Lunch on the Hill, and Cakes All Around (Cakes 27-34)

Today the girls and I drove around Webster Groves, Maplewood, and The Hill. We found eight cakes, and lots of fellow cake-seekers. It's funny how often we will have to wait to take our cake pictures, because other folks are out and about doing the same thing.  Today we saw a grandmother with her grandchildren, college students, and twice we saw a mom with small kids.  Hunting for cakes is definitely a "thing" in St. Louis!

This is the Webster University cake. Webster University was founded in 1915.

This cake was also on the Webster campus. It's the cake for the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. I've seen shows here, but the girls haven't yet. 

We liked the textured top of this cake...lots of "Happy Birthday" confetti stuck in there!

Gotta blow out the candle! This cake was tricky to find. We had to park by The Rep and walk down a path to the building. Holly got a dollar for spotting it first! (We needed some incentive to look hard for this cake.)                          

Continuing with the "educational" theme, the next cake was for The College School. This school is celebrating it's 50th birthday this year, hence the 50 on their cake.

The girls decided that they were hungry, so we headed to The Hill for lunch. If you want the best Italian food in St. Louis, you gotta go to The Hill. Chloe said I had to be sure that wherever we went had a cake.

The kids' meals and the lunch specials were all $7.95. There was a LOT of food! We were stuffed when we left!  

Holly was delighted to see that they had a soda gun. She again voiced her strong desire to have one of these in her room. I tried to explain that it's impossible...but she doesn't really understand why.

I tried to be a little subtle about taking pictures...the decor in Rigazzi's is cool. On each window, there are figures of famous folks. The stained glass is really nice, too! It's not a big place, but definitely has it's charm! Rigazzi's opened in 1957, but the building has been around since 1901.

Holly ate her entire pepperoni pizza all by herself, and told me that she was sorry to say it's a lot better than the pizza we have at home.

The restaurant wasn't very crowded, and Holly couldn't resist going up to take a closer look at the soda gun before I told her to sit down. She couldn't believe that so many delicious sodas come out of that gun, and even water, too. Of course she talked to the bartender all about it, and got her to demonstrate!

Holly said, "That guy over there isn't real, Mom. I wish I could sit over there to have my lunch."

This is the official cake for The Hill, our Italian-American community in St. Louis. It's named The Hill because of it's proximity to the largest point in the city, the intersection of Arsenal Street and Sublette Avenue.

All the pretty poses can't last forever, it seems...Holly tried to push Chloe off of the cake, and Chloe was extremely angry with her about it. It was not pleasant. Why can't we just get along? Chloe was nervous about getting up on the cake, but she really wanted to. Holly was just messing around with her, and didn't push hard enough to make Chloe fall, just frighten her. Ugh!

By the way, there's a big debate around town as to whether or not folks should stay off of the cakes. There are equal numbers of people in both camps, and the official statement was basically that they didn't think about having "keep off of the cake" signs until it was too late. My thoughts are that (1) we're careful (2) the girls don't weigh much (3) if there's something breakable or extra that's attached to the cake, or if we're wearing shoes that are dirty or could damage the cake, we stay off of it. 

The next cake was at a place that I'd never heard of: Schlafly Bottleworks. OK, I know that Schlafly is a Beer company, and I think I've even had that beer a few times. But I didn't know it was practically all right here in my backyard. These cakes today were all pretty close to home. I'm thinking I should bring Tom back here so that we can take the tour, and sample the samples! The restaurant looks nice, too! I wonder how the girls would feel about another Friday brewery tour? (I'm sure they'd be less than thrilled.) Note: no open toed shoes on the tour. 

The cake is like a brewery. Cool design, I think!

Next, was Kenrick-Glennon Seminary. I had a friend once who was going here until he decided not to become a priest. We ran into other cake questers here, and they wished us luck finding them all. I have no idea how many we'll find, but believe me, 250 is starting to seem like a really BIG number. I have a whole new appreciation for it. In fact, 100 is starting to seem like a much bigger number than it ever has before!

The next cake is the last cake of the day, at the Shrewsbury MetroLink Station. Can you see the cake in this picture?

Dandelion break:

The girls saw the glass elevator behind us, and they begged to ride on it. Sure? Why not? So we went up and down, and I promised Holly that some other time we would ride the train. I would have been up for riding the MetroLink to some more cake spots, but we'd seen enough cakes for one day. Chloe's always ready to go back home. She's our little homebody. When she didn't want to go look for cakes today, I asked her if she wanted a book about us visiting all of the cakes. "OH YES!" she said. I replied, "Well, Chloe, how am I supposed to make the book about us visiting the cakes, if you don't want to go visit the cakes?" I think that did it. She was ready to go after that! Now if I can just get her to value the experience more than the book!

Holly and I got snowcones on the way home. YUM!