Learned a few valuable lessons on this stage, too:

• Cake decorating is a fuck of a lot harder than it looks, and it's always looked pretty damn difficult.
• There are few dextrous challenges that can't be helped along with a good bottle of Guinness.
• Guinness and cream cheese cake icing are a wretched taste combination.
• Icing a cake is a lot like trowelling fresh cement into a smooth surface. Something else I've never done before.
• But like I said, Guinness is a magical elixer of many uses.
• Until I lick more of the frosting off of my fingers, that is.

The light flecks of green aren't image-compression artifacts, they're bits of the colored sugar like you put on cupcakes. I wanted just a light sprinkling, so as to not distract from the rest of the decoration.

The sentiment may be optimistic, but damn if it isn't sincere.

My Self is a snarky rat-fuck bastard, is what he is.

Lessons I have learned as I try to make my cake (more or less in order):

1. Cakes require a small-but-significant set of specialized hardware. Most people have these things around their homes. I don't.
2. When the cake-mix calls for softened butter, brace yourself...
3. Butter doesn't really soften very quickly just sitting on the counter.
4. Butter softens pretty fucking quickly in the microwave.
5. 30 seconds is too long, unless you are making butter soup.
6. It really suck ass when you realize that previous point, at the same time you realize that's your last stick of butter.
7. 10 seconds (after the 10-minute run to the grocery for more butter and for the non-stick spray you forgot) feels about right.
8. As Bill Cosby once said, you have to be careful with the eggs. Generally, when a recipe calls for eggs, it is assumed that no shell is to be included. Expect them to be specific about the shell if they want it in there.
9. Thank god one ingredient was a single cup of water, so that I could do one thing right the first time.
10. Just because you're making two cakes at once is no reason to try and mix them both at the same time. No matter how big the mixing bowl you got was.
11. Because, see, you didn't buy an electric mixer, you bought a whisk. And mixing that much batter by hand requires the arm strength of a Major League Baseball pitcher and the stamina of a Major League Soccer forward.
12. And guess what? Just because the butter felt soft earlier, doesn't mean it actually is. In fact, it isn't.
13. Even after 5 minutes of beating my batter, there are still lumps of butter in it. The butter, it haunts me. The butter, it taunts me.
14. Remember the athletic qualifications for working this much batter by hand? Well, I possess neither. I have, however, given my left arm the strongest work-out it has had since probably right around the time I was going through puberty.
15. (Relax, that last bit has nothing to do with the cake.)
16. Now I see why my grandmother would never intentionally leave more batter in the bowl for my brother and I to scoop on our fingers and eat. After you've suffered for that cake, you're damn well going to bake absolutely as much of it as is possible
17. Luckily, that figure never quite reaches 100%. And the batter does in fact taste sweeter when you've made the cake yourself. That also explains why grandma usually got first dibs on the bowl before handing it over.
18. However, you may find that you still, after over five minutes of beating, didn't get all the butter smoothed into the batter. I fear I've developed a butter fixation, now. A butter-phobia. It may be months, years even, before I can butter so much as a slice of toast.

So, it's in the oven now. Next up, adventures in icing and decoration...