Easter Cake

Hi all, hope everyone had a great Easter!

My daughter still hasn't done her easter egg hunt and I'm hoping she forgets because, thanks to all the easter baskets she received, she has candy coming out of her ear holes! Mom might just have to help her out a bit I think ;) You do what ya gotta do!

We spent Easter with Stephen's family and had a nice, while interesting to say the least, day. But I won't bore you with all the details!

I am going through a real cake phase right now. Just making, not eating ... fortunately! And I've been coming across some really awesome blogs and web sites that have inspired me so much.  This year, I decided to make an Easter bunny cake and, for the first time, worked with gum paste. It was so much fun! 

It was a white chocolate pound cake made from a doctored mix with white chocolate frosting and filling with raspberry filling also. The little bunnies and flowers were made from the gum paste. My father - in - law ate some and said what he usually says, 'did YOU make this? You sure you didn't BUY it?' So funny.

The first cake I made I used my new ultimate cake leveler with which turned out to be not so ultimate but flimsy and wonky and ruined the cake. I was mad but then decided to use the cake to make cake pops before making another. See below!

Red ones.

White and blue ones

(hey! New idea for July 4th!)

A weird pale green and white ones.

And colorful ones made by Willow! She got to do these all by herself while I got busy dipping and decorating the others.

Muffin Tin Monday

This is Willow's first Muffin Tin Monday in a while. I made it a sort of Spring theme. Actually she made it herself, except for the bunny features on the egg. It took a total of five minutes, if that.

Top left to right: carrots, ranch dip, cucumber butterflies.

Bottom left to right: bunny egg, butterfly-shaped turkey sandwich, bunny marshmallows.

Of course she left the carrots, along with some of the cucumber.

Since my last posting, I have turned 31 27. I'm getting up there! I had such a lovely birthday. On Saturday my husband was home rather than working which was like a present in itself to me! As was watching my daughter get to spend a lot of fun time with him. Including making a cake for me! I thought this was really special because no one has ever made me a cake before. I took some pics while they were doing it (and did my best not to interfere!) ...

Here she is adding the ingredients. Check out this shot of the egg ... cool!

Next goes milk.

Martha Stewart in the making

After daddy threw a glob of frosting at her!

The cake was a golden butter cake by Pillsbury with our added sprinkles. It was actually quite possibly the best boxed cake mix I've had!

A pic of my proud little princess with the cake. Unfortunately this was the best shot I got of it. It had a sprinkle-filled butterfly shape on top and decorated with lots of little white pearl sprinkles and hearts around the outside. The inside was very pretty and colorful.

Happy Birthday Hubby Cake!

It was my husband's birthday last Tuesday and yesterday we celebrated it at my MIL's of course. I can honestly say I have never heard Stephen milk his birthday quite as much as he did this year lol. Everything ended in, ''cause it is my birthday' and this lasted all week of course. By the time we actually celebrated his birthday on Friday, it had gotten very old. Hence the reason I made him such a sloppy cake.

Juuuust kiddin'.

It really wasn't meant to be sloppy, I adore my hubby. I don't know if you can tell in the pic but the buttercream I made was a little too soft so the piping lacked definition and drooped a little. Even so, it was my best attempt at writing on a cake. I've gone from writing like a three year old to a five year old, go me! I also cheated a bit and used store-bought ready-made cakes which I filled with white chocolate pudding. The cake lady at the store (or Janet, as I should probably call her) is always so nice and helpful. She puts up with all my questions and goes out of her way to teach me tricks of the trade. She even gave me the cake layers free!

And for anyone else who enjoys a spot of cake decorating; I found this wonderfully informative site called My Cake School which I signed up to and have learned tons from. This is one talented lady!

Willow's Lunch

My little girl started a 'trial day' at her new school last Wednesday. Or what we are considering for a new school anyway. It's a choice between two very good ones. She absolutely loved it, as I knew she would, and she asked immediately if she could go back the next day. But unfortunately she has to wait until August. 

Not much bento-making around here lately. Here's what she had the other day. Not sure which day exactly. Just one I happened to snap a pic of.

 A bologna sandwich thin with some dried apples and melon/strawberries. She ate it all :)

Today I am concentrating on cleaning my kitchen. Which entails the counters, floors, cupboards, walls, drawers ... everything. Yes, I made another cake lol. It was a very simply frosted (vanilla) cake (with banana cream filling) so I have no excuse really except that I only had an hour to decorate. It was for my lovely, but sometimes trying to say the least, brother-in-law and I had to make a mad dash out of the door with the kids after it was done to take it to his (un)party.

"I'm in charge" is Mike's favorite thing to say. Or yell!, whatever.

Willow's Lunch

Happy Monday people!

I completely forgot today was Monday and instead of making Willow her lunch in a muffin tin, she had it in a lunch box as usual. She had a ham and mayo sandwich which I cut out with a circle sandwich cutter and made a little girl out of sandwich meat and cheese to go on top. Above that are some pretzels, julienned carrots and grapes. She ate everything but the carrots. Not bad considering she's sick right now.

Things have been busy around here with church conferences, going out to dinner with family a couple times, shopping and making Ryder a cake for his birthday party. I've not been home much to clean up and then when you add a cake to the mix, can we say disaster zone? hehe. As it always is after I make one.

I decided to go with this cute Betty Crocker dino cake which I made with a butter pecan cake for the body and vanilla for the head and tail. Frosted with lime green butter cream and easily decorated with assorted chocolates of different sizes. It was a lot of fun.

And here's my little newly one year old tucking into it. Mmmm.

2 minutes later: As you can see, he liked it so much he didn't stop at the cake! lol

Willow's Lunch

Finally January is over. What a long and busy month! Willow had her princess party and loved it! Here are a few pics ....


We had the party in a hotel banquet room due to a last minute change of plans (due to the room we'd originally chosen being booked and us finding out while decorating it a few hours before!). My friend Kelly did the decorating and she made this throne for Princess Willow although she didn't sit in it much, she was too busy running around all over the place.


All the food and drinks had a cute name which my mother in law made labels for such as Stepmother's Fruit Tea.


Princess Punch


Her Majesty's Cream Cheese and Blueberry Crackers


Pink Princess Popcorn


and Cinderella's Pumpkin Bread. There were also, Knights in Armor (pigs in a blanket), Princess Sceptors (marshmallows on a lollypop stick dipped in chocolate with sprinkles and a pink M&M on the top. An idea I found on another blog somewhere), Princess pops (brownies on sticks), Golden Goose Eggs (devilled eggs), Ariel's Shell Delight (chicken salad-stuffed phyllo shells), King Triton's kielbasa, Medieval meatballs etc. Wish I'd gotten a picture of it all but I was concentrating on getting pics of the kids having fun.


So this is the cake I finally went with after changing my mind a zillion times. An easy sheet cake with a 6" round cake on top. Decorated with some crushed Graham crackers for sand, chocolate shells and starfish which I made using molds, little fondant characters, flowers and coral, The Little Mermaid figurines and an Ariel candle. Willow loved it. I actually did all the decorating during one of her naps but I'd made everything fondant a couple days ahead of time. For the cake board, I covered it in foil that I'd scrunched and crinkled and then covered that in blue cellophane to look like water.


The sheet cake was just a boxed funfetti mix. These are the colorful cake trimmings which I had to resist nibbling on.The round cake on top was a yellow cake.


We hired a Cinderella princess for the kids and she was wonderful. She really made the party.


She did face-painting, singing, story-telling, crowning of the birthday girl, party bags, pictures and lots of fun games and prizes. Would definitely recommend Once Upon a Time Parties if you're anywhere near RI.

A thrilled Willow with Cinderella. 

The kids scrambling for the pinata loot.


Willow opening her presents. This went on forever.



My baby boy was exhausted. He slept the whole time on my other friend Kelli.

So I haven't had much time or desire to do bento lunches this month. At least not cute ones. But hopefully I'll get back on the ball this February.

I do have a couple of pictures. This was a quick lunch I made for Willow the other day. Peanut butter sandwiches I made using cutters with stamps, some bunny and chickie crackers, carrots and cucumber with ranch dip.

And this I made yesterday in the VERY cute Din Din Smart Stainless Bus Platter that was very kindly sent to me from MySweetMuffin.com. I had really wanted one for a while now so I was excited to receive it! Oh and so was Willow of course lol.

Egg salad, peas, goldfish crackers, vanilla yogurt with a few blueberries and some oranges slices.

Don't you just love this tin? How fun. It has five little compartments so not only does the food not touch each other (and we all know about that right?) but you can use it to teach about the food groups. It's non-toxic and BPA, Phthalate, PVC and Lead Free. So need to worry about that and best of all IMO; dishwasher safe! 
It's nice and small and dinky but, as you can see, holds more than enough food. You can get these on the mysweetmuffin.com site along with so many other cute things they have. Check out the bento boxes!


I hope they make one for grown ups too!

Shower Cake

It's been a crazy busy weekend for me. Really shows in my house too! Despite our best efforts (mine and my husband's that is)  it just does not seem to want to get clean. The main reason being I baked a cake for a friend's shower at church. Whenever I bake a cake my kitchen always looks like it exploded both during and after. But if I really want the cake to be perfect it looks even worse LOL. Add to that restarting the thing three times and you have an absolute disaster in both kitchen AND cake.

Sigh.

I just could not get it to look smooth, or even or at all how I wanted it. I lost count of how many batches of frosting I made! At first the cake was white, then it was green and then I changed it to pink argh. The sweet ladies at my church gave me lots of compliments on it but I just saw a big mess.

Here are a few pics, judge for yourself!

No, I didn't let my four year old write on it :( I really am that awful at the writing part and try to avoid it at all costs! The theme was ladybugs. I couldn't get a red color frosting from Wilton's food color so I ended up squeezing the red frosting out of the tube kind. Same with the black. Good thinking on my part!

I was, however, very pleased with my little lady bug :D Isn't she cute?


Here is the cake table at the shower along with some lady bug table confetti.


These are some cake pops I made for the favors. They were a big hit. I made a chocolate cake in a 9x13 pan, let it cool and then mixed it with a tub of frosting until the cake was all broken up and combined. Then I rolled them into little balls and refrigerated for a few hours before inserting a lollypop stick and coating in some red-colored white chocolate and letting set standing in a Styrofoam bar. If I had had a bit more time I would have liked to have decorated them with some black spots or something but I settled for a cute ladybug cup that I found at IParty.


Here are some of the decorations Bonnie, my pastor's wife, did. She made the paper ladybugs which looked great. The ladybug balloons were from Amazon.


Adorable ladybug picks in the food. Also from Amazon.


The games!


My lovely friend Tiffany doing one of the games. She had to try to multi-task while being timed and kept talking to the baby or pretending she was on the phone, I was cracking up!


At least it tasted OK. Each time I made a frosting I put a different extract in for flavor (by mistake of course) and one of the ladies said, mmm what frosting did you use? lol Seeecret.


Alynn, the shower Mommy opening her gifts. She's expecting a girl :) Girls are great for first time Mom's I think, cause you're so excited about dressing up and making the baby cute. Boys make wonderful second babies cause then you get all the cuddles! Plus you're nerves aren't so high the second time round which is a good thing with boys!

It was so much fun. I barely had time to get home and tidy before we left for a birthday party. These next two weeks I'm going to be trying to get Willow's upcoming birthday party plans finalized. Thank you all so much for the cake ideas! I think I'm going to attempt an under the sea type castle cake and place some Ariel figurines on top. This time I will ask Grandma to watch the kids at her house while I make it!

Carrot Cake Flop

The other day, we celebrated my Mother-in-law's birthday. She and the rest of the family came over for dinner and to open presents. Now because my brother-in-law's are brutally honest (and I do mean brutally), I have to make SURE I cook something that I know they like whenever they come over. And even then it has to be perfectly cooked, perfectly seasoned, with the right brands of everything (i.e. the way my Mother in law would make it!) Think Everybody Loves Raymond. That's my life!

So I made barbecue brisket for dinner. Which is just beef brisket put into the slow cooker with about a cup of water and a little barbecue sauce. When it's done, I take it out, drain the water and add it back smothered in barbecue sauce. Once heated, I shred it and it's soo moist and tasty. I also made rice and for sides; glazed carrots, corn and biscuits (which turned out to be freezer-burned, oops!).

All is going well. Even Marie (that's my MIL) was thrilled with her presents. This is truly a first and we were all shocked. Usually you're lucky if it's not thrown back at you in disgust ... no kiddin'!

Here's the proof that she was happy and I might just frame it!

Although we did make one mistake! Fortunately it was just because she already had it.

Speaking of mistakes though, I made a carrot cake for her birthday. After getting the recipe from a fantastic baker friend and having (somewhat) decent baking skills I thought I couldn't go wrong. I did everything according to what she had written down ... word for word .... very carefully! Like I said, these aren't forgiving people lol.



I didn't leave a lot of time for the decorating so I wasn't going for beautiful. Just decent. I slapped some chopped walnuts on around the edges but admit I could have done a tidier job!


Still, it's a good thing I didn't bother because this was the reaction!

So I don't know what went wrong. Things like this always seem to happen to me whenever I borrow recipes from other people. For example, I have tried to make Marie's roast like ten times! Each time it's dry and burned and hers is juicy and falling apart. Wish I could say it was my oven but I've tried it in two!

 Oh well, you win some, you lose some. At least my Mother in Law had a nice time lol :)