My Dad’s birthday was two weeks ago, but we didn’t celebrate it until Monday just been. My mom surprised him with a trip to Rarotonga and they flew out on the day of his birthday, so we decided to wait until they got back before doing anything for him.
Rach and I decided to stick with the tropical island theme and throw him a Luau Party. And by party, I don’t mean party. I mean a family dinner with a theme.
Rach organised the decorations and I did the cake. I was planning to do an island cake with waves up the side and a towel and palm tree on the top. It went pretty much to plan, until about ten minutes before we left the house…
As I was getting the branches out of the hot water cupboard to finish off the palm tree, I accidentally knocked one of the branches and it snapped off. Then, because the rest were unbalanced, they backwards rolled off my hand and dropped on the floor. Miraculously, only one branch crumbled off, but it was bad and I was now two branches down.
I tried to mould them back together without any luck. I tried adding extra fondant. I tried meringue icing. And as a last resort I tried hot glue and chopsticks (seems logical, right?), which worked really well on two of the leaves, but the other two wouldn’t have a bar of it, so I was left with a set of two really great stuck-together branches with chopsticks hanging out the sides and two very sad-looking, half-crumbled branches. Fab.
I decided to leave it and go to Rach’s before I got too stressed about it. I wasn’t really concerned about the leaves by that point; I was more concerned about the naked palm tree trunk that was looking “a lot like a turd on a stick.” To be honest, not quite what I was going for.
Rach thought it was hilarious. We had another go at fixing the leaves, but after realising there was no possible way to make it work, we were left with two options – dismantle one of the plastic pot plants from her doll house, or cut a green flower off one of the leis. We chose the latter.
When Dad arrived home, I picked up the cake to show him. He was a tad stunned... I looked down and realised the flower had fallen off – he was quite relieved when I replaced it and explained what it was meant to be! Thankfully, the rest of the night went smoothly and I think it’s pretty safe to say the cake tasted much better than it looked…
That awkward moment when Dad blew out his candle… and the top of the palm tree fell off…
(excuse the poor photo!)
Happy birthday, Dad!
I love you lots.
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