I have to show you this massive Memorial Day Cake fail.
But first, I have to give you the background story.
Every month, we host a birthday party for our Assisted Living Residents. Our Music Therapist buys the cake. We like to change things up for our residents, so it's not always your typical birthday cake.
Because of a day off with one of our staff and a cancelled program, we had an extra 'birthday' cake in the fridge on Memorial Day. Originally, I had every intention of buying a special Memorial Day dessert for our residents (cake, cupcakes, cookies, etc.), but wanting to save our department some money, I opted to use this birthday cake.
Now...this was a very plain, chocolate bundt cake covered with vanilla icing and chocolate crumbs on the side.
I'm convinced this cake should have been on cake wrecks even before I got a hold of it.
We had some random cake/cookie decorating items around the office and a few of us quickly decided we should dress up this birthday cake and make it look a little more Memorial Day-ish.
You remember those little white tubes that contain colored gel for writing on cakes? Well apparently they also put gel food coloring in them as well. Now, in my defense, I wasn't even aware gel food coloring was sold this way because for the past year and a half, I've been buying Wilton or Americolor gel colors and haven't bought generic food coloring from a grocery store.
So, I saw those tubes and quickly grabbed the blue one...wrote out "Happy Memorial Day" and immediately knew something was wrong. One of my co-workers instantly started cracking up and somehow managed to say "I told you they were gel colors not gel writers!" when she noticed the quizical look on my face. I was wondering why the writing wasn't a pretty clearish shade of blue...but instead globs of black colored goop.
Oops.
So...I grabbed a spatula and had the brilliant idea to spread around the horrid black/blue writing. Luckily, the true blue color started to appear. It was so difficult to essentially re-ice this stupid cake, but I was determined to make it look festive.
We also had one of those bags of thick decorating icing where you can add on the plastic decorating tips. I chose the star tip and quickly got to work. Now...this was very special icing as it was red AND sparkly and I was sure would provide the perfect finishing touch to our Memorial Day cake.
Without further ado....
the cake.
Now...keep in mind...those chocolate cake crumbs were already on the side (and I still haven't figured out their purpose).
It still tasted okay (as okay as a store bought cake can taste) and the residents loved the red, white and blue. Their mouths were died blue and I'm sure later that evening the CNA's may have had some questions (if you get my drift).
But, the bottom line is, we had a very nice and emotional Memorial Day Ceremony where my residents were able to remember the true meaning of Memorial Day...one that goes much deeper than cake.
