The perfect recipe for Sand Castle Cake and Friendship.

A few weeks ago, on the back porch, my next door neighbor confessed that she was hosting two back-to-back bridal showers.  These just weren't any bridal showers, they  were VERY important bridal showers.  She, because of the brides-to-be, wanted everything to be just perfect.

And, as only she can do, she roped our other neighbor and me into helping her host the PERFECT bridal shower.

Game on.  We are up for the challenge.

My job, to bake the perfect bridal shower cake.

Not a problem.  Years ago, I made one of the best investments of my life (my husband just gagged).  I bought a Williams Sonoma Sand Castle Cake mold.  Perfect for pound cake.  Walker's favorite.  Awesome looking cake mold.  Perfect when you live at the beach.

I was excited.  I bought some cute embellishments to add and it was going to be perfect for the bride to be and her shower.

In the meantime, my other girl friend calls me and asked if I could help her clean some beach houses on the same day as the shower.  Yes, I have this cake thing down.

Friday night comes and I bake the cake.  My thought process, bake the cake Friday night, keep it in the mold, get up Saturday morning, take it out, decorate, go clean beach houses, come home, take the cake over, perfect and punctual.

Saturday morning, I get up, drink a cup of coffee, and turn my cake mold over.   Again and again and again.  No movement.  Then, I grab a paring knife, cut away at the edges, dump, nothing.  This goes on for 45 minutes.  NEVER has the EVER happened.

Panic sets in.  I call my other neighbor, who I know is up, it is early, 7:15am, and say"get up here, I need help.  The damn cake will not come out of the mold."

Franklin gets up, sees the sweat on my brow, picks up the mold, slams it on the counter and it comes out.  Boy, did it come out.

Mo, my hero, comes in and sees it.  OMG.   That is pretty much all that we said.  OMG.

Mo grabs the mold, the wafers, the almond extract, the cake plate, the embellishments and says, "you go to work, I got this."

And before she leaves, we sit my daughter down and do what ever mother does, we tell my daughter to lie if Rhonda comes over.  Yep, that's right, we said, "don't tell Rhonda, don't stress her out, tell her I hid the cake, it is done."  Mother of the year, teach your kid to lie.

Off I go to work.  Mo texts me hourly with the status of the cake.

In the meantime, the fudge maker makes one batch of fudge, it doesn't turn out, makes another and then I am not sure what happened next.  I just know there was fudge.

Finally, the text with the finished product comes across my phone.  Cake is done and lovely.

I run home, grab the cake that has been placed on my counter by the shower cake baking fairy and run it over to the shower thrower. 

Ahhhh. 

Then, a few hours later, I go over to the shower.  There sits the bride-to-be and the cake fairy.  The bride-to-be says, "I loved my cake" and I couldn't sit there.  The cake fairy is sitting there smiling.  And, the shower thrower was happy.

There are so many ingredients to this story....

Screw that Amish Friendship bread, this Sand Castle Cake was all about friendship.

Women "get" one another.  We "get" the desire to do something nice for fellow women.  We get that when the recipe or the best plans don't work, we can get it done.  We understand that sometime a lie isn't really a lie if you are preventing a shower thrower from throwing herself into a crazy tizz. 

I have been SO blessed with a circle of GREAT friends.  Think about, I call a woman at 7:15 am on a Saturday, throw this cake at her and she handles it and smiles while the bride says thank you to me.  Wow.  This is the story of Friendship.