This is a picture of my 10th birthday cake. The photograph is pretty bad, but the cake was beautiful, and very original. I don't remember how I ended up requesting a cake in the shape of Swiss cheese (though I loved Gruyere as a kid), but I know I enjoyed it.

Both my kids have said they'd like a cake like this - I imagine it'd be too expensive to have it made and I'm not an artist.

I knew that all the time I wasted in craigslist had to be good for something. Today I found out that the green part of green onions make a good substitute for chives. Apparently many restaurants use them as a matter of course (and still call them chives). I never have chives around, but often I have green onions so this will work great for me.

Mike saw the idea for a spider cake in a Family Fun magazine and immediately wanted us to make one for Halloween. I've learned my lesson about actually baking cake, so we figured we'd buy one premade and then assemble it. That turned out to be harder than we previously thought. They had no plain black cakes at Safeway and the cake I thought to buy at Costco was too high to make it look like a spider. Finally Mike found this semi-frosted, plain chocolate bundt cake at Albertson's and that's what we used.

He used licorice for the legs, white dot candies for the eyes and a pink one for the nose. He decided to skip the mouth. We were all pleased with the results and served the cake with ice cream.