Cake, Cake and More Cake!

I’m so excited about the month of August because my newest Bella spin-off book, The Icing on the Cake, releases from Revell! The official release date is August 15th but my author copies have already arrived. If you would like one, let me know. My VIP readers get my books at a low/set cost of $11, which includes shipping.

I’m officially declaring August as my “cakewalk” month. I’m going to walk you through the photos/stories of cakes I’ve baked/decorated. Why? To get you in the mood to read The Icing on the Cake, of course! To make things even more difficult on my end, I happen to be on the Advocare 24-day challenge for the first 24 days of August. Oh. Help. Dieting and cake at the same time? Let us pray!

Okay, I’m going to dive in with a photo and story that I think you will enjoy. Because my book is wedding-themed, I’m going to start with a wedding cake story, one near and dear to my heart.

In 2004, two of my daughters (Randi and Courtney Rae) got married within four months of each other. (Can you imagine?) The wedding costs were staggering, but the most over-inflated cost of all? The cake for wedding #1. Nearly $600 traveled out of my pocketbook for the wedding cake and groom’s cake. Imagine my horror when about 2/3 of the cake didn’t get eaten. We took it home and tried to digest it over the next several days but ended up tossing about $250 worth of cake in the trash. Talk about a waste!

A few weeks later, we started making serious plans for the next wedding. I asked daughter #2 if I could try my hand at making the cake for her wedding. I had to buy the pans and teach myself how to stack/layer/decorate, but was willing to give it a try. I baked the four laters of cake and took them to the church early morning on the day of the wedding. Two precious friends met me there and (literally) helped me do the laborious part. They stacked and trimmed out the cake and it really was a thing of beauty.

Sometimes the things we fret the most over turn out to be the very things that bring us joy in the end. Such is the case in my book The Icing on the Cake. Scarlet, the story’s heroine, faces all sorts of challenges as she opens her new bakery on Galveston Island. What looks impossible (keeping her aunt/mentor happy) turns out to be pure delight when all is said and done. Oh, and the icing on the cake? She meets and falls in love with a handsome Italian fella from a family you’ve already grown to love. He joins her for a cake competition on The Food Network. What fun!

Putting together a cake is treacherous work. So is starting a new business. But anything worth pouring your heart into will have a payoff in the end. That’s kind of how I felt about writing this book. The cake baker/decorator in me wanted it to be perfect, of course! In the end, I’m confident I’ve served up a tasty slice of yummy goodness to my readers.

So, dive in! Get your copy of The Icing on the Cake today. Email me at booksbyjanice (at) aol.com if you want to be added to my VIP list or visit amazon to pre-order your copy today. Join me again tomorrow for another fun cake story! Let’s just hope the calories from the pictures don’t pack on the pounds!