Thanks so much for your condolences (and snickers! 🙂 ) and helpful ideas for my cake failure yesterday. I’ll have to keep those in mind for the next time — though I think I should probably swear off making cakes since they are not my best thing.

As Carol surmised in the comments, this was for a ladies’ meeting last night. I don’t usually schedule myself to hostess, both because I have plenty to do to get ready for the meetings anyway, but also I just fill in when we don’t have anyone else volunteer. The rest of the year is taken care of, but nobody was free for this month. I had been cutting out recipes from backed-up stacks of cooking magazines and was looking forward to trying them. If I am having company at home, I stay with the tried and true, but for church fellowships and ladies’ meetings I like to experiment. There is usually more than one thing, so if one thing isn’t great there are other options. Plus I can expand and make things that my family wouldn’t usually go for.

As it was I scraped the stuck pieces of cake out of the pan and added them to the chunks on the plate and then went ahead and made the glaze that was supposed to go on the bundt cake and drizzled it over the cake chunks and left that here for the family. It tasted great, which my oldest son says is all that counts with him. I had a package of Duncan Hines blueberry muffin mix with streusel topping (that I first discovered when my friend Carol made them for us. They’re one of our favorite things now!) which had optional instructions for making it into a loaf, so I did that. I like to make homemade things for occasions like this, but, really, that just boils down to pride sometimes.

I also had another dessert I made for the first time, Zucchini Chocolate cake, which turned out well. You never know how many people are going to show up at these things — we’ve had from 5 to over 20 — so I like to bring a couple of desserts and 1 or 2 non-sweet things. I had cut up this cake into squares, and when I brought them in, a couple of teen guys who were finishing up cleaning the building (one was your son, Carol) asked if I could “hook them up with some brownies.” I told them they weren’t brownies but rather zucchini chocolate cake squares — and they didn’t seem interested any more. 🙂 I should have given them each one first and then told them what it was.

Another thing I was going to make was Pesto Cheese Tarts. But somehow when I sat down with the recipes and made a grocery list Saturday, I had missed the pesto. I’ve never used it before and don’t even know where it would be in the store. And I had another recipe for mini cheese balls, but hadn’t thought to buy crackers, which I have always seen served with cheese balls. So now I had two recipes missing a major ingredient but with really not enough time to go to the store. And the more I thought about rolling the cheese concoction into little balls, at that point in the day with time and energy flagging, the less that idea appealed to me. Both recipes also included special ingredients which I don’t normally have on hand and wouldn’t likely use if I scrapped both of these recipes for something else. I pondered over this while doing other things and finally came up with the idea to make the cheese ball recipe and put it in the tart shells and sprinkle them with the chopped walnuts that were supposed to cover the cheese balls. They were “okay,” not great. I’m going to scrap the cheese ball recipe — I’ve had others I liked better.

My other non-sweet thing was Pepperoni Pinwheels. For that I just took the ingredients up to the church and threw them together and baked them in the oven there so they could be served hot, and I set the refreshment table and made the lemonade while they were baking. I did leave off the egg, partly because I was out after all the other baking, and because I’d made similar things like this with crescent rolls and cheese without egg, and partly because I didn’t want to transport an egg and have to deal with all of that in the amount of time I had.

So I did end up with a few presentable things to put on the table. I had planned to make tea but forgot all about it until it was too late, so I just served lemonade and ice water.

On a whim I printed out the picture I posted yesterday of the failed cake and brought the recipe that showed what the cake was supposed to look like and showed it to the ladies. They got a kick out of that, but I found out my reputation as a cook is better than the reality. I’m going to have to confess my failure more often, because failed plans and salvage jobs are really more my norm!

The rest of the meeting, the much more important part, went well. One of our ladies shared her testimony, and that’s one of my favorite things — to hear how God has worked in people’s lives and brought them to where they are. Our meetings vary — sometimes, as last night, one of our own shares a testimony. If a lady in our church has had opportunity to go on a mission trip, I try to have her speak about it at some point. Sometimes we have a missionary speaker or guest speaker. Sometimes the meetings are more hands-on — making verse bookmarks for missionaries, assembling care packages for college students, or wrapping missionary Christmas gifts. We always, of course, have a refreshment and fellowship time. And at most of our meetings when there is time, each table prays for a specific missionary family and then the ladies at that table write that family a little note of encouragement, then I collect all of those and send them out.

And today I took a two hour nap. 🙂