Garrett's Birthday

Yesterday was Garrett's birthday. It was a relatively normal day, except for Garrett got cake and presents, and I got a job! Well, a temp job, but this one should last longer than the other one as there is no real set time limit, and I get to work with Grace, which should be fun. I have to admit though, I hate thinking about losing so much free time, since I'm going to have to commute, and thus wake up early and thus go to bed early. But it'll be a nice work environment, we'll have more padding for our savings, and it's something else to put on my resume.

But back to the birthday boy. I enjoy baking, and I wanted to try something new. I had three boxes of cake mix lying around and decided I wanted to go ahead and use a mix, so I used this cake recipe, which involved cake mix with a little extra something. Instead of using the buttercream and ganache recipe, however, I decided to use a Betty Crocker buttercream recipe I have used before and skipped the ganache. I do want to make a cake with ganache some day (because I loooooove ganache cake), but decided not to this time. I also decided to add Oreo crumbs on top because Garrett loves Oreos. Same with the candy letters:
Garrett really liked it. I liked it too (I say that as if it's all gone; we have barely made a dent in it!), but I think I had higher expectations for it. I thought adding the pudding mix and the sour cream would make it significantly more moist, but it really didn't. It was still moist enough, just not what I expected. I wonder if I should have baked it a little less longer than it said since my oven tend to bake/cook quickly. But it was/is still good. But I think for my birthday, I might have to get my favorite cake from Publix:


Now that is a cake.

Oh, and Garrett got a Blu-Ray player from his parents for his birthday, which is awesome and I can enjoy it too! We put a regular DVD in there on Sunday (he got the present a couple days early) and it looked really nice. We'll probably still buy a lot of normal DVDs because of price (we love buying used DVDs from Hasting's too much to start spending $20+ on movies), but I think we're going to have to get Inception on Blu-Ray for maximum wow-factor.