And it ends...

The season of Cake Fest is finally at an end! It's been a no man's land for my diet, let me tell you.

We started with a Twilight / New Moon party for Sarah, who had a Thanksgiving birthday this year. Two tiers of strawberry and french vanilla yumminess. The first cake. Devoured rapidly. Ignore the vampires. I almost made a blood red cake to go with the theme, but resisted. I think the girls appreciated that. :)





Note that I was NOT serving wine to 13-year-old girls. We had cranberry Sierra Mist in wine glasses (because when you turn 13, beverages in fancy glasses seem cool). You can see the evidence of this by the 2-liter bottle in the background. Hey, we are classy, too! ;) lol

Then we had Matt's birthday on Pearl Harbor Day. Of course, he had THREE "parties" so he had THREE cakes/cupcake trees. These were devoured rapidly but we were losing impetus as we got to to the last cake.

Here's the first cupcake fest:



And here is his cake on his actual birthday:



Now, I enjoy baking birthday cakes, but even I was losing steam at this point.

Along comes Christmas. Cookies. LOTS of cookies. I did not bake a SINGLE Christmas cookie and we STILL had trays of cookies (gifts). The kids LOVE this time of year. Cakes, cookies, what's not to love? ;)

I said no cookies were baked, but the CANDY we made, well... that is another story. May I highly recommend Oreo Truffles to anyone who likes that sort of thing? Super easy to make! Homemade caramels, orange-cranberry mini bread loaves, and peanut butter balls (they are really BUCKEYES but people who like WVU refuse to eat BUCKEYES, so I've been told to call them peanut butter balls. Hey, when in Rome...)

So, my diet made it to about Dec. 15, intact. No real blows yet, since we gave most of the candy away. Then I just lost the fight. Sigh. New Year's Eve... OINK.

Then comes January... our LAST birthday. Thomas loves Reese's, so we had a Reese's cake. This thing is too rich even for ME.

But first, we started with the cupcake tree at grandma's. (Note the extra awesome new Steelers shirt.) ;)



Then we went sledding to shed the pounds gained. ;)

We went home to THIS.



My dear daughter stayed up with me until midnight the night before putting this together! SOMEONE wouldn't go to bed (too excited about turning 12!) and we wanted the cake to be a surprise.

In case you doubt the richness, here's a pic of the inside... it has pudding, whipping cream, melted chocolate, and cocoa ALL IN THE CAKE batter. The icing has peanut butter, whipping cream, butter, powdered sugar, etc. Really. Four layers of cake... 2 layers of chocolate icing... one layer of peanut butter icing... all slathered in MORE peanut butter frosting... then decorated with Reese's miniatures. Not. Rich. At. All.



Did I mention that when we stopped to pick up VANILLA ice cream to go with it, Tommy fell in love with CHOCOLATE Moose Tracks ice cream and would NOT be dissuaded? Yeah. Well, it was his birthday.

This is how I ate MY piece of cake. You may note that I don't care for peanut butter.



I don't think I've ever eaten a piece of cake quite like that before. :)

So, the Cake Fest is over. Thank goodness! My diet can continue unabated at last! :) I've ordered Jillian's 30-Day Shred from Amazon. haha It will probably kill me.