Face Plants and Cake Balls

We've had a pretty uneventful week here at Casa Flamingo. I didn't think purchasing a new engine for the Expedition from Advance Autoparts, and school supplies from Target, was really worthy of a blog post, so I didn't waste your time. And I didn't think I could squeeze any more posts out of the shrinking beef lung on a hook until an alligator actually eats it -- I'm already losing credibility after having devoted three blog posts to it last week. So I've waited around all week for blog fodder to rise to the surface and as it happens, today was full of fodder (it's feast or famine with fodder as we're all familiar).

Mace and I ran errands this morning. We went to see The Computer Guy, then to the Post Office, and then to the banks (we usually have to visit two). Mace is a great car companion. He typically carries on incredibly fascinating conversations with you in the car about all his imaginary adventures. Today was no exception, but his complicated tale about some dump truck work he had to do later was interspersed with a persistent request to go to the bank first -- cause that's where you get the suckers. And because we normally visit two banks, he can wrangle two suckers out of the trip and sometimes even three because the bank where I keep my business account always gives me suckers for the kid who's not with me at the time.

Sometimes we make it home with that third sucker, sometimes we don't.

I like grape.

And I include that seemingly pointless anecdote (can it be an anecdote if it's pointless?) so that you will know that Mace did at least have a small measure of happiness in his sucker this morning before his day took a nasty turn.

This afternoon, I made Mace take a nap so that we could go swimming at Heidi's. I had to wake him up at 4:00 so that we could leave, so he was still a little groggy when we were leaving the house at 4:15. As we were heading down the front steps to go to the car, he tripped on the third step from the bottom and face-planted into the concrete. It was awful -- I had already stepped off and away from the stairs by several feet when I heard his Crocs catch the stair and I turned and watched him fly face first in slow motion straight down to the concrete. Poor thing, he cried and cried. This picture was taken tonight before bed, so he had recovered from the initial trauma and hadn't actually seen his face yet in the mirror.



When I showed him his face in the mirror a few minutes after I took this picture, he looked absolutely shocked and raised his eyebrows up as if to say, "Well no wonder my face hurts so bad!" He didn't lose any teeth and the worst bruise is under his hairline, so we're trying to get him to say, "I had a fight with the alligator -- you should see the alligator" when people ask him what happened, but so far, he gets hung up on "alligator" -- it sounds a little like "I figh' aganalator."

But the worst tragedy of the day was my attempt at making Red Velvet Cake Balls. It was a test run of the recipe because I wanted (note the past tense) to make them for Joe and Dez' joint birthday party next weekend. It's a six step recipe that takes about 12-15 hours to actually pull off. I made the cake this morning; waited an hour and a half for the cake to cool completely, then crumbled it into a bowl and mixed a can of cream cheese frosting with it; then I made 35 balls with the cake/frosting mixture and put them in the fridge to chill; several hours later I started dipping the balls into the candy coating and that's when it all went to poo:



See, when you work with white chocolate candy coating and red velvet cake, you end up getting little red velvety crumbs in the candy coating and ruining the whole effect:



So you can switch to milk chocolate coating, but I will warn you that the coating process is still a horrible experience:



The moral of the story is: when you see a link to a recipe on Shelya's (that's right girl, you know this is all your fault) Facebook status update that directs you to the recipe on a cooking blog and all 165 of the comments underneath the recipe say stuff like "Sounds delicious! Can't wait to try it!" or "I had some of these at a party last Christmas, they were great!" -- but none of the comments say, "I made these last week -- super simple and the balls were sooo easy to coat!" -- then don't bother even trying because you are not a professional chef and yours will look like little piles of poo when you are finished.

And if I show up to Keller's sweet little one-year old birthday party on Sunday and her mommy Shelya has made perfect Red Velvet Cake Balls that bear no resemblance to piles of poo, I will probably throw a temper tantrum.