4th of July Fails

I hate to call things "fails" because I am an optimist and I think something good comes from every project attempted, but if I am being honest, these projects didn't turn out nearly as well as I had hoped they would (and fail alliterates with Fourth of July better than a word like..."experiment.")

Why am I showing you my less than stellar projects?

1.  I still think I had some good ideas here, and maybe you can make them work.

2.  My new friend, Steph, at Somewhat Simple told me to.  She asked us to link up our "craftastrophes" and show each other the reality of DIY.

So here it is, the good, the bad and the yummy:

I think you've had to have seen it by now.  The gorgeous flag cake, originally created by Elissa of 17 and baking.  I've seen lots of others attempt her cake, and I wanted to, too, but not with out throwing some of my insanity into the recipe. 

My first thought was that I could get more stripes into the cake, if I made all of the layers red, and lined with thick layers of frosting.  It would also simplify the part where you have to divide your batter into three colors.

Then I thought that if I was going to be using so much red food coloring, I might as well make red velvet cake, instead of white cake.  (Forget that I've never made red velvet cake before).

So the good news, is that red velvet cake is really yummy!  The bad news is that each of my cakes kind of collapsed in the center, not giving me the thickness I needed to form my layers (especially with my "blue velvet" layer).  I don't know if that is typical with red velvet, or if it was just baker error.  These were also really hard to get out of the pan, so instead of beautifully constructed layers being stacked, there was a lot of piecing going on.  It did taste quite good, although my mom complained that it was too rich and sweet with all of that frosting--but she eats really healthily, so I think most people would really like it.  :-)

Not quite the dramatic effect as the original, but still somewhat festive.

You might also check out Thrifty Decor Chick's Southwestern version of this cake. :-)  I'm in good company!

If I were to attempt this again, I would stick with a white cake recipe and use wilton cake release.  Maybe I'll try and redeem myself next 4th (or maybe not!).

*****

I was really excited about this craft project I took for the kids to do during our camping reunion over the 4th of July weekend.

This picture makes it almost look like it worked.  You remember we did this sand art project two years ago.  I thought this would be an exciting improvement over the original.  I got the idea from big website that I can't find or remember at the moment.  The idea was that you use black foam (maybe that's what I did wrong?  I used cardstock because it was cheaper), squirt on some glue, and use a straw to blow air on the glue, spreading it out into the shape of fireworks.  Then you decorate with blue, red, and white sand.  I couldn't find any sand in the store, so I went with glitter.  When I used regular white glue, it was too thick to spread into the cute designs.  We tried watering it down, and then it would run everywhere (like off of the page in the above photo).  If anyone knows the link to the real directions, let me know.  And if you know what I did wrong, let me know, because I was really excited to share this project with the kids, and it mostly turned out to be a big mess.

Are you human, too?  Link up your "craftastrophies" at Somewhat Simple.