One Week Until Cake!

I can't believe that our 100th Birthday Party is only a week away.  This summer has gone by outrageously quickly.  I've been so busy with my internship in New York, with moving back and forth to New Jersey, and now with getting ready for school to start again tomorrow that I haven't had a chance to visit the Mac-A-Cheek during it's centennial season yet.  I'm so looking forward to driving over next weekend, and best of all I'm bringing several friends with me who have never seen the Castles before.  It will be a wonderful chance for me to reconnect with my family, and at the same time I'll have the pleasure of introducing the museum to new people who can view the work we've been doing with fresh eyes and hopefully provide some great feedback.

Newly designed exhibit panel
about me and my role at Piatt Castles

By far the strangest thing for me about the Castle (and this has been true for pretty much my entire life) is the exhibit panel about me.  Somehow the panel that discusses the lives and work of my grandparents seems perfectly reasonable, but the panel that discusses who I am and what I do has always seemed so funny.  It's just so weird to see pictures of myself on display.  This week it got even weirder.  As I've taken over more and more of the graphic design work at the Castles I've started doing a lot of the exhibit layouts.  The tricky thing about exhibits about live people (like myself) is that they require constant updates.  We realized that the exhibit about me was woefully out of date, so I found myself designing an exhibit panel about myself.  I tried to remove myself from it a little and work as though it were a panel about any other Piatt, and I think it turned out pretty well.  I will say that the best part about creating this panel was that fact checking was a breeze!  The new panel has gone to the printer and will be on display in Mac-A-Cheek in time for our party next weekend.  I've included a little preview of it here.

I hope you can make it out to Mac-A-Cheek to celebrate with us next Sunday afternoon (details here).  I look forward to seeing you all in real life.  If you can't make it, I'll have a blog post up about it as soon as I can.  In the mean time, have a great week!

Cake!

We've spent the last couple of days hammering out the details for our Centennial Celebration Birthday Party on September 2.  My absolute favorite part of what we have planned is a birthday cake contest open to amateur bakers of all ages.  If I were 8, and not a Piatt, I would go crazy for this.  As a kid I loved contests.  If I had grown up in an area with county fairs I surely would have devoted lots of time to fair competitions.

Ceiling Fresco, Drawing Room, Mac-A-Cheek
This has nothing to do with cake, but I thought it might inspire
you as you decorate your cake contest entry.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand, I hope you'll be as excited about this birthday cake competition as I am.  If you'd like to enter, or know someone who makes a mean b'day cake, you can get more information here.  If you can't tell a pastry bag from a profiterole, not to worry!  We'll also be giving away professionally baked cake, cupcakes, and ice cream donated by local business as well as recipe cards featuring a cake recipe (or "receipt" as it was called then) that my great grandmother (also named Kate) and her sister-in-law Bertie wrote in a book they called their Chicken Diary (it discussed the tails and successes of raising chickens as well as the various ways in which the chickens' eggs were used).

Whether you come for the cake, the competition or the celebration - I look forward to seeing you in September!