Our Own Cake Wrecks

"Cake is happiness! If you have a cake in front of you, you should not look any further for joy!" 

— C. JoyBell C.

Life has been good when it comes to birthdays in this family. Every year, as our birthdays inched closer, my mom would ask us what we wanted on our cake. Sometimes, we asked for we asked for a soccer field or big firetruck (my brother), and sometimes we asked for certain flowers or confetti sprinkles (me). I remember having an amazing cake with a rainbow of Skittles spanning the top and cascading down the sides. Apparently, I also enjoyed any icing that I could press both palms into and lick off my fingers afterwards.

So maybe we were a bit spoiled in the cake department. (Seems I was also spoiled in the hair department- oh young, blonde Erika. Treasure that natural, effortless color while you can, because you'll be buying a box of dye every month to get back to your...roots. Le sigh.)

Anyhow, as we've gotten older and Mom now lives slightly farther away than the next room over, we've made do with store bought cakes the way many families do. And because Walmart is the closest store to us with a bakery, we usually end up there. 

We've had a troubled history, the Walmart bakery and I. I'll explain in a minute, but needless to say, I was almost giddy with excitement to order Sky's welcome home cake, and not just because he was coming home. I wanted to see what would be wrong with it. Because there is always something wrong. That's the beauty of ordering Walmart cakes. It's an adventure!

I was not disappointed. Well...I was a little- the words were all spelled correctly. But when I ordered it, I showed them a picture of the rank on Sky's uniform, and asked that they include it (he got promoted while at school, so I wanted to celebrate that as well). So naturally, when we got the cake back, I did not see the stripes I asked for...but some sort of bright yellow, Star Trek looking symbol. Welcome home from space, Sky?

However, we have had even better/worse luck with cakes for my brother. This is the history I mentioned. His birthday is the 4th of July, and one year, I decided to order him a cake and matching chocolate chip cookie. And if there is anything better than a cake saying "Your Specail Andy", it's an accompanying giant cookie that says "Extra Specail".

Sometimes, there are cakes so beautifully done, we ooh and ahh, hesitating to ruin the masterpiece. This one was of those times. It was that..."specail".

The only way I can think of for Walmart to top those cakes would be a cake with hideously ugly brown, pink, red, and green icing. It would be a significant moment for my brother- finding out he was accepted into the college he'd applied to and celebrating that. But it wouldn't say "Accepted". Oh no. That's not interesting.

It would say "Excepted". Congrats, Andy, on being excepted. I'm not sure what that means, but that's what you get. 

Because Walmart just knows best.

P.S. A reminder to enter the Military Wives' Bible giveaway - and also, be sure to stay tuned for the next post, because I will be hosting a giveaway for one of my most favorite things!