Cinnamon Roll Sacrifice

Yesterday was crazy! I had two baking projects to complete, and even knowing this, I agreed to babysit for a friend in the afternoon. Honestly, the kids were no big deal at all. My baking, however, took way longer than I expected it to!

My first project was a birthday cake. In the shape of a shark. My cousin asked me if I could make it for her 5 year old. It really was simple enough, just time consuming! Luckily, I had the exact perfect number of eggs I needed to make two cake mixes. I baked two 9x13 pans, cut the shark body shape from the diagonal on each cake and stacked them on top of each other, and used the remaining corner pieces for fins and tail.

It's funny, the thing I was most worried about in anticipating this cake was how I was going to make gray frosting.... I got lucky and my first concoction of several food colorings mixed together developed this perfect shark gray color!

A quick moment of bragging for myself, half the shark body was frosted while I was holding a tired wiggly 9 month old who refused to take her nap. It was awesome, I was proud :)

By the time I finished the details, I had about 5 minutes to primp for our date. A double date with our friends the Chipman's to see "The Hunger Games"!

Ever since there was word of the movie coming out and people everywhere were getting so excited, we've been meaning to read the books. We were going to borrow them from my mom, but it seemed every time we tried, someone else was already borrowing them! So we gave in and just bought them for ourselves last weekend. I read the first one for about an hour Sunday night and then another 4-5 straight hours Monday night. Justin read the whole thing on Wednesday. Before dinner. He's such a fast reader, it amazes me!

Anyways, it was awesome and we had fun! It would have been more fun though, if I hadn't gotten a headache about 20 minutes in, that eventually got so bad it was making me nauseous. And of course the only position that seemed to be the most comfortable for both my head and my stomach was leaning forward onto my knees. Except, oh wait! I can't do that anymore!! Brigette's totally in my way!! I kept thinking I needed to go the bathroom for fear I was going to throw up, but I didn't want to leave the movie! And apparently Justin had the great idea to get me a coke or something for my headache, but kept waiting to suggest it because he didn't want to leave the movie either! :P He's a nice guy though, and did go get me a soda. Fortunately, it started to help pretty quick.

By the time we got home, picked up Carrie, and put her to bed, it was after 10pm.... And I still had to make cinnamon rolls....

Now I didn't actually HAVE to, but I'd been planning on it all week and really really wanted to! This morning we were planning on taking a few things over to a friends house to join in their community garage sale. I said I'd bring cinnamon rolls for both our families. So at almost 11pm, I started making them. Only to realize that I had zero eggs. Remember how I had the perfect number for my cakes earlier in the day?.........

I texted a friend and her hubby quickly brought an egg to my rescue! I measured, mixed, let rise, punched down, and rolled out dough in the next hour. At midnight they were ready for topping/filling. I spread on a nice thick layer of brown sugar and went to sprinkle the cinnamon.... 2 shakes... That's all that was left in the container.... You've got to be kidding me!!! Cinnamon is kind of essential to cinnamon rolls!!

There was no way I was going to bug my friend again. 11pm was bad enough, I was certainly not going to text anyone at midnight. So I googled, and was pleased to find out that my walmart is open 24 hours.... Let me tell you, walmart looks weird at midnight. Boxes all over the place. But I'm sure I looked weird too. Sloppy ponytail, pajamas, and flour/dough/sugar all over the bottom half of my belly because it's the same height as the countertops and protrudes into the messy baking zone :)

By the time my three pans baked one at a time (more than one pan wouldn't fit), I finally went to bed at 2:30. Knowing I was getting up at 6:30 to co-host a garage sale. Goodness gracious!

Fortunately they were DELICIOUS! And a side plus, I actually made a few bucks selling them for 50 cents at the garage sale.
By the end of the morning, we'd made $29.50. But I'd also visited a few garage sales myself and spent $20.... I'm just glad we at least made a profit! And honestly we did end up with a several cute things for me, Carrie, and Brigette!

I'm exhausted, but now it's off to Mesa for the rest of our General Conference weekend activities!