And to prove my love for Nigella Lawson.

Two weeks ago Saturday, I was watching the Food Network because that’s what I do on Saturday mornings, and I saw a show featuring Nigella Lawson, that sexy, buxom British beauty who enchants me. On this very special episode, Nigella does Christmas and she baked a cake in this Bundt pan that looked like a grove of Christmas trees.

I squealed like a bitch. HAD to have it.

So I went to Amazon and ordered it. Here’s a picture of what the eventual cake should look like.

Now I should have gone online and looked up Nigella’s recipe, because she never makes anything that’s overly complicated. Instead I decided to make the recipe that came with the cake pan.

And if this cake comes out even slightly edible, I feel like I could pass myself off as a French pasty chef.

There are 14 ingredients in this cake. That’s a lot. Especially if you are used to adding oil and eggs to a box mix. Which I confess that I usually do.

So I assemble all the ingredients because if there is one thing I know for sure about cooking and baking, you are far more likely to succeed if you get all the ingredients out first. Mise en place, as the French say: everything in it’s place.

I greased and sugared the pan (Paula Deen trick: don’t use flour, use powdered sugar for cake pans) and then started mixing all this stuff. Cream the shortening and sugar. Add egg whites and beat till fluffy. This meant I got to use my nifty new egg separator that was supposed to be in my stocking.

Add in vanilla pudding mix, vanilla extract and sour cream. Mix all that. Sift in half of the flour/baking powder/salt mixture. Add in 3/4 of the milk. Mix and add the rest of the flour.

At this point I am thinking I would never do all this even if I was a man trying to shag Nigella.

But when you’ve come this far, there’s no turning back.

I portioned out two cups of batter and folded in white chocolate chips. Unless I burn the shit out of this cake there is no way it could taste bad. I stuffed all that batter into the pan. Then I returned to the rest of the batter.

Now I had to fold in egg yolks, cocoa, chocolate pudding mix and the rest of the milk and made this very thick, very rich batter and to that I added chocolate chips.

You could bail out Wall Street six times over with this shit.

The chocolate layer got plastered on top of the vanilla layer and then the magic cake pan went into the oven for an hour.

When I took it out and the toothpicks came out clean, I had to wait for 10 minutes for it to cool before I could see if it would fall out the pan in one perfect piece.

The 10 longest minutes of my week. And it’s been a long, long week.

Wait, wait, wait.

La. La. La.

And all this baking and waiting was helping to take my mind off the fact that my in-laws arrive tomorrow. Which will mean five or six long days of holding my breath waiting for my mother-in-law to say something evil to me. Ah, holiday fun.

So the timer finally went off and I rushed over to the cake, inverted it onto a plate, flipped it over and, VIOLA, seven of eight trees came out with perfect tops. The other one was a bit crumbly, no doubt because I didn’t get batter all the way down into the pan.

This cake is almost as beautiful as Nigella.

When it cooled, I sprinkled on powdered sugar snow and it’s a thing to behold. It looks like a happy winter wonderland of calories.

Last night we sliced into it and…well let’s just say there was “O” faces all around. This is maybe the best cake EVER. Even my MIL couldn’t say anything snarky about it.

This is why I love Christmas. Making something wonderful and beautiful that everyone likes and shares.

That was the sappiest paragraph I have ever written. And every word is true.

Merry Christmas, y’all!

Didn’t do well with food: I had a salad for lunch (good); Chinese food for dinner (bad) and yogurt-covered pretzels for dessert (jury’s out on that one, depends on how many more I eat.) Don’t judge me.

I also had a Starbucks caramel brulee latte and, Oscar Mayer Goosefeathers, it was a warm cup of comfort and joy and awesomeness. Aaaaaand I forgot to order it non-fat. Not to mention decaf. Don’t. Judge.

OK, you can judge. Look- something shiny!

I got my hairs floofed. And colored. See:

Good day. Tomorrow? The gym. Dah dah dum.

All day long my phone has been clinking with birthday messages from Facebook friends. I have a lot of love in my life and I am very grateful for that.

But over on Twitter, where I am a bit more anonymous and a indeed more true to myself than I am on my public Facebook page, I became aware there is another birthday to commemorate today.

I am relatively new to a community of friends in Twitter, many of whom are mothers who use social media and blogs to reach out to other parents, sharing stories about children, pets, men and life. As the parent of an adult, I read their tweets and blogs and reminisce about the days when my girl was little. I am enjoying these ladies, and admit to being a little envious of the tools they have now to bond. It was a lot harder to find kindred souls back in the day.

Today I know from the community on Twitter that this should have been Madeline Alice Sphor’s second birthday. It should have been, but this lovely child was lost to a respiratory infection last April.

You can read more about Maddie here, here, here and here. She was a gorgeous little girl with a smile that will melt even the coldest heart, at least that’s my best guess why there’s a puddle all over my desk right now.

My husband’s cousin and his wife, along with the rest of our family, count blessings every day. Bridget gave birth to twins boys at 26 weeks, and they spent months in the NICU with their boys, Max and Tyler, who are now 21 months old and healthy.

She kept an amazing blog about the experience, which has allowed our family, scattered all over the country, to watch these two beautiful kids grow.

So today I am going to give myself a birthday present: A donation to Friends of Maddie and the March of Dimes. So more kids, including Max and Tyler, can have many birthday celebrations.

I really love my home. We have a nice house on a nice cul-de-sac in a nice neighborhood. We have a gorgeous view of mountains and yet we are close enough to our jobs and shopping that we don’t feel inconvenienced.

If there was a Starbucks within walking distance, this place would be amazeballs.

And right now I have three sleeping dogs keeping me company in my very comfy living room while my cat chows down on his breakfast in the kitchen. It’s pretty peaceful here.

In a few hours, my hubby will be home and I will smile because after 20 years of friendship and 5 years of romance, just laying my eyes on him still makes me smile.

There is really no point to this post other than as much as I bitch, I really do have a very nice life.