Morning Rituals

We all have our own rituals in the morning, don't we? Typically, mine consists of hitting 'snooze' on my alarm as many times as humanly possible, crawling out of bed, throwing on my work clothes, making a quick stop in the bathroom to potty and brush my teeth, and then running out the door, sometimes while tying my shoes. Of course, these are the mornings I have to work at 5:oo AM, and let me just say for the record that I am in no way, shape, or form a morning person. I stay up late. And I enjoy my sleep.

My mom, however, has a much nicer morning ritual that I have seen her perform too many times to count. She, like myself, is not a morning person. Her first "good morning" is to the coffee maker. It greets her in return with a warm, aromatic smile, and she makes her way to get the newspaper. Coffee mug and paper in hand, she sits at the table and reads and drinks in a sleepy-eyed state until the caffeine has had enough time to course through her veins.

Once she's had ample time to wake up, she moves on to the puzzle section of the paper. One of our favorite puzzles to do together is the Word Scramble one, where you have four or five words to unscramble, and then you have to use certain letters from each unscrambled word to unscramble the final puzzle, based off of the provided cartoon. Sometimes, the words elude us so badly that we have to pull out Scrabble tiles to help us figure them out.

Her morning ritual is something that will always be a fond memory for me (aside from her morning grumpiness :)), so I thought I would use that to celebrate her birthday!!

I took all of the elements of what she does every morning: the coffee, the paper, the puzzles, the Scrabble tiles, and gave her something edible to enjoy.



The cake was the same pumpkin white chocolate chip cake I mentioned in the earlier post about wedding preparations... It turned out just as delicious, but let me tell ya... This is NOT the type of cake you want to use with a shaped cake! It's so moist, and porous, with all of the chips in there.. It's so not ideal to cut and shape and then try to cover with a heavy fondant. It sagged, it wrinkled, it tore... But I kept it together for the most part. At least it tasted yummy!! :-)

So, pumpkin white chocolate chip cake, cream cheese icing, fondant to cover... I made the mug handle out of gum paste (which I let dry and then wrapped with the same colored fondant as the mug) and stuck a few cut pieces of a thin wooden skewer in either end to stick into the cake.



You can see the whole spread in this shot... The cupcakes were lemon with a lemon zest icing. The "steam" coming off the coffee mug had to quickly turn into candles, because the chocolate pieces I had created started melting and falling over... So I had to eat them to teach them a lesson. ;-) My lovely husband (of one month as of today!! Happy 'monthiversary,' Brandon!) ran out to the store to get me some twisty candles to substitute.. What a great guy.



Closer up view of the mug on its saucer, the newspapers, and the Scrabble tiles that spell out "Happy Birthday Sue." You can see how the cake is really starting to get saggy underneath the fondant.



And here's my lovely mom and dad, checkin' everything out after Mom's extinguished the fire. ;-)

Happy Birthday, Mom! I love you!!