Where there's a will there's a way...

This is now my new motto... I volunteered to make icing for cookies for Nicholas's class... my son proudly told his teacher that his mom made the best strawberry icing (thanks grandma!) and so Ms. Nelson promptly emailed me a few weeks ago and asked for my assistance... I said sure thinking that this would be an easy task - a couple of cans of frosting (I was going to cheat!) and food coloring and I'd be set... right?? Not so easy - do you know that there is NO WHERE in Japan that you can find a can of frosting??? Not the international stores - no where. You can buy a box of Duncan Hines cake mix for $7 but you're pretty much screwed when it comes to the frosting...

Well, stupid me waited until the day before to get the icing ready - yes, I am a procrastinator! So after the 2nd international store and 2nd local store - I realized I was in trouble.

I went into "Plan B" mode... make my own. All I needed was powdered sugar... I already had $10 worth of butter and $7 worth of food coloring... and thank God I had brought vanilla from home! Off to the sugar aisle... found something that sort of looked like powdered sugar, it even had a picture of a frosted cake on the back... whatever it was, there was only about a cup of it in the bag, so I bought three of those then saw something else that actually said "powdered sugar" - there were only two tiny bags of that. So got those and headed home...

Opened up both bags and did a little taste test - the one that said "powdered sugar" was pretty darn close, the other - not so much. It might have been some sort of flour... ick. So with my two tiny bags I made a batch of frosting - which clearly wasn't enough.

After getting the kids (and making a stop at Cold Stone Creamery for a "before dinner snack"), we went to the 5th and final grocery store - Food Magazine (which ironically enough has lots of labels with the "Great Value" aka Walmart symbol...). Searched and searched and found something called "sugar powder" - got a bag and sure enough, it was almost the same thing. Made some more icing, did a few taste tests, got a sugar headache, and was then ready for the coloring...

I needed to make about 6 colors and so I got out all my little Rubbermaid containers (that boy better remember to bring them home!) and then we got started with the food coloring... opened up the boxes - had to buy them all individually - and guess what? You guessed it - it's not the same! It's a powder... imagine my horror as Sydney figured this out with the RED ONE!!!! After cleaning that (and her) up, you would have thought I killed someone! Anyhoo, got all of the colors mixed and I tell ya - that powder works a lot better that the liquid drops. The colors were very vibrant and didn't require much.

All in all it was a great Mommy moment - I impressed the heck out my son by making purple and orange by mixing the colors together. And then the proud look on his face as he left this morning made it all the searching and struggling totally worth it - at that moment, in his mind - I rocked!

Of course, it just dawned on me that I forgot to give him lunch money... good feeling's gone... Well, even though it was short lived, I'm glad I made it worked - because as I'm now going to say every day, where there's a will (and a smiling child's face), there will be a way!