Happy Birthday Cakes

Forgive me if this post is a jumbled mess. I'm running on about 5 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours. Why? Because I spent the whole night baking 3 wonderful birthday cakes for 3 adorable little girls. The girls, who are sisters, share a birthday very close to each other so they got to celebrate together today with a joint party. Each of them of course has their own personality and so they had their own theme for each girl. Elmo, Disney Princess and Pokemon. This was quite the challenge for my first official cake decorating endeavor but staying up all night was worth it! I really hope that the family enjoyed their cakes and I hope they were a hit at the party. So, take a look at my creations.

The mess ensues.

Mmm. Funfetti cake.

The early stages.

Jessie was my little buddy into the wee hours of the morning.

Wanna try and guess what time it is? Yeah it was late. Or early.

Somehow I managed to make a Pikachu out of fondant at 6:45 in the morning.

Elmo cake!

This is Annie. She's my parents dog. Or rather my brother's dog that my parents take care of. She's cute.

The princess cake.


Hee hee hee. That tickles.

Baking Fail

For any of us that have tried to bake, we've all had one. Whether it was a cake recipe where you accidentally added a 1/4 Tablespoon of salt instead of a 1/4 Teaspoon of salt, or simply forgot about the brownies baking in the oven and had charred chocolate for dessert.

When Josh and I got married I wanted to start out as Super Wife. Our apartment was our first place on our own apart from our parents and the week before we got married and I was living there by myself I cleaned up after every little mess and had so much fun just cooking meals left and right. That phase has long since passed. Trust me.

One night I had a craving for some good ole Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies with a cold glass of milk. I wasn't quite ambitious enough at the time to make up my own batch so I drove to Walgreens and got the prepackaged kind in the squares that you just place on a cookie sheet and bake. The only instructions you really have to follow on this one is setting the oven to the right temperature and setting a timer. Easy enough.

The smell started to fill the apartment and I knew we were in for a good treat. After all the slaving in the kitchen over ripping open the packaging, these cookies better be good. I went about my business as the cookies baked and when the timer went off I skipped to the oven excited to see the golden brown cookies with their melted chocolate chips bubbling ever so slightly at the top. What I found was more like this:



I was devastated. How could I ruin the easiest cookies in the world? I'm going to suck at this Domestic Goddess crap. I frantically dug the wrapper out of the trash to make sure I did everything right, temperature: 375 (check) time:9-11 minutes (I did it for 10, check). What the what?! The burned cookies incident would be a mystery until a day or two later when we made a frozen pizza and discovered that to be burned too. What we finally realized is that our oven bakes 20-25 degrees hotter than what the actual temperature is set at. All I could think when we discovered that was, "I AM NOT A FAILURE!"

Since then, most of my baking endeavors have been successful. Most.

Sweet Monday

Though most of us "normal" people in the world have little appreciation for Mondays, I figure it would be a good idea to have a regular post on Mondays just to make people smile. Whether it's a cute baking idea I've found, maybe a little cartoon, or a funny story, I hope it makes everyone's Monday just a little bit sweeter.

I was browsing over at CakeSpy (btw: I want every single piece of merchandise with those cute watercolor cupcakes!) and found this post about 50 Ways To Kill a Twinkie. I think my favorite sequence is where they make croutons out of the fried twinkie and then proceed to serve them on a salad. When you're expecting croutons, friend twinkies must taste so gross! I wonder how a fried twinkie tastes anyway...(note to self:pretty much anything fried tastes good!)

And now for something completely different:

Hello Naomi was my inspiration for the Robot Cupcakes and I wanted to share another adorable set of cupcakes that she made. Seeing what she comes up with really gets my brain cranking on great ideas for cupcakes. Take a look:



I hope you have a Sweet Monday!