Happy 50th Birthday friends!

At school a couple of great teachers were turning 50. Two months ago I had this awesome surprise party idea, the whole staff involved, and cakes involving black fondant strips and sparklers. Then stuff happened. That's what I call working two jobs, being a DI coach, math remediation, volunteering to help with the choir show and trying to cook dinner at least a couple of times a week. So it sat in the back of my mind but never really came to. Plus I was making small cakes for my Wilton class so that has been a lot of baking this month. But yesterday around 6:30 another teacher asked if we were doing anything for them so I said I'd make something simple, she got flowers and chips and dip (which I originally wrote as "flowers and dip" but that sounds gross) and we had someone else get some soda. On a side note I try really hard not to call soda "pop" but it's really hard down here and a lot of times I think the word soda just doesn't fit in with the atmosphere of our Appalachian (app-uh-LAY-shun) school.

Okay, something simple? Riiiiiiight.

Now, remember we decided to do this at 6:30 - pm! I had just begun my 45 minutes drive home from school and had not really prepared for this. Good thing I always have plenty of cake ingredients and am no longer worried about rushing out to buy boxed mix! So late last night I made the two paisley-shaped cake tiers. I was so excited to buy these 4 months ago and doubly excited to finally stack some! (I had used the smaller one in a Christmas cake - but this was the first time I used them two together. I have three but the bottom one is waaay big.) So, late last night night I was baking these cakes. It's been a long week and I was tired, so I went to bed as soon as they were cool enough to store. That was around 10:30. I got up at 4:30 this morning ready to decorate! I did cheat a little and base iced it using some Pillsbury buttercream I had in the cabinet. It was on closeout and I like to keep some on hand for cake emergencies. I did make my own icing though for the roses and shell border. Luckily purple is the favorite color of BOTH birthday-ees, so that made it super easy. Here's a few views of what it looked like at 6 am:

From the front

From the top

A bit closer up

So of course I wasn't exactly done when I went to school. I originally planned to have sparklers and whatnot, right? So I needed something a bit ridiculous. I decided to make a large 5-0 out of melted white chocolate - a trick I learned from the Hello Cupcake books. Then I had an even better idea - I also covered two small candles with white chocolate and attached them. Edible 5-0 birthday candles! Awesome!! All the time spent was so worth it for our cute little party. 

 Happy Friday!