White Chocolate Strawberry Cake

Sort of. One of my goals this year is to become craftier and to learn how to sew and knit. My sister works at Chronicle Books, which makes lots of awesome craft kits and I not so subtly hinted that I would love some and lo and behold, I got The Softie Kit for my birthday.


So cute! The kit with a bunch of patterns and the material to make one softie, which are basically whimsical stuffed animals. This week, I buckled down and decided to make the easiest pattern, a cake.



It took me an embarrassingly long time, at least 3 hours. My stitching is far from perfect and I now realize I could’ve stuffed it a lot more. However, considering I haven’t sewn a thing since 7th grade home-ec class, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

By the way, here are the things I remember about home-ec (which wasn’t called home-ec but something equally lame like “Life Skills”) are:
1) Making a hand-sewn blue and black lizard stuffed animal that I named Skittle Dwarf. The reason eludes me.
2) In the cooking section of the class, the group next to me had apparently never seen fractions before and was totally confused by the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I distinctly remember, “Miss? The recipe calls for 3 or 4 cups of flour. So which is it? 3 or 4?” to which our teacher said, “….You mean ¾ cup?” And then we had a substitute teacher for awhile.

I sewed a good deal of the cake on our living room ‘video game’ couch, which used to sit next to the wall like a normal couch but is now sitting diagonally across the living room, a foot away from the TV so we can properly fry our brains. The boys bought an HDTV and a playstation, which is now the bane of my existence because I can’t figure out how to work it half the time when I need to watch The Girls Next Door and the other half of the time the boys are playing games in which they kill half-naked cyborg women.

So anyways, BJ was sitting on one side of the couch, playing the Kill Stuff Including Cyborg Hotties game, in which one of the main characters is named Liquid Ocelot. I’m not kidding, I can’t make this stuff up. And I was sitting on the other side of the couch, making a felt cake. BJ would occasionally say things like, “Damn, how did they SEE me?!” while I would say thing like, “Damn, why can’t I make a French knot?!”

Contrast. It makes life more interesting.

Also, I lost the pom-pom I was supposed to use as a ‘cherry’ on top of the cake and I just went outside to ask if anybody had seen it. “What the hell is a pom-pom?” asked BJ. “You know. Those fluffy things? They make the little Easter chicks out of them?” Blank stare and long pause. “No idea what you’re talking about. I think pom-poms must be an Alaskan thing.” BJ decided before turning back to kill people.

I made the cherry out of pink thread instead.

Real baked goodies this weekend, we ate all the biscotti!