Animal Cookies!

These cookies were for another adorable little boy's 2 year old birthday party! I wish I had a picture of him enjoying the cookies! His mom is a baking friend of mine so we collaborated and made these together! They were all her son's favorite animals. I believe his favorite cookie of them all was the shark! I'm pretty sure my favorite was either the alligator or the giraffe. What's your favorite?

FIESTA TIME!

These next cookies were created to celebrate a sweet little boys 1st birthday! The mom was doing a fiesta themed party and fell in love with these beautiful cookies here. I figured I shouldn't mess with such great ideas so I duplicated these fun, colorful cookies. I really wish I had thought to take pictures of the whole party to go along with my cookie pictures because the mom did a great job putting it all together!

Birthday Cupcakes!

I've mentioned before that I have a baking friend, L,  who I have collaborated with on a number of baking projects in the past. Well, her birthday was last month and her husband asked me to make cupcakes for her! How fun, right? I pretty much had free reign as long as I stayed away from anything super girly, like pink (which, I totally already knew to do cause, we're friends, ya know? ). Her favorite color is green, so I wanted to use that and I thought this would be a fun opportunity to try the whole 2 icing colors together thing. Its actually super easy and it was fun to see how the colors came out of the icing bag since I wasn't exactly sure how it would end up looking. I also made the letters of her name out of chocolate and put them in the tops of the cupcakes.

 

 

One Year Later...

About a year ago I entered into the world of making yummy things look pretty. I got the idea in my head that I wanted to make a layered, decorated cake. Looking at it now, its a pretty sad little cake with only the basic of decorating. However, for my first try, I was pretty proud of what I accomplished. Even better than the cake though, is the path that cake set me on. I began to explore the world of the Michael's baking aisle and listened as the icing tips, bags, and gel food colors called out to me.

At this point, I make cakes occasionally, but cookies have become my primary decorating method. The cake learning curve is much steeper than the cookie learning curve. I bring all this up because once again, I recently had another birthday. And once again, I chose to make my own cake. A year later, I've learned a lot, I've grown, yet I still found myself driven slightly crazy in making this cake! I loved how it turned out, but i forget sometimes how many ways a cake can go wrong. That's all I'm going to say about that.

This cake is a modified version of a cake picture I saw several months ago. What excited me most about this cake was the big flower on top. I really wanted to see if I could make. Thankfully, the creator of it had some awesome youtube tutorials that were really easy to follow. Once I switched from gumpaste to fondant, making that flower was practically the easiest part of the cake!

12th Birthday Cookies!

My oven broke about 3ish weeks ago. It literally just quit working one day, no clue why. Of course, the fact that it was probably 20 years old didn't help (no idea how old...but it looks pretty ancient). Really, it was a blessing. It's old. It didn't bake evenly. It didn't tell me when it was preheated (I got an oven thermometer so I could at least tell from that). We've wanted to replace it since we got married. It's just hard to convince ourselves that it was worth spending that kind of money when it DID still work. So, it breaking was unfortunate, especially cause the bread I tried making when it went kaput on me never got made :( However It gave us the reason to actually get the new one we've been talking about getting for a year and a half now. We looked online, read reviews, talked to my mom, and finally picked one. Of course, we picked one that they didn't have in the store, so I've been waiting patiently (sometimes not so patient) for a new one to arrive. Well guess what???? It comes TOMORROW!!! YAY! I'm so excited. I'm sure I'll post a picture at some point.

I'm telling you this, because, well, I write about baking and an oven is a pretty important thing for a baker. AND, cause it went kaput just a couple days before I had to bake some cookies for a friend's daughter's 12th birthday! uh oh...what to do? Thankfully, it wasn't an issue at all cause I have a friend who lives like 2 min. away and I was able to go and use her oven. So I made my dough, rolled out my cookies, put them on cookie sheets and drove them over to her house. Then, I baked them and drove back. fun stuff. It totally worked out and the cookies were a ton of fun to do.

I was given only a few instructions. The birthday girl's favorite color was blue and she wanted some butterflies and flowers, specifically roses. I had gotten some fun birthday type cutters that I wanted to use, so I chose variety to add in along with the butterflies and roses.

Birthday Pinwheel Cake!

I married into an awesome family. However, this awesome family has 3 June birthdays, all within about 5 days of each other (the birthdays are my MIL's, her sons,and my Sister in law who married into the family, in case you were wondering how they managed all those close birthdays). Really, who does that? It's like Christmas in June- people to buy for, lists to get, etc. Actually, it's kind of fun celebrating thing the all birthdays all at once. Thankfully, they are all willing to share, so we just do one birthday bash for all 3.

I knew I wanted to make a cake, but what to make for 3 people??? I had elaborate grand visions in my head, but thankfully reality intervened before I committed to anything in my mind. SO....I just picked a fun, summery cake that I'd been wanting to make for a while. Pinwheels and polkadots!

I got the idea for this cake from this blog here.

Happy June Birthdays!

Mario Brothers Cake!

My Brother-in-law's birthday was a few weeks ago and I offered to make him a cake. After coming up with a few ideas, I decided to go with a Mario Brothers cake. I thought it would be a fun throwback to childhood.

The outside is buttercream frosting with fondant decorations. The castle walls are made out of fondant and "glued" together with candy melts. I also attached sticks to the inside of each wall so I could stick it into the cake and have it stand upright (worked great, except a bunch of the icing came off with the castle when I pulled it out to cut the cake.

You'll notice that Mario is just a little print-out :( This saddened me, but there was no other option (other than not having Mario at all on the cake and that just didn't seem right!). I tried to have an actual Mario. Really, I did. My first thought (though she had/has no idea) was to see if my friend who is good at fondant figures could do one for me. However, she and her family got sick that week and so I didn't get to spend the time with her I normally would. Then, I figured, well I can do this! So I got started....and about halfway through I could tell it wasn't going well. He just wasn't looking right and I hadn't gotten anywhere near doing his face (which I knew would be the hardest part). I had already checked a nearby cake store for a plastic Mario figurine and they didn't have any. So there you go-that's how I ended up with a Mario print-out.

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!)

Helicopter Cake!

My Brother in Law's birthday was in the beginning of December and since he is really into RC helicopters, I thought it would be fun to surprise him with a helicopter cake (admission-the surprise factor may have had to do with uncertainty of how it would turn out in addition to a surprise just being fun).

I used my trusty pinterest and google search skills to find inspiration and then set about creating my own version of things I saw! I was really pleased overall with how it turned out.  I did find myself  slightly dismayed at how small a 9 x 13 cake is-haha. Its certainly big enough and feeds enough, but after looking at a bunch of professional cakes and watching too many episodes of cake boss, I had somewhat inaccurate estimations of the amount of cake I had to work with ;) oh well, I made it work anyways!

For those curious, I used butter cream frosting for the edges of the street, grass, and the stream. I used fondant (and cookie cutters) to create the helicopter pad and the rocks.
The bridge was made from graham crackers and fondant and was the only part I would do differently if I were to make this cake again. I was never really happy with how the bridge turned out but i didn't have the time or extra icing to re-do it.
The helicopter was a toy helicopter we had around the house.

Here are the pics-