Cake Battery

Remember this?

Apparently the gender roles have continued to the next generation.  Buffalo and the Prom Queen have two kids, a 5 year old girl and a 3 year old boy.  A few stories:

• for the niece's third birthday, I made her a Dora the Explorer cake.  It was a 3D cake of my own carving.  Bran Flake asked me "will it be good enough that she will know what you're trying to make?"  Seriously.  WTF?  
• this past year for her fifth birthday, she wanted Hannah Montanna Montanah Montannah seriously, my fingers will not type that.  Anyway, long story but the moral is at one point Flake goes "well if you can't make a good cake for everybody, I suppose I can stop at the store and get something better" and then when we got to the party, she kept rearranging the presents and freaking out on people because everything had to be PERFECT
• I'm wasting a bullet point to say that the last one was a REALLY FUCKING LONG PARAGRAPH TO PUT IN BULLET POINT
• and now, just had the nephew's birthday.  No awkward questions about whether or not the train cake I was making would be recognizable as a train, no accusations that I wasn't putting enough effort into it, no rude yelling at other family members because the party wasn't perfect enough.  

So on one hand it was nice to not have to deal with psychotic grandma behavior, but I kinda feel sorry for my poor punkin nephew.  Niece is obviously the favorite.  When she misbehaves, it's "oh honey please don't do that, okay?" and then nobody notices that she turns right around and keeps doing whatever she was doing.  Nephew misbehaves and it's "NO!" and a spanking.  And while I realize that it's actually better to be a disciplinarian than to spoil a child and so in a perfect world nephew would grow up to be a much better person, I'm afraid the obvious favoritism is going to work against him and make him bitter.  It's already showing when the two kids are playing together. 

There are more stories.  It goes on and on.  She gets to travel with my folks, they never take him along and even said once that they're afraid they'd hurt her feelings if they took him... but they never think about if they're hurting his feelings by leaving him home! 

Anyway, my cake turned out well and I really wish I could have gotten a picture of the way my sweet little nephew's face lit up when he saw what I'd made.  That was pure joy.  But I had both hands holding the cake so no pictures.  Oh well, I remember what it was like and that made it all worthwhile to me!