Busy Saturday

I am quite pleased with how much I got accomplished yesterday. After I dropped Chris off at the school for their away game, I went to the car rental place and sorted out the bill. Then I came home and spent a couple hours building my new desk. On our way home from Kingston on Friday, we stopped at Ikea again and I bought two tables to replace my delapidated L-shaped desk. It looks really good and it matches my bookcase, too. (On that note, anyone want the old desk? It's a pièce de junk, but if you want it, it's yours.)
After a quick trip to the grocery store, I was ready to start Chris' birthday cake. I had a bit of a setback when I didn't wait long enough to take the cake out of the pan and it completely fell apart. Half of it came out onto the cooling rack and the other half was still stuck to the bottom. So I had to make a second cake and this time I made sure it was cool enough before attempting the transfer again. For this cake, I decided to try using fondant so I could do some of the intricate decorations I had planned for this ND-themed cake. First, I made a basic buttercream icing and covered the cake in a thin layer - basically, it's the glue that holds the fondant in place. I then made two batches of fondant, one in blue and one in yellow. I was surprised at how easy it was to make; the hard part is all the kneading at the end to remove the stickiness and get it to the right consistency. The base layer for the cake was the yellow, so I had to roll in out very thin then pick it up and place it over the cake (all without ripping it). That was a bit stressful, I must say. Once it was on the cake, I had to smooth it out and cover the sides. I had watched a couple YouTube videos on how to do it, so it wasn't too hard. I used the blue fondant for the decoration and I cut out letters using some cookie cutters I had bought. Across the top, I spelled out ND's slogan "Play like a champion today" and across the bottom, I wrote "Happy birthday Chris". In the middle, I put the ND logo, which I made by printing off the design from the Internet and using an exacto knife to trace and cut the fondant. All in all, there was nothing terribly difficult but it took a lot of time (6 hours!) and patience to get it done.