Daniel's birthday.

Yesterday we celebrated Daniel's 26th birthday! I tried to make it special for him, I made some baked ziti for him and his whole family and also some cupcakes.  We had his parents, his brothers and their wives and our little niece.  It was a good time of just hanging out with the family-- I like moments like that. Here's the cupcakes I made for him-- I tried some new recipes.  We had peanut butter cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting.  I also piped some cute little chocolate decorations.

 The little chocolate decorations are the number 26 and hearts if you can't tell.  Last night a few people thought that they were butterflies, or upside down bows. Haha.

Leeland loved his peanut butter cupcake.... And made quite a mess with it!

Happy birthday Daniel! I truly hope that we made you feel special and I hope that you had a great time celebrating. We love you!

Christmas Festivities:

We were unable to go to Michigan this year for Christmas (much of Daniel's family lives there) because Daniel didn't get enough time off work.  He only got Saturday through Tuesday and since we typically drive, 2 days are spent traveling there and back. (About 13 hours in the car one way.) It was nice to celebrate and enjoy my family's typical traditions that they do here, but I really did miss getting away.  Looking at the calendar prior to Christmas weekend, I was feeling a little overwhelmed and like we had overextended ourselves.  It's so easy to get caught up in all the festivities, and subsequently not truly be able to worship and celebrate.  Here's what our weekend looked like.....

Friday December 23rd

 Praise God that my Brother-In-Law is home safely from Iraq!  We were so excited to have him back on this side of the pond, AND home to celebrate Christmas!  Friday night was spent at my in-laws celebrating his return.  While he was in Iraq, he missed his birthday and Thanksgiving so we had a Thanksgiving dinner re-do with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pie... And I baked him a birthday cake.  Of course we also had to celebrate Christmas in there, so Leeland and his little cousin got to open all of their Christmas presents.  My in-laws left the next morning for Michigan which is why the babies got to open their gifts a bit early.

Saturday, December 24th

Christmas Eve morning we had another couple over that is friends of ours for breakfast.  They of course brought Leeland a gift-- cute little track suit pictured below.  And they even got Daniel and I a little something which was unexpected and super sweet of them.  I made breakfast, I made this breakfast casserole and this french toast recipe.  Both of them SUPER easy, I prepped both ahead Friday night and baked them in the oven that morning. 

Saturday evening we went to church.  The Christmas Eve service was PACKED!  It was such a sweet service though, with what seemed like lots of extra singing which was totally fine by me-- the band at church is always wonderful and singing Christmas carols with a packed house is just magical.  After the service, we went to my Granny's house for some yummy food and for Leeland to yet again open some more Christmas presents.  

After my Granny's house we were headed home to play Santa, or just simply put the gifts that had been wrapped and hidden in our room for several weeks now under the tree.  

Sunday, December 25th-- CHRISTMAS!

Christmas morning we woke up and got Leeland up to open gifts.  We had a minor issue with my fancy camera and all of our Christmas morning photos had to be taken on my iPhone.  I was quite bummed!  We left the camera out in the car on accident the night before-- when Daniel walked the dog, he brought it in.  It was pretty chilly out that morning and when he brought it in the lens got all fogged up.  I wiped and wiped and it kept fogging, it took about an hour to "defrost" and of course Leeland was not waiting to open his presents. 

After we opened up our gifts and our stockings, it was time to head to my parents house.  Their tradition is a big Christmas morning breakfast-- bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, pancakes, eggs.... MMMM, I'm starting to drool just thinking about it. And of course there was more presents.


Once we were done there, we were free to celebrate as a family.  We came home and took naps with new PJ's on and then got up and had some dinner.  And cake.  Our new tradition this year is a "Happy birthday Jesus" cake-- an excellent way to teach the boys a bit more about the meaning of Christmas. 

And that my friends is our Christmas in a nut shell with some photos.  The past 2 days since Christmas have been all about family time (taking advantage of Daniel's time off work), cleaning, organizing and trying to figure out what to do with all these presents!  Our little man really racked up and got far more than he could ever need or want.... kind of makes me nervous about next year with 2.  Hope you and your families had a great Christmas!

Dallas Cowboys Cake

I made a Dallas Cowboys birthday cake this weekend for a surprise birthday party.  Sadly, the only picture I took of it was from my iphone. (My bad.)  Here it is though:

Wonder Pets Cake

Yesterday was my nephew's 1st birthday and here are a few photos of his Wonder Pets themed cake that I made, a sheet cake, and his own personal "smash cake."

I'd say that's the look of a satisfied customer!

50th birthday cake.

Last weekend the family got together to celebrate my Father-in-Law's 50th birthday.  I made the cake, and really struggled coming up with an idea.  If you ever google 50th birthday slogans, cakes, etc, a lot of jokes about death come up.  The themes are always black, and I even saw a few cakes that just had tombstones on them.  Not the idea, I was after.... If someone threw me a doomsday 50th birthday party, I would probably kick them in the shin.  It's a little rude.  Here's what me and Daniel came up with:

Methuselah is the oldest person in the Bible whose age is mentioned.  Did I mention that my FIL's a pastor?  Biblical joke.  Anyways, it was a hit! Check out those lovely layers of chocolate and white cake with LOADS of chocolate buttercream frosting!  And if I don't do a good enough job of talking it up here, here's a perfect advertisement....

A hit with the baby as well!

Red velvet & cream cheese.

Tonight we celebrated my niece's birthday! She will be 10 on Monday, which is hard to believe. For the past couple years she has mentioned that she has wanted a luau themed birthday party.  This year my Mom made it happen-- and thankfully the threat of Hurricane Irene didn't rain it out. There was a brief down pour, and then we were back outdoors.

Since I make the cakes in the family, I was naturally asked to make the birthday cake-- actually it's kind of expected. Kind of random but the request by my niece was a red velvet cake. I don't think my sister was even aware that she had ever had red velvet cake. She wanted me to attempt to make the cake in the shape of a "Hawaiian Flower", and red velvet typically comes with cream cheese frosting.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate working with cream cheese frosting??  It tastes absolutely delicious! I'm a huge fan of anything with cream cheese in it, but it is a literal pain in my side for decorating. It just doesn't get the the right consistency necessary for decorating. I've tried a few different recipes and they have all turned out kind of goopy and runny which isn't conducive for a pretty cake unfortunately. So I'm not happy with the look, but here's the birthday girl and her cake-- I will say that it tasted great, and I came home with an empty cake pan. Daniel says, "you can't sacrifice taste for looks, who cares what it looks like?" I'll go with that on this one, although I am a little disappointed.

And can't resist a post without Leeland!!?

Lightning McQueen

One of my sister's friends ordered a cake from me this week for her son's 3rd birthday party. He was having a "Cars" party and specifically requested "Lightning McQueen" and it was also said that the cake had to have some blue and green on it.  So this is what I came up with:

Cupcakes & Father's Day.

Happy Father's day to all of those wonderful Dad's out there! This year we celebrated Daniel's 2nd Father's day! What a joyous occasion it is! My hope is that he always feels appreciated, loved and respected by Leeland and I, but it is nice to set aside at least 1 day and make him feel EXTRA appreciated, loved and respected. Daniel is for sure the love of my life and since we have gotten married, times have been pretty tough. An adjustment to married life, an adjustment to a baby a year later, and with the recession finances have been ultra tight. But Daniel is such an amazing man! When I'm down, he's up and he's one the most hard-working, caring, and dedicated men I have ever met! He will do anything to support his family and I'm so thankful that he had today off work to get some true R & R for his Father's Day.  I know that God made he for me, and me for him. We truly are the perfect match that God worked out and put together in His perfect timing. So happy Father's Day honey! I look forward to many, many more!

It seems I had lots of baking this weekend. You may remember my post from yesterday, making my little cousin's Hello Kitty Birthday Cake. Today I was hard at work on some cupcakes! Cupcakes for Father's Day to take to my parent's house when we celebrate, and some cupcakes to take to work. Here are the Father's Day cakes for my dad, family.

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate butter cream!

My attempt at adding sprinkles, but they rolled right off. Darn! I thought sprinkles would make them extra manly.

And some more cupcakes!.... One of the beauties of working in a small office, (there are 6 of us, 2 full-time and 4 part-time) is that there is no harm in setting aside an hour 6 times a year to have food, fellowship and celebrate each person's birthday! So naturally when we were all discussing what we were going to bring to the birthday celebration, sweets was my category!

Cute, simple, and sweet flowers! Same chocolate cupcakes and this is just colored butter cream frosting.

Hope everyone else had a lovely weekend! The downside to all these sweets I worked on this weekend is that I'm pretty sure I gained at least 5 pounds. Back to running tomorrow for sure!

Hello Kitty

Today is my little cousin's birthday! It's actually my cousin's daughter-- so that makes her my cousin too, right!? haha. I'm not very good at the whole family connections and relations thing. I'm terrible at Christmas and family reunions-- I usually don't even know half the people there. Terrible, right? 

Regardless of the family connection, I was asked to make her birthday cake. Her 8th birthday party them is Hello Kitty!

Happy 8th  Birthday Madison! Hope you enjoy your chocolate cake tomorrow!!

Care package + Recipes

  Shipped out a care package to my brother-in-law today. He's deployed overseas. He's been there for about 3 weeks now-- and though it's still a little soon to send surprise packages, because of his travels there he may not be able to receive mail in another month or so. :0/

  My brother-in-law Nate is the one person that I can count on to absolutely love everything that I bake-- before he was deployed we talked about me sending him cake. I think he may have thought that I was joking, but I totally wasn't! So today we shipped out some apple cake and some peanut butter, chocolate chip, M &M cookies.... That's not 3 different types of cookies, that's just one cookie that is all those things. I didn't come up with them, but I've been calling them double the goodies cookies.

  I got the idea from i am baker, you can find the post here. Essentially you mix Betty Crocker peanut butter cookie mix and Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie mix and then you can add in whatever you want. (Mix according to package instructions). I added in colorful M&M's. i am baker added in some more chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and she used all blue M&M's! Super easy and SUPER delicious!!!

  Another thing that made the cookies super awesome was that I got a new cookie scoop thing-a-ma-jig. Something like these:

I can't believe that I have been baking all this time and never owned a cookie scoop! This thing is a life saver-- it makes perfectly uniform cookies without a mess and they were thicker and looked amazing!

The other thing that I sent to Nate was Apple Cake! It's one of his favorites-- it's super tasty and moist every time I make it.  I got this recipe from my Granny-- it's another simple one, it starts with boxed yellow cake mix. So here it goes:

Apple Cake

Ingredients:

-1 box yellow cake mix                 -1 tblspn all purpose flour

-3 eggs                                           -1 tblspn butter

-1 can apple pie filling                   -1 teaspn cinnamon

-3/4 cup packed brown sugar        -1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Grease and flour your pan-- I use a 9x12 (or 9x13).

In a large bowl, mix together cake mix, eggs and apple pie filling. Pour into the prepared pan. Combine brown sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon and walnuts. Sprinkle over the top of your apple cake batter.  Bake for 35-40 minutes until toothpick comes out clean. 

Until next time, happy baking loves!!

Another baby shower cake and sugar sheets.

This weekend I had another baby shower cake order-- those things really make me realize how many people are pregnant. I know SO many people having babies right now! Are you in the same boat? I have to admit that it makes me a little jealous... just a little. I would LOVE to be pregnant again and make Leeland a big brother. In God's time it will happen-- the patience on my end is the hard part.

So without further ado, here's the cake I made. The couple that it is for don't know if they are having a boy or a girl-- a good old fashioned surprise.  The cake needed to be somewhat jungle themed or monkey, and I thought green and yellow were good "jungly" gender neutral colors.

I used sugar sheets to make the yellow and green polka dots.  Sugar sheets are a new product that Wilton just came out with. And I mean really new-- like this month-- like when I called AC Moore, they wouldn't give me any because they weren't going out till this weekend-- BUT when I called Michael's, a sweet gal there offered to sort through their boxes and find exactly what I needed.  Thanks Michaels's! (For there record, I do in fact love both stores and know that they have their own protocol for new merchandise and love to frequent both.)

They are literally like paper-- 8 1/2" x 11" and are about the same thickness as card stock.  You can use scissors to cut them or Wilton makes a special punch tool where you can punch out various shapes. I tasted some and they just taste sweet and they are a little chewy like fondant. Overall I really enjoyed them! They are much easier to work with than fondant and I like that they are so thin so you don't get the look of a giant circle popping off the cake.  The bag is resealable and the instructions say that if you place what you don't use back in the sealed  bag then you can store them-- I used all of what I bought but I wish I would've kept some scraps to test that theory and make sure it didn't dry out. Thanks Wilton for another fabulous product!