My mom may have become deluded into thinking I’m an actual pastry chef of sorts.

“Make the cakes. Tell me what ingredients to get and I’ll learn what you do,” she said.

My mother is a serious cook. That she would even think she could learn something from me sort of makes me laugh.

I decided to do a tuxedo cake and a basic white cake with strawberries for those who do not care for chocolate. I told her what to get, and had her bake the cakes ahead of time because we’d be sort of pushed for time otherwise. You know, make mom do the work.

There was a moment of concern when I thought she’d gotten the wrong kind of cream, due mainly to a recent bad experience.

“If anyone makes a joke about me being some ‘pastry chef’ and this tasting bad, I’m going to snap,” I said grumpily, wondering if I was going to be permanently trapped into never being able to recreate anything outside of the work kitchen.

In the end, it all worked out well, everyone liked the cake, and my nephews (my litmus test for whether it really tastes good or not, since adults sometimes lie about what they do and do not like to avoid hurt feelings while kids just want to eat more if it’s good) ponied up for seconds and thirds.

The rest of the weekend was nice. Brutus got his usual haircut and was terribly grumpy and nervous the whole weekend because of it. My sisters and I got to talk, and my sister Janet and I spent several hours reminiscing about the horses and horse experiences we had growing up.

My sister Janet also got my dad to watch The Messengers, a scary movie, by telling him it was about “a sunflower farm in North Dakota.” He likely didn’t think it would be what it was, with that description.

I also beat the ever lovin’ pants off of my brother and two nephews (and sister for a short while, when my youngest nephew left the game to watch the end of a movie) playing The Settlers of Catan. You can view my glory moment here. See how happy they all were.

And of course, we scared the pants of my nephew. See the video here.