Sweet...13?

So, I have to admit to an embarrassing truth. Nearly all of my official orders come from one woman. She works with Sean and has a fairly large family, so she usually dials me up for birthdays or other important gigs. I'm grateful for her business, but part of me wishes that I could expand more easily. Wait, what? You're telling me I have to do things like advertise and market and stuff? Oh. Okay. Never mind, for now. 

Anyway, this uber-loyal customer contacted me for her daughter's 13th birthday. As we stood in the parking lot near our cars when I delivered her son's New York Giants helmet cake, she told me that she thought she should make sort of a big deal of this birthday, because it was her 13th. When I commented that I didn't have a big deal made of my 13th birthday--or even my 16th--she agreed with me. But she still wanted to go all-out. Who was I to deny her?

She said that she wanted a stacked cake with zebra print and a funky neon green bow on top, and left the rest of it up to me. I'd never done a fondant bow before, but the online how-tos seemed pretty easy. I got the whole cake done fairly easily, using sugar sheet zebra print to save time (and thus money) for the zebra motif. And the bow I made out of marshmallow fondant. About three of my bow loops cracked and died a premature death before I could get them on the cake. I got the whole thing done and stood back to take pictures, zooming in from different angles. When I looked at the pictures to see how they turned out, the bow was wonky and...stupid. 

Something about pictures makes the subject more objective. Like, looking at it on the little digital screen allowed me to see flaws that I couldn't necessarily see when I was up-close and personal. I turned to my husband across the room.

"This bow sucks, doesn't it?" I asked, already irritated and oozing be careful what you say vibes. 

"What do you mean?" he responded. "It depends on what you're going for."

I stood there, simultaneously gaping at him, tamping down irrational anger, and shooting him a venom-laced look of death.

"What I'm going for?" I hissed in a (reasonably) restrained voice. "What do you mean, what I'm going for?" 

He looked at me, suddenly aware that he was on thin ice. 

"Well, uh, I mean, if you're going for the super-deluxe, luxurious, 5-layer bow, then it's not. But if you're just going for a funky bow, it is." His eyes were wide as he looked back at me, waiting to see if he needed to duck and cover or if he could stand his ground.

I continued to glare at him, and then realized how foolish and how stereotypically hormonally female I was being. I willed myself to GET A GRIP and decompress.

"Could you see how deep you were shoveling that hole of yours the more that you kept talking?" I asked him with a (hopefully) self-deprecating smile.

"Yeah" he said tentatively, obviously still unsure if he was still skating on thin ice. "That's why I decided that I had just better shut up."

I let him escape in relief as I tweaked the bow a bit by pushing some parts in, pulling some parts out, and yada yada yada. It turned out fine. After all, I wasn't going after a "super deluxe, luxurious, 5-layer bow." All I needed was "funky." Mission accomplished.