Christmas Cupcakes

  I made these for my son Gavin and the rest of his 1st grade class. I had wanted to make vertical snowmen on top of the cupcakes, but Gavin had a different idea. He insisted I make them look like ornaments, because he had seen that in a book before. So that's what I did.

We all had a wonderful time at his class Christmas party!

I pray everyone takes time to focus on the true meaning of Christmas and let God use you to bless others this year. I think one of the greatest and most important gifts we could ever give our children is to teach them to be compassionate and kind to others, and to not look down on others for any reason. God uses us to show His love and goodness on this earth, for He Is Love.  It is never hard to find someone in need of love and compassion.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

Rapunzel Cake

This is a very special cake because I made it for my little girl's 4th birthday. Faith watched me very closely while I worked on this one and critiqued me the entire time. Her only disappointment was that I did not add the prince to the cake. She said, "Who is going to protect her hair from getting cut off?". lol 
I did originally plan on the prince and drew him out on paper just like I did Rapunzel. But I did this while trying to watch The Biggest Loser. I am a BIG multi-tasker but it does not always work out for me. For example, the next day, after I had baked the four, 6 inch layers of cake that were to be stacked, I realized the prince was actually taller than the entire tower of cake. OOPS!!! 
I never found more time in my crazy schedule to sit down and try and draw him smaller. Oh well, I liked the cake better with out him. We told Faith that Daddy would protect Rapunzel and she said, "well I'll just eat her hair." And she did! The first thing she asked for when I cut the cake was Rapunzel's hair.  

Oh yeah,...she had to BE Rapunzel too. The funniest thing was watching her get "Tangled" in her hair during the entire party.

This cake is for my beautiful cousin, Breanna, who's birthday is the day after Faith's.  I made her favorite cake and then cut out the shape of her face on fondant and drew on the fondant with an edible foodwriter.

The two birthday princesses! 

Look Whooo's 1

This is for an adorable little girl's 1st birthday. I was very excited to do this cake. I love all these owl themes for girls right now. I have been trying to talk my daughter into letting me redo her room in these sweet little vintage owls. This little girl's very creative mom had the cutest owl party decor I've ever seen. Most of it she made herself and even got her husband involved with it. I was very impressed!!

I love making cakes for someone who is so appreciative and that is how Kristin is. Making someone that happy makes every bit of the hard work worth it!!!

This is the smash cake for the birthday girl.

This is also probably my last cake for awhile other than my daughter's birthday cake coming up in December. I am sure I will do a few things here and there for Gavin's class at school. He is already after me to make something and take it to his class. I will post pics of whatever we come up with.
My schedule with my kids just does not permit me to make cakes right now. Honestly, I do not know how people do this with children at home with them. I am homeschooling one of my kids with an almost 4 yr old at home as well, and between the 3 of them and all of their activities, we are constantly on the go. We have also only half way finished a small remodeling project we started back in early Sept. which = life out of order in the B household which = DeeDee at this point almost considered clinically insane.

Baby Shower Cake

The mom is having a sweet little baby girl as if you couldn't tell ! I was given a picture of a cake and asked to duplicate it with a few changes here and there. This was a very fun cake to make! My kids loved watching me with this one as well. Faith told me which of the monkeys and giraffes were boys and which ones were girls. Oh, and the monkeys were going to get married.  One of the monkeys was sad and one was happy. I guess one of them wasn't too thrilled about getting hitched, huh? ...hehe

Gotta Have Faith

Conversations with my 3 year old

Me- "You're my favorite little girl!"
Faith-"You're my favorite little Moma!"
                                                                         

Faith- "Moma when I grow up, I'm gonna make cakes and paint just like you."
                                                                        

Faith was sneezing a bunch and I told her I may have to give her something to help her stop sneezing. She says, "Jesus said I can sneeze if I want to". 
                                                                        

We found a couple of dead bugs behind a dresser in Faith's room.  I asked her who killed those bugs, she says, " uhh,...Jesus".
                                                                        

Faith- " I have hairy arms!" (Looking at her arms she says), "I had skin when I was a baby, now look at all that hairy stuff all over me."
                                                                        

After church, she is talking about a boy in her class named "stinky Michael" (a name given by Faith, not the boy's parents). She is fussing saying she doesn't want to sit by him anymore,...hmmmm.
                                                                        

And how did Jesus get in Faith's heart?... Well, according to her, she ate him when she was a baby.  Uh... ok?!... we'll work on that one.
                                                                       

Faith- "God is great, God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. By His Hands we all our feed. Thankyou Lord for Daddy's bread. Amen"

Dylan's Big Dreams Cake

This is for my oldest son Dylan. He just turned 17. He really challenged me on this cake. He even thought I was not going to be able to pull it off, and I have to admit that I was thinking the same thing. This is supposed to be a Lamborghini car and a F-22 Stealth Raptor and a Lamborghini Yacht. No, they don't look like the real things, but Dylan was happy. While I was working on them, he would come by and give my work an inspection and say," yeah, you got that right and that's right but wait Mom you left off this detail." He dreams of building all of these for real oneday.

He had a great birthday! We do not do the big showy birthday parties, instead we let our kids pick somewhere special they want to go with us. We want their birthdays to be a celebration all about them. Dylan wanted to go to Reptile Planet (yuck!), but he loved it! Then we had a small family birthday party. Great day!

Whatever challenges come your way, all things are possible to those who believe what God has promised them.

This was mine and Dylan's original plan. I sketched it out better than I executed it, unfortunately. I was going to do a sheet cake and make it look like water and put the boat in water. I was going to make a pier and park the car on the pier.

For the plane, I was going to stick it on a dowel and fly it in the air. Cool, huh? Yeah, well it didn't fly!...literally. The car, boat and plane are made out of rice crispy treats. The plane was ridiculously too heavy to stick on a dowel. So the plan changed to just putting all of them on the cake together. I tried putting a mound of rice crispies on the cake to prop up the plane so it was tilted with the nose in the air, but the plane decided to crack right down the middle and down both sides.

The plane was the last one I made and I was very tired. You have to really press the rice crispies together hard and then they will become very solid. I am thinking I got a little lazy with it. Also my last batch of rc was too marshmellowy and they need to be more dry to make it work well. So that could have added to the problem. Or..... the plane was just too darn big and needed a support system built for it. I would love to try it again just to see what I did wrong.

Beginning stages

This was the car off of the cake compared to a new toy Lamborghini. It would have helped me to have had this little car to use as a model.

Cute Little Cake

This cake was for two beautiful little girls who were having a small family birthday party.  Happy Birthday Abigail and Ellie!

 

This is the last cake for me for two or three weeks. I am taking some time off to enjoy the last bit of summer vacation with my kids and to get my boys ready for school.  

Very heavy heart right now, thinking about some precious family members going through some extremely difficult times. Praying and relying on our Comforter and Healer today!

Baby Shower Petit Fours

Petit Fours for a baby shower and the Mommy-to-be is having a little boy. I was asked to match the invitations and the other decor at the shower and also, to put the baby's initial, O, on some of them. They were made from cream cheese pound cake with a lemon mousse filling.   

This was my first attempt at petit fours. I have to admit, that I was a little scared and intimidated after reading many other blogs about how hard they were to make and how most of them said they would never do it again.

I did my homework and read everything I could find about petit fours and then mapped out my plan. Of course, nothing in my kitchen ever goes as smoothly as planned. For instance, I had to make 4 batches of poured fondant when I only needed 2. The first batch was a total disaster and went straight in the trash. The second was perfect but not enough, so I made another batch. The only problem was that the color of the 3rd batch did not match the second one, which had already been poured over half of the cakes. So a fourth batch was made to add to the 3rd to get the right color. Lesson learned, make ALL of the poured fondant at one time if it has coloring in it so the color will match.

And the pouring..... oh my is it messy! And I am a messy baker to begin with. And actually pouring did not work for me. I ended up dipping the sides, then spooned some over the top. It sounds easy,...but it's not and it will still make a mess. I could not have done these with out the wonderful tutorials from bakerella.com and veganyumyum.com. Anyone who wants to give these a try should definitely read their blogs first. 

And as messy and challenging as it was, I would do it again. I made all my notes about the problems I encountered this time so I could avoid those next time. This was a GREAT experience for me and I learned soo much!

I received the sweetest email saying how much everyone at the shower loved them. I can't even begin to say how good that made me feel. I already had my concerns over these petit fours. I wanted to be able to spend more time decorating, but I ended up spending most of the time just making them. I was feeling like it was not my best decorating job, so that sweet email meant the world to me.

Thanks Renee! I appreciate you trusting me with these when you knew I had never made them before. And thanks again for all of your kind words!

M&M Cake

 

This cake was for one of my babies,...my sweet Gavie Bear! It was Gavin's 6th birthday. (Wow,... how time flies!) This was the perfect cake for Gavin because he loves candy!  I've always called him my little candy man. I had 9 1/2 large bags of M&Ms poured around these two cakes. So we are stocked up on M&M's for a while. If I ever have to make this again, I have figured out a couple of different ways I could have done it that would not have required ALL of those M&M's. Of course, my usual method of learning,...I figure out what NOT to do the next time. But none of the kids complained about the M&M's, so we're good! 

Gavin enjoyed his party with some family and a few of his really good friends from school. His party was just as it should have been, all about HIM enjoying his day and having a great time! God answered my prayers and blessed us with a beautiful day! It has rained all week so this truly was a blessing. After hot dogs and cake, we went swimming in the pool, so the sunshine was very much needed and we even had a cool breeze for the moms. 

Gavin helped me come up with the flavors for these cakes. The yellow one is a vanilla cake with mini-M&M's baked in it. It is filled with peanut butter and chocolate ganache. Yum Yum

The red one is a chocolate cake filled with buttercream icing and, of course, big surprise,.... M&M's.

1st Birthday Cake

This cake was for a beautiful little girl who was turning one. She also happens to be my niece. I made a smash cake to go with it but unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of it. I don't know how I could have forgotten it. It was only 6:00 a.m when I was taking these pics and I had not been to bed yet at all. The smash cake was a one layer 6 in. round, all decorated in buttercream so she could make a Big mess. Her mom requested it be made in lighter colors than the cake, since she would be wearing it. LOL So I did light yellow and pink polka dots and a number one on it.

This cake was decorated to match the decor of the party. I cannot, however, take credit for the design of it. I was just a last minute fill in because the original cake decorator was unable to do it. So I tried my best to do what they had already planned. I am sure, though, it was not quite as good as what it should have been. I know there were many things I would have done differently if I had had the time. I just did the best I could do in the very short time I was given. I will say though, that this is my first and last rush order. I made that promise to my family. But I'm happy for Victory that she was able to have a cake for her 1st birthday.

Happy Birthday sweet Victory! I hope you enjoyed your party and had a great birthday!

Double Graduation Cake

This cake was for two of my cousins. One just graduated from High School and the other one from LSU. They were having a big crawfish boil and pool party to celebrate with all of their family and friends. We all got a sweet surprise when my little brother, who lives in Georgia, showed up at the party. It made my day for sure!   

This cake was chocolate with a cream cheese, kool whip filling that had chocolate almond bars chopped up in it. I'm going to have to come up with a name for this filling and add it to my list. It's from one of my family's  favorite cakes that we love to make and it's actually the icing on that cake. I used it as a filling because it's Breanna's favorite and mine too,..well actually I think there our several of us who would call this one a favorite. 

This is the back of the cake.

I love you Cory and Breanna and I'm very proud of you both!!