At least I tried...

You know when you have these grand plans of how something is going to go?  And then it goes completely different.  Actually terribly wrong.  Has this happened to you?

This happened to me.  Most recently for Matt's birthday.  Sorry dear.

I had asked him if there was anything special he wanted for his birthday dinner at home (side note: we did go out to eat and see a movie over the weekend...so thankfully it wasn't all a bust).  He requested fajitas.  And strawberry cake.  Easy right?  That's what I thought.

I decided I didn't want to make a huge cake that we'd have too much of, feel guilty about throwing it out, and regretfully end up eating all of it.  So I found this "cupcake for two" recipe on Pinterest.  Perfect!  Unfortunately they weren't strawberry, so I thought, I'll just add some strawberries to the batter and icing. Made sense to me.  I baked away but as the timer was approaching to end, my baby started crying.  She can wait a few minutes, I thought.  Ding!  But they weren't done yet.  So I waited another few minutes.  Ding! Not done again.  Seriously?  At this point, Maddie is very upset with me for not feeding her.  So rather than them just burn, I decided to turn the oven off and just let them finish their mostly done selves in the oven.  After I finished with Maddie and got her down for a nap, I went to check on them.  They looked lovely.

My goal was to have dinner ready by the time Matt got home.  I started up the inside grill (because there is still about 3 feet of snow outside) and get the chicken ready to throw on.  In the mean time, I put a few tortillas in the toaster oven to warm up and get the fixings out. Unfortunately, our fan above the stove doesn't work too well, so when the chicken goes on the stove top it's sizzling causes the smoke alarm to go off (this has happened before, sadly).  Which then makes my dinner helper, Maddie, get startled and start crying.  Which then causes the dog to start barking.  So I'm opening doors trying to fan out the fumes when Matt pulls up the driveway to me holding a crying baby and smoke erupting from the doorway.  Happy birthday....

I hand over Maddie who is wailing at this point so I can finish up.  He tries to change her diaper and it isn't working, plus she decided to pee over all her clothes and on Matt, so we decide to switch duties - me - baby, him - dinner.  While I'm upstairs I think, man it's really smokey up here...meanwhile the smoke alarm goes off again!  What I forgot to tell Matt was that I had put tortillas in the toaster oven and didn't set the timer properly.  He turned around and smoke billows are pouring from the mini door.  Our house was so smokey and smelly!  We opened every door and window, turned on all the fans - and it's in the 30s outside - so our daughter wouldn't get smoke inhalation.  So now our house is cold too.

Scorched tortillas. And me getting our baby away from the smoke.

We finally get Maddie settled down and dinner prepared.  After we eat (in front of the space heater because we are still trying to air out our home), we go for a walk (for some fresh air), I spend some time getting Maddie down for the night (poor baby had a traumatic evening) and then head downstairs to enjoy the delicious looking cupcakes I'd made.

This is before we took a bite.

With the icing oozing off (because apparently the strawberry addition made the icing a bit runny), we take a big bite.  Completely raw in the middle.  Seriously? The poker thing came out clean...I don't even know what happened.  Strawberries is all I can guess.  That or the kitchen just had it out for me that day.

At this point we just bust out laughing.  Again.  To tears.  What a night.  All I wanted to do was make a special dinner for my hubby.  Thankfully we had ice cream as a backup and parked it on the couch.

This is probably why we usually go out to eat for important celebrations.  I promise...I usually know what I'm doing.  Usually.

To top it all off - our house still kinda smells.