A Bridal Shower!

A While back, I was invited to a friend's bridal shower. I asked if I could help make anything (baking-wise that is), and the host said I could bring some cookie favors! I was excited to get the little Wilton's wedding pack and try my hand at some bridal cookies. The cake was fun to work with, but I think the little dress may have been my favorite.
The bride's colors are Tiffany blue and a bright poppy red. I did my best to recreate the colors. Not having a reference for red, mine ended up darker than what she's going for and the blue needed to be a tad lighter. Still, I think they were close enough ;) If you've worked with royal icing before, you know that it tends to darken in the 24 hrs. after you've made it (it does this whether its already on the cookie or not). I still haven't quite figured out how much it darkens and how to account for that. So honestly, I think I "probably" had a pretty good Tiffany blue initially and then it darkened from there. I'll never know!

Regardless, I absolutely love these colors together. I think it's such a pretty combination. Had I gotten married in spring or summer, I likely would have considered these colors myself.

And finally, the cookies themselves...

I attached little toppers to all the cookie bags

Birthday cake pops!

Remember the little girl's birthday cookies I did? (as in the previous post) Well her mom (who also loves to bake) wanted to cake pops instead of cake for her daughter's birthday this year. Since we liked to hang out and bake together, she asked me to join her in  making cake pops for the party.

We did chocolate cake with pick and purple for the outside. I learned a lesson with these. For the purple, we started with pink candy melts and tried coloring from there. I figured the fact that we had purple, red, and blue food coloring we could come up with a good color. Honestly, we never really loved the purple we came up with. In the future, I will either start with purple or white candy melts and color from there.

Remember the adorable tags this mom did for the cookies? Well, she made an adorable stand for the cake pops also. I'm learning from her to think outside the box on the display aspect. (I can do the baking...my brain has to be trained to think crafty presentation!)

Fun girly butterflies and flowers

A friend of mine recently asked me if I would make some cookies for the favors at her daughter's fifth birthday party. I was excited to help a friend out and a little girl's birthday sounded like a fun thing to create for. There was no real theme for the birthday other than cute and girly. The birthday girl likes pink and purple, so those were my color choices.

I decided to do fun little butterflies and flowers. I used a darker and lighter shade of both pink and purple and sprinkled a little pearl dust (aka, edible glitter) on top at the end to make them shimmer a bit. I am not a photographer by any means (as anyone could tell) and the purples all ended up looking blue in the pictures. They were actually a fun, bright purple, but you'll just have to imagine it.

I also made a special birthday cake cookie for the birthday girl.

I put the cookies in little treat bags and the birthday girl's mom added adorable little tags and ribbon to them. Aren't those tags so cute? (I blocked out part was the birthday girl's name. Here mom did not have strange purple blocks on the tags!)

Valentine's Cake

And now begins posting catch-up....

I made a cake  for V-day, it was a fun 3-layer, 6 in. cake. It was my first time do 6 in. rounds and my first time doing 3 layers. I think because of inexperience, it ended up being a little lopsided and the top layer was a bit smaller than the others. Certainly not perfect, but I learned for the future! I did the hearts using a technique called quilling. They were made out of fondant, but the actual cake was covered in buttercream.

Easter Cookies!

I told myself that even though I am way behind on some pictures and posts, I'm going to put my Easter cookies up within a decent time frame. So here they are, only a week after the event. yay! I think it helps that I ended up with only a few pictures since they were all taken at the last minute (I almost forgot entirely-oops).

I'll be honest, I had grander visions in my head when I started these. However, I got into a few arguments with these cookies cause they just didn't want to follow directions (or my hands weren't doing what my brain said to do, I'd rather blame it on the cookies). I was happy in the end with how they turned out, they just weren't quite what I pictured.

I mentioned earlier that I took the pictures at the last minute...and truly, I did. We joined my SIL's family for Easter this year. Since, I completely forgot about pics, I ended up taking some once we were already there. However, because of that, I was able to snag one of my SIL's mom's pretty China plates as a backdrop! When I was taking pics, they were all just in a big tupperware and I forgot to take pics of ALL the cookies once they were transferred onto a nice platter-oh well!

This poor little duck never got his feet! I meant to add them and completely forgot!

I used Wilton's pearly spray (edible glittery spray for food) on these.
The picture doesn't do it justice at all-they looked pretty neat in person.

These were adorable tiny cookies I made. They were all just about 1 inch big and covered in sugar sprinkles! They were so fun!

Super Bowl Cupcakes...that never saw the light of day

Goodness...I am so behind on posting! I have pictures from multiple things that I have yet to put up! My plan today was to at least put up pics of some Easter cookies I made, but I forgot I took all the pics on my hubby's phone and haven't put them on my computer yet. So hopefully I will get those and soon!

In the mean time...I will finish a post I started a long time ago from a cupcake mishap back in January.

I had wanted to make something fun for the super bowl and settled on some cute football cupcakes-simple, fun, and yummy. What could go wrong? They were baked, decorated, done. See...here's the proof-

Of course, some of you may have been at the same super bowl party I was and you're thinking, "I don't remember any cupcakes."

Well, that would be because they never made it there. See, I have this neat cupcake/cake carrier that *seems* like a great idea. I used it to carry a 9x 13 cake once, it worked great. There's this little tray that you put in the carrier has raised edges for normal cupcakes on one side and mini cupcakes on the other side. In theory, a fantastic idea that should allow you to take your cupcakes wherever you need to go.

In reality, the edges that held each cupcake in place were were much too short to do any good. we didn't even get to turn the car on before one bad move sent all the cupcakes tipped over on there sides into each other. There was no saving them. Unfortunately (or fortunately), no pictures post disaster. And when I say they got messed up, I don't mean a couple were messed up and the rest were fine...I mean the frosting was messed up on just about every single one. Awesome, right? yeah...not so much.

They still tasted good, so I'm sure I could have brought them into the party, but I just couldn't do it.