The Devil's Food

It was my future father in laws birthday on Monday. He likes chocolate so I made him a Devil's Food cake. It was triple layered and had devil's food puding on the inside. YUMMY! The frosting was semi-homeamde. i creamed a stick of butter and some milk with some dark choclate sensation hot cocoa from swiss miss. It looked like I had made a huge mistake using the hhot cocoa because it was all lumpy but i pressed on. I add the confectioner's sugar and voila, choclate buttercream. It was sooooo good but too thin for the cake. I was out of sugar so I added the dark choclate fudge store bought frosting. That did it. You could taste every ingredient in that frosting and it made the cake taste so rich! here is a picture.

I also made cupcakes for Greg and I out of the leftover frosting, pudding and cake batter. They were equally as delicious. I piped the pudding into the centers so you know, that oooey gooey goodness comes spilling out of the center when you bite into it. Here's a pciture of them...

I also made his father a really nice card but I forgot to take a picture of it. I will get a picture of it tomorrow.

My Mother's Day

Here it is almost a week after Mother's Day and I haven't posted yet. I have been so tired because Mother's Day weekend was so full of crafts and baking I was exhausted. Not to mention Kendall hasn't been sleeping through the night. But I had a wonderful mother's day and there's way too many pictures to add so I guess I am just going to have to make do. I still haven't figured out how to efficiently load pictures to my posts so I get a bit frustrated.

Here's me and my munchkin:

Anywho, in no particular order (because I am being lazy and don't feel like sorting):

These are the cards I helped Kendall make or her Grandmother and her GG (her Great Grandmother). She did the finger painting and I cut and matted them for cards. they loved them! Pics of Kendall finger painting are further down.

Next is a picture of me, a happy Mom. Really, Greg went all out for my first Mother's Day. I got breakfast in bed- French toast, eggs, turkey bacon and strawberries, I got a necklace that had a little girl pendant on it with her dress being Kendall's birthstone-peridot, I got to spend, spend, spend at Michaels, and I got a handmade T-shirt and card. More on those later.

Here is a picture of one of the cupcake bouquets that I made. i thought I'd try it and it seems to have come out okay.Next time I will use toothpicks only. I used lollipop skewers here and it worked but they ended up poking through. I also will use a dome shaped Styrofoam ball instead of the cube. There's also skittles in the vase. I think it looked okay, what do you think?

Here is the aftermath of Kenni's impromptu finger painting session. She had it everywhere within minutes including her mouth. But I had so much fun doing it with her but i looked a wreck so no pictures with Mommy!

Here's my precious...just a little artist. She is so adorable I can't believe i helped make that face! So beautiful she is. Okay enough mushing.

These are other cards that I made for other relatives. I also made some 60 cards for my fruity Mommas on BBC-Babycenter.com.

Close-up on my T-shirt. If it's unclear, I'm the Best Mom, Hands DOWN! :)

I let Greg borrow my Cricut to make me a card. Don't tell anyone but he had a blast! He was also begging me to use it finally so I gave him quick tutorial of everything I know (I'm still learning and it has been three months). Here's what he came up with.

Beautiful isn't it? Look at the 3D flower he made. Gorgeous. I call him Martin Stewart (I am Martha of course!)

Here is the inside. Do you see my necklace in there? That's how he surprised me with it. So cute he is. How did I get so lucky?

Here is the cake I made for myself. It was only one layer think and it was made with leftover icing and cake batter from the cupcakes. The frosting was a yucky burgundy color so I made it black with black icing color from Wilton. It was pretty easy but I admit i used the whole jar. Eh, it was worth it aestetically. The flowers are M&M's. This cake was so yummy. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

And here is the other cupcake bouquet I made. It was for Greg's Mother. Her birthday was the 11th so I also made her a coconut custard pie which for my first time making it was delish!i think this one came out better than the first and I used the toothpicks with the dome shaped Styrofoam ball. made a huge difference not only in presentation but in overall ease of assembly.

And just because I am proud of them here are the cards I made for my Fruities

It took me roughly 10 hours to complete them all. These cards went from Cali to New York and Canada to Florida. All the thanks I got from making them made me feel so good. Some of them said that it was the only card they had gotten and that made me feel real good that I can make them smile like that.

I mean who doesn't like getting something handmade with love?

Good Grief Cake

So, I skipped my last Wilton Class. Not cool. But Greg was sleepy and I didn't want him to drive all the way out to Huntington sleepy and then still have to watch the kid while I was playing with cakes. So I ditched. Boo.

That doesn't mean I wasn't playing with cake though. I attempted the Wilton rose. I did rather well too if I do say so myself. I wish I would have taking pics I didn't (I will though). I tried to put the plowers on the cake before the had hardened and the all fell and drooped, it was terrible. I got all upset (crying even) and started to smooch all the flowers and took off all the frosting and started all over again.

The white icing had mixed with the yellow icing to make a nice dainty pastel kind of yellow. I used my big flower tip (can't remember the number) and attempted to make swirly flowers (excuse the terminology, I'm a dropout!). I also took the cake top that I had cut off and tried to crumble it up in efforts to form a dirt effect. It looked great I just f-ed up the flowers so I had to cover my mistake. The end result is this

That is why I am calling it good grief cake. This cake put me through so much grief, that and the fact that I am not pregnant and have no outlet to let out my feelings. I was trying to get pregnant and got shut down this month...

Any who, that's another story for another blog, long story short I had a lot on my mind. But The cake was delicious! It was dark chocolate Fudge (Box kind) with my vanilla butter cream frosting that we make in the class. MMmmMMM perfect fix for my chocolate cravings.

If you look closely at the pic where a slice has been cut, you can see towards the edge of the cake where I packed on the crumbs because there is a layer of frosting between two layers of cake...

Looks cool, I might develop that some more.

My Second Cake

So after my third lesson I fell like this cake is a huge bummer. It has been nice lately and we don't control the heat in the house (at least not yet) so the house was bit on the humid side and my icing started to melt and run. I had a to do a quick fix up while in class and I really only had a few minutes to get it finished since I was going straight to my cousins house right after class to give it to him. My cousin Cameron turns 19 tomorrow (today being that's it almost 5am).

We did clowns today. Since the red icing ran on the side in two places I patched up one side and the side that was the most jacked up i put a clown there. I'm not a big fan of the clowns they are a bit creepy. This cake definitely does not look better than my rainbow cake. I have good ideas for next weeks cake so stay tuned...

Here's some pics...

I guess it looks good...I can't be a professional right off the bat eh?

My First Cake

So I have started many a blogs and I have hardly ever kept up with one. That's not entirely true, I have one other that I post in consistently but that means I post exactly once a month-still terrible. Hopefully I can post here a little more often than that. We'll see.

I just needed a place to share my projects whether it be a crafty projects or a baked one. I'm slowly making the move to a more handmade/homemade life and I am proud of my accomplishments. I try first at home to make or do something before going out an paying for it. That includes everything from materials used to services. I'm not even close to being there yet but the journey has been fun. I'm also trying to get my family on a whole foods diet as well. That's a bigger success. We shop at Trader Joe's and we love it! Trader Joe s has a wide selection of organic foods that doesn't taste like cardboard.

So here goes...

I am taking the Wilton Cake Decorating class Course 1 at Michael's. It's fun and it gives me time alone from my boyfriend and my daughter. I haven't had "me" time since she was born last August. The first cake we were supposed to make could have either been a shaped cake or a round cake that you put a rainbow on...I chose the rainbow.

So what do you think? Ha, I have no followers yet so I am talking to myself here but it doesn't matter. I am very proud of it. I especially like the clouds. I used white and blue icing to ice the cake to make it look more like a sky. The book only called for blue and it was a darker blue than that. What I am most proud of is the way I mixed the darlker blue of the rainbow. In the book it was purple and I think the blue is better so I mixed Wilton icing colors violet and royal blue to get that nice deep blue.

The cake is America's Choice-Lemon. I was going to make it from scratch but for the sake of saving time and money to actually decorate the cake I just bought it. The cake was delcious but I barely ate a slice. My boyfriend Greg ate almost half the cake by himself. We gave the other half away to his family.

Anywho. That's my first cake.