Ace of Cakes

I was trying to come up with a catchy title for this post, and I realize that the one I chose sounds a tad braggadocious. Please excuse my apparent lack of humility here!  

But this is indeed a post about cakes.  And cakes are what I do, pretty much.

I went SO many years without one of theses mixers, until I had daughters-in-law 
who insisted that my kids should pool their resources and get me one.  
Best. Gift. Ever.

We have 14 grandchildren who live within striking distance here in VA, and I am the birthday cake-maker for all of them.  (The 7 who live in Wisconsin have a dad who makes them, and the 2 who live in Tennessee have a mom who does.)  My VA grandchildren tell me what kind of image they'd like on top, and I try to fulfill their birthday wishes! It's a tradition now, that I make their birthday cakes.  If it's just going to be for an intimate family celebration, I'll make a round layer cake or a 9x13" sheet cake.  But if it's for a party that will involve a lot of friends and other guests, I'll make a larger 14x18" sheet cake (which uses two cake mixes).  I do Baptism and First Holy Communion cakes sometimes, too; but my bread and butter is birthday cakes.

Or perhaps "my confectioner's sugar and butter is birthday cakes" would be a more apt way of putting it.

I am by no means a professional, but with as many cakes as I've made for my grandchildren (and my boys, too) since we moved to VA in 2017, I should be!

I always made and decorated birthday cakes for my sons when they were growing up.  They would put in their "order" for what image they wanted on the top, and I would do my best to make it happen.  (As an artist, I work mostly in frosting--LOL.)  I made some nice cakes for them back in the day, but I think I've gotten a lot better at cake decorating in recent years; partly because of the VOLUME of cakes that I've made, and partly because as a Grammy, I have a lot more time to spend on them than I did when I was a mom of young boys.

October is an extremely busy month for Grammy's Bakery.  Our oldest grandson celebrates his birthday early in the month (he just turned 12).  And then last night ended a three-day run of birthdays: one grandson turned 8, the next day his cousin turned 7, and yesterday his younger brother turned 6. For the two brothers, the cakes were just 9x13" ones, because our tradition with son #2's gang is that my husband and I usually go over for dinner with them and their immediate family, with a cake and present in hand. For the newly-minted 7-year-old granddaughter in the middle, I made the larger-sized sheet cake, because although we visited her on her real birthday, she'd had a big party with cousins and friends last weekend and the cake was for that.

Here are those last three cakes: we've got a Ja'Marr Chase, for our grandson who is obsessed with football in general and the Bengals in particular; a Princess Zelda, for a video-game loving granddaughter; and a Godzilla-themed one, for a grandson who requested it (after having monster truck-themed cakes for a few years in a row!). I kind of cheated with old Ja'Marr, because I was intimidated by making either a portrait of him or an action shot of him receiving a pass. But my grandson was thrilled with it, so all was well.

You might have noticed that I mentioned using mixes up there.  Yes, I do.  I've tried making a yellow cake from scratch, using a recipe from a Mrs. Fields cookbook, and it was good; but it wasn't as tasty as the ones I make from mixes (she admits sheepishly).  I start with a Betty Crocker yellow cake mix.  But where it says add water, I add milk. Where it says add oil, I add double the amount--but of butter, not oil.  And where it says add 3 eggs, I add 4.  It's a trick I found years ago online somewhere, for making a ho-hum cake from a box taste like a bakery cake.  (You're welcome!)

I always make my own buttercream frosting, with butter, confectioner's sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla. Then I make my own colored frostings, and although I do have some professional metal tips for cake decorating, I've never invested in a lot of gadgets that would make my hobby easier.  (Not sure why, I suppose I should.  But most of the cakes I make for my grandchildren have so many colors involved, I would need so many different tips and bags!)   So instead, I usually make my own decorating bags out of ziplocks, and I snip one corner.  If it's fine work I'm doing (like outlines), I make the snip very tiny. If I need to fill in a big space with a color, I snip off a little bit more. When I'm in the middle of making a cake, there are about 10 bowls of frosting going at once, spread out all over the place, and countless ziplock bags; there's confectioner's sugar dust everywhere; and my fingers are stained every color of the rainbow.  It's a glorious mess, I'll tell you.  And I could never do a cooking show, not with the way I trash just about every inch of my kitchen.

I showed my leftover decorating bags from this most recent string of cakes to my daugher-in-law Ginger last night. (I usually hang onto them until a cake has been delivered safely, just in case I need to do touch-ups or what-have-you.  And I still had the ones from the two cakes I'd made before the Godzilla cake for her little guy.)  When I did, she said I should blog about making cakes.  So this post is for you, Ginger. :)

The inspiration for this post.

If you're going to make colored frostings, the best food coloring is the Wilton brand (there on the right).

This truly has been one of the great joys of my life, making these cakes that I hope will be treasured memories for my grandchildren when they're older and look back on their childhoods.

I'll end this by showing you a few of the cakes I've made over the years.  I might not be an ace, exactly; but if cakes were rated by how much love went into them, I'd probably have few equals.  

Wow, braggadocious once again!  Sorry, dear readers!

Football, monster trucks, Pokemon, and Disney characters (princesses in particular) are common themes in these cakes, you might have noticed.

We have another busy cake month in November, with three grandchildren celebrating birthdays in a 10-day span. And we will be out of town, visiting our oldest son's family in Wisconsin, during that stretch.  So I am planning to bake and decorate three cakes for them before we leave, and drop them off so they can be frozen until needed.

Because CAKE = LOVE.  At least in the Pearl family.

A Mother Carries Her Babies Forever

I was recently scrolling my Substack feed (this is my new much-too-addictive time-suck, and I fear that I'll have to delete it, like I've deleted all the other social media sites that got to be too much), and I saw this fascinating post.

This explains a lot, doesn't it?  That bond between mother and child is an extraordinary thing.  It's almost like having your very heart living outside your body. It's painful sometimes, for life is so very fragile and the world can be a scary place.  A mother's heart dies a thousand deaths, worrying about her babies.  But it's such a gift, to know that kind of love.  It's hard to imagine a love more profound.  And how incredible that we women were given that wondrous privilege: to be the ones who are co-creators, with God Himself, of human life.  I have five sons, all giants when I stand next to them now, and incredibly--through a miracle so awesome it could only come from God--their first home was in me.  I am often brought to tears by this knowledge.  I love them more than my life!  And  I love the idea that after they were born and started their own lives out in the world, separated from the mama who bore them, they might have left some of their cells behind in me.  I carry those boys with me always!

Dear readers, I'd like to ask you to please keep two of our sons and their wives in your prayers.  Sadly, two of our daughters-in-law recently miscarried babies in their first trimesters (this would have been the 8th child for one couple and the 6th for the other).  These precious wee ones join the nine other tiny Pearls who left this world too soon, before we ever had a chance to meet them, and with whom we hope to be reunited in the next life.  Without Faith--without the belief that God always knows what's best for us, even when our human brains are incapable of understanding why things happen the way they do--life would be unbearable sometimes.  There is so much sadness to endure here in the Valley of Tears.  But how comforting to think that those little ones left a bit of themselves behind in their mothers, and those sweet babies will be a part of them for the rest of their lives.

God is so good.  All the time.

Summer 2026! (Part 2)

I got some lovely comments on my last post (my birthday post!), and I finally got around to replying to them today. I love my readers.  I've always been the kind of person who would rather have a few good, true friends than a legion of acquaintances with whom I socialize.  This has carried over to my blogging life: I don't have a legion of readers, but the ones who do stop by are so kind and sweet and loyal.

If you come here often, you might have seen that back in late July I did a Part 1 post about our summer goings-on.  I've been meaning to add to it, and especially to post some more pictures of our week with our kids and grandkids at our Oyster Haven Vrbo lake house, but time has gotten away from me.  My husband and I have been staying at his childhood home, just down the road from Oyster Haven, sharing the house with a number of his siblings.  Two of his sisters and their husbands are also living at the old homestead for the summer, and we have all been getting along swimmingly.  (Sometimes, other siblings also come to stay for short stretches, and nieces and nephews as well.)   It helps that there are 4 refrigerators: one in the kitchen, one in the garage, and two in the basement.  Each couple has claimed one as their own, and this keeps things from getting too complicated when it comes to meals.  Now and then, one of us will cook dinner for the group; but often, each couple is doing their own thing food-wise. And it's all working out beautifully.

On my birthday, one of my husband's younger sisters and her husband made a delicious steak dinner, which we enjoyed with 16 other members of the extended Pearl family who were in town at that time.  So it was a real party.

My husband and I have been spending a lot of time together on the boat.  Most days when the lake is calm enough, that's where we say our Rosaries, Divine Mercy Chaplets, and novena prayers.

 

A couple of days ago, we went out for about 3 and 1/2 hours.  We did our prayers, read our books, talked and lazed in the sun, and then we headed over to a bar/restaurant called "Flip Flops on the Dock," where you can park your boat for free and walk up to the lakefront restaurant to eat.  It was so much fun, such a perfect day!  We each got a cocktail before dinner, because it felt like a celebration.  (Getting old is not a joke, says this newly-minted 68-year-old; but there are some aspects of life in these "golden years," when you have grown kids and a retired husband, that are absolutely wonderful!  Especially when he's someone with whom you love to hang out.  And I do.)

Okay, now for the photo dump from our Oyster Haven week in early July.  (I have lots more pictures, but don't want to share too many with my grandkids' faces in them--especially the children of one of our sons who is not on social media and doesn't want them on it either, which I totally understand and respect.)

Magnet tiles were the craze with the younger set this summer.

The kids played in the lake and on the beach during most of the daytime hours.  But after dark, there were nightly raucous games of Texas Hold 'Em at the kitchen table.  Our grandkids are all getting pretty good at playing cards and keeping their poker faces.

People are always asking how we do meals for 35 during our vacation week together.  It works out surprisingly well (but it sometimes looks a bit like we're feeding an army--a starving one).  I used to cook all of the dinners, but I'm accepting more help these days.  Breakfast and lunch are pretty much handled by the parents of the different families, and they feed their own kids what they like and are used to.  In the old days, I tried to get up and make breakfast casseroles and bacon for the whole gang, or pancakes; but it's just hard, with different wake-up times, dietary needs, food allergies, etc. And the same goes for lunch.  So we let our kids take care of those meals.  I mean, we provide all kinds of staples, like butter, eggs, milk, cheese, bread, condiments, coffee, sodas, waters, adult beverages, etc.  But the kids end up doing a lot of shopping of their own, too.  Both of the fridges were packed to the gills by the end of our week!  

For the dinners this year, the couples each took a night to host.  We had a steak night, a pizza night, a chicken Alfredo night, a taco night, a roasted pork loin night.  And then for the 4th of July, we had a traditional hot dogs and hamburgers cookout.  Somehow, it all works, it really does.  But it's a bit cray-cray!

And we use paper plates and bowls and plastic forks and spoons.  I can't allow myself to feel guilty about how many garbage bags we fill with all that disposable stuff, because I can't imagine how we could keep up otherwise.

I can think of few things that make me happier than seeing my boys together.  There were lots of laughs, as always.

You might recall that last year, while wading out in the water our son #4 got poked in the thigh by a sharp branch on a log that had somehow washed into our cove, and he ended up with a serious infection.  He spent two nights in the hospital on IV antibiotics. Ultimately, he was fine.  But the accident happened early on in our vacation week, and once he was discharged, he was not allowed to go in the lake for the rest of his time there.  This 2026 week at Oyster Haven was going to be his "do-over."  Well, wouldn't you know, he ended up at Urgent Care again, with a swollen elbow. A small scratch somehow developed another infernal infection.  But this time, things were not as dire: it happened later in the week, after he'd been able to enjoy lots of water activity; it required an antibiotic, but just an oral one, not an IV; and most importantly, he did not need to be admitted to the hospital!!  He did have a much better week...but 2027, we're counting on you to be infection-free.

In spite of the elbow, he was a pretty happy camper.

I think now I'm just going to do the proverbial photo dump.  There are so many good pictures from our fantastic week together, but here are just a few.

My heart is full, looking at these images and remembering how magical our week was.  The kids love being together up here, and they stay busy from sun-up to sun-down.  What a blessing it is to have this house by the lake.  On turnover days, when my husband and I have to spend exhausting hours getting it cleaned up and ready for the next renters, I sometimes forget why it's so great to have it.  I need to keep coming back to these photos to remind myself that it's all worth it!

Really.  SO worth it.

Summer 2026! (Part 1)

I can't believe how long it's been since I've been here! The last time I posted anything, we hadn't even left VA for the summer, to head up to NY to manage our Oyster Haven Vrbo rental house and reconnect with extended family on both sides in the hometown where we grew up.

Before we left, son #2 and his wife hosted a party for my husband and the two grandsons whose June birthdays are within days of his.  Our daughter-in-law Ginger (wife of son #2) had "tattoos" made up of my hubby's face, and we all sported them to honor our Pearl family patriarch.  That was a hoot.

But I'm kind of hoping that those wash-off Papa faces are the closest any of my grandchildren ever get to having tattoos! LOL!

There's actually so much to write about--too much!--but the most important thing that's happened in all the time I've been away from this blog was our family vacation week at our lake house with our entire clan (12 adults and 23 kids ages one to 15, in a house that we advertise "sleeps 13"!) in early July.  It was simply magical, as always, and times like that make hanging onto our Oyster Haven house for as long as possible a top priority for my husband and me.  The kids and grandkids all look forward to that week that we block off for our own use (why should renters have all the fun?!)--it's like Christmas in July, truly.  Just so special.

We had a photographer come to take family photos by the lake in July of 2024, but our youngest grandchild (a sweet little one-year-old gal) had not been born yet, so we wanted to get some new ones taken with her included.  Last time around, we had everyone dress in various shades of blue and white.  This year, we went for patriotic red, white, and blue (it is our country's 250th birthday, after all).  We hired the same photographer, and she was wonderful at cheerfully wrangling our large and rather challenging group of mostly youngsters.  Especially because it was an extremely hot and muggy day, in the 90's with about 90% humidity.  Ugh!  We were all dripping with sweat, but she got us efficiently assembled into groups and got those pictures snapped in record time.  And somehow, she managed to make us look as cool as cucumbers.  I'm so proud of the grandkids, because it could have been a miserable experience, but none of them were crabby or whiny.  They really rose to the occasion and patiently posed like champs, and I'm just thrilled to have these precious family photos.

I'm not going to share any of the pictures with the grandkids in them here, for privacy's sake; but here's one of my husband and me with our five beloved sons and their better halves.

Back in 2022, four of my boys came to spend a belated Mother's Day with me, and son #4 had us pose for a funny picture--as if we were a 90's boy band or hip-hop/rap band.   He doctored it up and the next day, he posted this on the family text stream.

"Mama Knows Best" was the debut album of the Mama's Boiz.  He said that our next title was going to be "Don't Step on a Crack."

Son #1 was missing when we made that first album cover, but our family photo shoot presented the perfect opportunity to get a picture of the whole band of brothers.  So before the serious photo session got underway, son #4 had the photographer snap a quick picture for our long-awaited second album.  And then he made some edits to it and this is the finished product:

I think my silly boys are already discussing what the next album is going to be called.  I can hardly wait for that one to drop.  (And Mama really does love those boiz of hers.)

I'm realizing that I'm probably going to have to make this post a two-parter, because I have too many memories and pictures to share.  But here are a few snapshots to give you an idea of how AWESOME our week was.  It looked like we were running a summer camp on our little private beach in our little private cove.  Too good to be true, honestly.

Part 2 coming soon!

Hope you're having a glorious summer, dear readers!