When the cake came out of the oven this evening it looked close to perfect. Its rounded top was perfectly golden. All I had to do was wait for it to cool down and I could frost it.

My mother came home from the hospital, so we decided tonight would be a good night to have Big E’s birthday party. We had spent the day with friends and on our way home we had gotten pizza from his favorite restaurant and I had picked up the ingredients for his cake.

After dinner the kids went outside to play with one of Big E’s new toys and when I came inside to check on the cake my heart sank. I must not have left it in the oven quite long enough because the beautiful, golden, mound of the cake had collapsed in on itself.

I was pretty disheartened, but it was too late to make another so I grabbed the frosting and stirred in some bright blue food coloring. Even though the cake was cooled enough, the spatula kept catching on it and pulling up the top layer. The only solution was to use a lot of frosting in each area.

Tears started gathering in my eyes as I ran out of blue frosting and a huge chunk of my flattened cake was sitting there uncovered. This just wouldn’t do. It looked awful.

Time was ticking and the kids would soon be inside, so I grabbed random bags and containers from our baking shelf and found a pouch of red frosting.

Slowly I squeezed red frosting to cover the gaping area if my cake. When I was done, the cake was frosted, but obviously it looked EVEN WORSE!! How do I fix this?!?

Now Big E is my compassionate kid and he wouldn’t have cared what it looked like, but I felt like such a failure that I had mutilated his birthday cake in such a dramatic fashion.

I stepped back a moment and stared at my franken-cake. Surely I couldn’t accept defeat. I took a closer examination of the contents of the baking shelf and a plan started to formulate.

Withing five minutes, the hideous birthday cake that would be king turned into a lovely, quirky, underwater cake with an awesome crab holding up the candles.

BIG E LOVED IT! His eyes lit up with his first glance at it. I smiled at how silly I had been to be so upset with myself and felt gratitude that my sweet boy was so happy.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG E!! WE LOVE YOU!!