A Brief Glimpse - the Food

Everything was self-made except the fruit salad (which was from Mother's Market, and all organic) and the nut clusters (from Fresh&Easy); and everything except the obvious meat (tri tip and pork) was vegetarian!

 Appetizers: Salsa-cream cheese pinwheels, caprese on sticks, nut cluster things (not pictured: olive-pesto puffs)

The main meal: fruit salad, pasta salad, sundried tomato sausage (not pictured: Jen's green bean potato salad)

Slicing up the tri tip (strangely, no pictures of the pork)

The Cake! Baked and decorated by Mom, designed and taste-tested by EJ. He made the cake stand, too.

Another cake in the bank.

So with a little tweaking, mom turned her carrot cake into a low sugar cake and took it to the showerlette for testing. It was approved by all. The carrot cake will be one of the two low sugar cakes that will be part of the tower-o-cakes. So that gets all of the experimental bits out of the way. No more testing. Now we have a collection of proven recipes to work with. So all that is left now is to make them and freeze them.
And then we eat them.

Delegation

On the cakeage front, there has been NO sample cakes made to date. Except the one EJ made to show FMIL ("Mom") his recipe. However, "Mom" has decided she needs to 'brush up' on her cake decorating skills by taking 2 Wilton cake decorating classes at JoAnn's. She is already showing up the other ladies in class (no guys are there, sadly).

This is from her first week:

Cute, eh? EJ's had the honor of ingesting her classwork this week; tomorrow she's frosting and decorating an entire CAKE (but I don't think that's going to EJ - he has plans to shape up before I have to fit him for his wedding outfit!)

And then there was cake!!!

So as part of my job of handling the cake is making and eating cake. Tough job. We've decided what the top layer of cake will be and the shape it will be. That part was easy. We're using my spice cake recipe, since it's Nessa's fave. But since my mom is going to be the one actually making the cake I made the hike over to her pad (literaly I walked there) and gave her my recipe. Then for the fun and flavor of it all I took over part of her kitchen  and then we made a test run cake.

This was done for two reasons. First, so that when it come time for mom to make THE CAKE it will not be an entirely new recipe for her. And second, so we can eat it. Duh!

And since mom is a fantastic cook and baker in her own right, there was realy nothing to do in the demo/teaching department. About the only thing that was a point of interest was to find out how thick the batter is at the end. Aside from that, there was no real purpose other than we wanted to eat some cake.

Speaking of eating cake, we did, and it tasted good. Even grandma likes it. And Gran is a little picky these days as to what she likes. So I guess the top layer of the cake is Gran tested and Nessa approved. Off to a good start in my book. Now onto the next 17 layers!

Or was that 7?

Or maybe just 4?

Well, on to the NEXT layer! How's that? Yeah, that works.