Church Picnic

Today Wornall started at it's new time- 10:30am. I definitely like having church earlier although today was a difficult day for the change. After service was the church family picnic. Everyone brought a side or dessert so on top of getting out of the house a half hour earlier, I also had to get my cake ready. I did most of the preparation the night before but our morning was chaos.

I don't know what happened to Allison last night but she would not stay asleep. She must have been up a half dozen times between midnight and 5am. It was awful. No one in our house got any sleep which made for a rough, rushed morning. Allison slept through church again which had everyone remarking that she is just the sweetest baby- and then Nathan and I would share a LOOK and a head shake.

I decided I wanted to make a special (but simple) cake because I've really missed baking and cooking. Nathan's schedule is all over the place and I don't get to make the big meals that I used to.

I made the vanilla cake from a Betty Crocker package but I made the buttercream frosting (with lemon zest) from scratch.

I wanted to layers to be an ombre effect and chose pink (because everything else in our house is pink with Allison here). I divided the batter into 6 bowls and added 1,3,6,9,12, and 15 drops of red dye to each and it turned out really well. I put a thin layer of icing between each cake layer and did a thin crumb coat before I started in on the ombre roses. I know the roses are messy but I can't find where I put my icing bags and tips so I went DIY and made icing bags out of a yogurt container and a ziploc bag. I would usually use a pop can but I didn't have one and the yogurt container worked great. It wasn't as nice as it would have been with the right tools but it came out just the way I hoped it would.

The picnic was great, even though the weather has turned crisp. I loved wearing a jacket and boots- Autumn is my favorite season! I was able to chat a bit with some of the new couples and with some people that have been at Wornall longer than me that I've never talked to much before. We stayed for awhile after the gathering so that Nathan could help take down the tent.

When we got home I saw how crazy our morning really was - look at the house!

 While Nathan went for a nap I started to clean. Now I'm sitting enjoying the quiet of my family napping, and a hot cup of Starbucks coffee that John Mark and Jill gave us as a Welcome gift!