Have you ever thought about your own funeral?

(Ok, that was completely random, I know.  And it doesn’t have much to do with this cookie jar cake I made for my little nephew’s first birthday, other than the fact that it’s got me thinking about people… and love… and life… and now, apparently, death.  Errrr… bear with me, here.)

Now that my littlest is off to school with her big kid siblings each day, I actually have a quiet moment every once in a while to, ummm… THINK.
And sometimes I think about my funeral.

Who will take the time out of their crazy, busy lives to search their closet for subdued colors, clear their schedule for a few hours, and BE there?
Will they be TRULY upset… or just be going through the motions?
And when they get there… what will they say?

What do I HOPE they’ll say?

Well, it turns out I’m as selfish as the next guy, ’cause if I was given the chance to look down from above, I’m pretty sure that first off, I’d want everyone there to be weeping.
I mean, like, WEEPING.  With ugly crying noises and all.
(Ok wait, I should caveat that.  If I’m super old and have lived a long, full life, then people will have had lots of time to mentally prepare for my departure and I’ll be ok with singing and dancing.  No weeping needed.
I’m thinking a more “young-ish” and “went before we expected” sort of funeral.
K.  Moving on.)

Now, I’m not saying I’d want it to alter their lives for the worse or anything like that.  I’d definitely want them to get over my death (eventually), but if they didn’t feel any sting from me being gone… if it was just kindo’ like, “Ok, that’s sad but whatevs”, then what kind of life would I have lived?

I guess, what I really want is for them to have loved me.   I want to have “touched” the people in my life.  To have made them feel happy… special…and to know they were loved by ME.  That when they think of me, they smile ’cause it made them feel good when I was around.

But what if THIS is what they’ll be thinking, “Shawna… worked hard.  She always had a full plate.  She was busy, and often tired.  And she was…nice.”

THAT would be an epic failure.  That would NOT have been worth it.

I guess my point is… I want my brain and my heart to start remembering (every single day that I have left) that my time down here is about the PEOPLE in my life, and those I encounter along the way.
How I treat them… how I make them feel… how I love them.
And that’s it.
Everything else is just fluff.

It’s fine to work hard… to be busy… and being NICE is never a bad thing, either.  But if THAT’S all I’m about… if THAT’S all I’m remembered for, then my life will have been wasted.
I wouldn’t have shown the people I love what they mean to me.
I wouldn’t have brought anyone much joy.
I wouldn’t have touched lives.
I would have missed it, completely.

And man ALIVE… I don’t want to miss it.  Ya know?

It was a crazy weekend.
But I managed to make this cake for my handsome little nephew’s party, spend ample amount of time laughing with lots of family on a couple of different occasions, and hopefully bringing them a little joy in the midst of it all.
The last being moved to the top of my priority list, and something that I am going to start making my mission to get reaaaallly good at.

‘Cause life is short.
And I want some good, hard crying at my funeral. 😉 Xx

Details on how I made the cake…

To get the marble counter top look on the cake board, I started with a small chunk of white fondant, added just a small amount of black fondant to it and partially mixed them together, so that you could still see some separation of color in it.  (Chunk on the bottom left.)

Then I placed the grey chunk over a larger chunk of white, pushed them together, stretched them out, and folded one half over onto the other.

Stretched it out again and folded it over upon itself again, in the same direction that I did the first time.

Then I rolled it out and covered the board with it, using water to attach it.

I used the white almond sour cream cake recipe I have posted in my Recipes section, and I carved a slanted divot into the top section of the cake, trying to keep it as even as possible all the way around.

I didn’t need a lot of cake (as most of the adults are on healthy diets and all… *sigh*) so I used the same size diameter styro dummy as a base to give it more height.
But if you do need a bit more cake, I recommend making a double barrel cake (which I show you how to do in my blog post, here).

I then “glued” the cardboard cake card the cake was on, to the top of the styro (so it wouldn’t slide around) with melted candy melts.

I iced the whole thing using (my new obsession)  super easy meringue buttercream, and then stuck it in the freezer for about 25 minutes before I covered it with fondant.

After I covered it with Carma (’cause it’s my absolute FAV) fondant, I rolled up a little ball of extra fondant, rubbed it with some powdered sugar, and used that to get into the divot section of the cake and smooth it out.
Works a charm!

I then cut a large hole out of the top of the fondant finish so that my “cookies” would look like they were coming out of the jar when I placed them.

I used my Groovy Uppercase Letters by Clickstix to add the word “cookies” to the front,

and I used my Flourish Centerpiece mold by Marvelous Molds to get the fun, scrolly look above and below it.

And I used food coloring markers to write my nephew’s name and draw lines on wafer paper to make the little added sign.
So everybody knew exactly who the cookies belonged to, of course.

I made Cookie Monster (and the cookies) out of modeling chocolate, and then added royal icing that I textured with a pallet knife, on top as his fur.

 

I put a skewer up through his bum (I know… that just doesn’t sound nice) and down into the cake.  It was tall enough so that it reached and rested on the styro part of the cake, and hence helped offset Cookie Monster’s added weight and didn’t push down on top of the cake (’cause modeling chocolate can get heavy).

I added the mod choc cookies (cutting some in half so they looked like they were coming out of the jar) and made a smash cake as well, so that little Gunnar could, well… get his smash on.

Which he loved and hated both at the same time.

Which is pretty much how we all feel about cake, deep down, right?
(Never mind.  Don’t answer that.)  Xx