My sorority alumna group has a book club, and I’d volunteered ages ago to host in October. Today was the day. We read Jennifer Weiner’s Best Friends Forever, but actually only 2 of the 8 women at book club read the book. This was another example of me realizing that September is a bad month to expect to do things like read books for book club. I had a single-minded focus on school, so everything else just took a backseat.
But I have to say, I’m really happy with the spread I put out. Cake, apples and caramel, chips and sour cream salsa, cheese and pepperoni with crackers. And I absolutely stole Maggie’s Christmas in July idea of a decorate your own cookie station. I cheated on the cookies and used one of those Pillsbury ready-to-bake packages when I ran out of time, and they were a hit. I made the vanilla frosting but not the chocolate. I went with a blue/tan/brown color scheme, and I hung the card catalog fabric I had made from Spoonflower last fall.
My handwriting on cakes is as bad as it is in real life, but I still like my book club cake. I made a chocolate cake in a loaf pan, trimmed it all around, then covered it with a layer of vanilla frosting. I put it in the fridge overnight, then I covered the “spine” and “front cover” with chocolate frosting (ready made) so it would look like a book. I piped more chocolate frosting all around the bottom edge to look like the back cover of the book. I put “BFF” on the spine since that’s the abbreviation for our book’s title. The lettering is sloppy, but the cake still went over really well.
I didn’t go with the Devil’s Food Cake today, since it takes kind of a while to make. Here are the cake recipes, with my changes: