that produced this cake. Every time I see this picture I think, "How could anyone be so stupid? This has to be a setup." I always thought that until this weekend. Now I know that picture above wasn't a joke.

I usually order cakes and cookies from a wonderful local bakery. But since I waited until the last minute to do everything for this birthday party, I found myself at the Publix bakery the night before ordering a cake. I knew it wouldn't be the beauty and joy of the local bakery cake, but so many people order from Publix I didn't think anything of it.

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I perused through their books and passed the 400 character birthday cakes and finally settled on my cake of choice. The bakery manager actually helped me settle on the order as I didn't want anything with a character and I didn't want anything with the traditional roses and fussy borders (kind of like the cake pictured above). We talked it over, she wrote it down, and I felt pretty good about my decision. The cake wouldn't be ready until 12:00. The party was at 2:00 so that was kind of pushing things, but I could still swing it.

So, 12:00 came and I showed up to pick up my cake. A lady handed me my cake and I looked in the window with anticipation. This was the cake:

Not a bad cake, but not exactly the colors I was going for. They were supposed to decorate it in the same colors as the plate in the picture below. (This was at Reagan's school party the day before. The drama leading to this I'll have to tell in another post.)

Let's see, side by side comparison, nope. Definitely not the same colors. But that's ok, we'll go with it. All is not lost.

The decoration also wasn't quite the same as we discussed. We talked about making the cake look like a birthday package, but different styling. But it's ok. All is not lost.

We also talked about the cake being in the shape of a number. That was at the suggestion of the bakery manager. So, that they got. But here's where I had a little meltdown...let's look at the cake ONE more time shall we?

That cake is a great number one. The only problem is Reagan was turning TWO! There was a big number 2 written all over the order form!

My sister came up to the bakery when I was in the middle of my drama and said, "What's the problem?"

Me: "It's a one!"

Sister: "So just scratch it out and write a two."

Me: "No, it's a ONE!"

At that she looked in the box and saw the giant number one cake. Yeah, you aren't recovering from that.

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With no time left for them to make another cake, I had another sister and my mom stop by the Target bakery and pick out a cake for them to write on. They found this cake that had the right colors, but had this silly "Suite Life" stuff all over it (how unhip am I, I don't even know what that is). The Target cake decorator had already gone for the day but someone mentioned that the Starbucks lady used to be a cake decorator. They ran the cake to the Starbucks, the lady left her customers and said she'd be right back, ran over to the Target bakery, and worked some magic. She actually managed to salvage the cake and produced something that was quite adorable.

Here is the cake number TWO we ended up with for the party:

Anyone have a kid named Reagan turning one? I happen to have an extra cake just for you.

Oh and no, I didn't pay for that cake. And while I was at it I got some petit fours thrown in for free too.