Zebra Cupcakes and Ice Skating

These are some cupcakes that I did for the girls' friend, Eva.  She LOVES zebra print.  Last year I made her a zebra print cake and this year she wanted cupcakes.  After some brainstorming with her mom, we decided on zebra print holders with some 'E's and '8's as cupcake toppers.  I cut those out of zebra print scrapbook paper with my Cricut and put them on lollipop sticks.  I used hot pink icing and sprinkled it with black sugar crystals.

The girls got to ice skate again.  They absolutely LOVE to do this.  Notice they are hugging the wall at first, but were soon out in the middle.  [The pictures are really poor quality.  I desparately need a new camera :(  ]

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

Yum!!!  Enough said.  Really.  I'm not a big cookie dough fan, but Shelia is.  I made her these cupcakes for her birthday.  I must say, they were good!!  Rich, but good.  The cupcake itself tasted like a chocolate chip cookie, then it had an eggless cookie dough filling in the center.  It was topped with cookie dough icing, mini chocolate chips, and a mini chocolate chip cookie.  Seriously, this was one of the best cupcakes I've made as far as taste goes.  Super Yummy.  A bit time consuming, but worth it!

A Friend turns 50 !

Our friend, Bryan, just celebrated his 50th birthday.  There was a party for him on Saturday and then another celebration in Sunday School the next morning.  For his party, I made german chocolate cupcakes and a chocolate cake.  For Sunday, I made a german chocolate cake.  He loves my chocolate cake and he loves german chocolate cake, so I used the recipe for my regular chocolate cake and just added the coconut pecan icing. 

Chocolate cupcakes with regular chocolate icing around the perimeter and coconut pecan icing in the middle

Chocolate cake with an chocolate almond buttercream icing, chocolate ganache, and strawberries

Chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream and coconut pecan icing

Minnie Mouse Cupcakes

These are some cupcakes that I did for a family in our church.  Their little girl is turning 2 and is having a Minnie Mouse birthday.  They needed 48 cupcakes!!  These are chocolate cupcakes with red buttercream icing.  I made the bows out of a 50/50 fondant/gumpaste mixture.  The ears are black candy melts.  Then there are edible pearl accents.

Banana Pudding Cupcakes

These are some banana pudding cupcakes I made.....just because!  I saw a picture of one on Pinterest and wanted to make them.  When I went to the link, the recipe was not posted but rather she referred you to a cookbook she was writing that would be out this fall and the recipe would be in there.  She named a few of the ingredients so I just figured it out for myself.  I'm sure she probably made them from scratch, but I think these turned out pretty good the easy way I did them.

First, I baked cupcakes using a butter pecan cake mix.  While that cooked, I made some instant banana cream pudding using the pie recipe (less milk).  Once the cupcakes were cool, I used a filling tip to fill the center with the banana pudding.  I topped the cupcakes with buttercream icing that I made using banana flavoring.  Then crumbled up vanilla wafers and sprinkled those on, and then drizzled it with butterscotch ice cream syrup.

We had friends over that night and the husband ate two.  He said they tasted like "banana bread on crack."  I must say, they were pretty good.  And different....a break from chocolate and vanilla.

Dolphin Tale Party

I can't believe it, but my baby is 5 !!!!!  She wanted to have a Dolphin Tale party.  If you haven't seen the movie, you need to....(this movie started Leah's love of dolphin everything).

The Invitations

The invitations were not my idea.  I must give credit to my neighbor, Stacy, and her creative brain :)  She came up with the idea and helped me put them together.  We made them with my Cricut.  I especially loved that they were unique and not like any I've seen.  You pull the dolphin up and it has the party information on that card.

The Decorations

This is a balloon wreath that I made for the front door.  I found inspiration on Pinterest, of course ;) and wanted to have it done for Ella's birthday but didn't make it.  There is a number 5 with her name on it that I can take off and replace with whoevers age/name.  

The centerpieces of the table were hurricane vases filled with green crinkle paper packing filler and then dolphins and a number 5.

Ok, so sandwiches are food and not decorations, but I just wanted to show that we made ham sandwiches in the shape of dolphins.  I found a sandwich cutter at Wal-Mart and when you use it to cut the sandwich you get two dolphins and a heart.  Cute, huh?

I also had blue Hawaiian Punch in a drink dispenser that had a chalkboard tag around it that said "Ocean Water" and I had decorated around the bottom with sand and seashells.  I know I took a picture but perhaps I dreamed it as I can't seem to find it now.  Big sigh.......

The Cake

We had a cake tragedy this morning.  Oh my.  I can laugh now, but was on the verge of tears this morning.  The story goes like this.....Ella and Leah had their friends Eva and JB spend the night last night.  I got up at 6am and started cleaning and getting ready for the 10am party.  I asked Charles to go get Leah's dolphin balloon filled with helium.  He said he would rather me do it so I asked him to get the kids breakfast started (I had bought Pillsbury cinnamon rolls).  I always put my finished cakes in the oven to keep them from little fingers in the icing or some sort of accident or something.  I always do this.  See where this is going??  He didn't think about it until he went to put the cinnamon rolls in the preheated oven.  You've heard of twice baked potatoes??  Now we had twice baked cupcakes!!  Luckily, the cupcakes themselves were fine, but the icing was a different story.  It had changed colors and gotten so hard and cracked I couldn't even get candles to go through it.  When I got home and found out, panic ensued.  I took a shower and prayed.......prayed that God would help me be loving and forgiving to Charles because I know he didn't ruin them on purpose and that He would help me to salvage Leah's cake.  So, I scraped off the hard, crusty icing and made a new batch.  I re-decorated the dolphin (though this rush job did not end up as cute as yesterdays).  The cupcakes, thankfully, we just as good and moist as they should have been :)

The cupcakes in dolphin formation.

The re-decorated dolphin.  See the waves (how crusty and hard) that's how the whole dolphin was!  Eek!  This rush version wasn't as cute as the first one.

I wan't sure I'd have enough cupcakes with just the dolphin (though  I did) and so these are decorated  with teal icing, sprinkled with brown sugar for sand, and fondant sea shells, starfish, coral, and sand dollar toppers.

The Games

They played three games:  (1) pin the tail on the dolphin (again, if you haven't seen the movie, you might not understand)   (2) water balloon fights   (3) dolphin pinata.  

Pin the Tail on the Dolphin

The pin the tail on the dolphin, I again have to give thanks to Stacy.  She drew him out and painted him as well as all of the individual tails.  I think she did a great job!!  The kids had fun.  We blindfolded them, made them spin around five times (since it was Leah's fifth birthday) and then pin.  I think Leah actually came the closest but pretty much tied with Annalee and Matthew.

Water Balloon Fights

I had in mind a couple of games to play with the water balloons but the kids just wanted to throw them at each other.  It was so hot I didn't even care :)  It will kind of hurt your feelings though that you spend hours filling up 110 water balloons and they were confetti in the yard within a matter of minutes!!!

(No pictures of the actual fights.  I was actually using the camcorder during that.)

Dolphin Pinata

I had the pinata filled with Skittles, Twizzlers, DumDums, dolphin stickers, dolphin necklaces, and gum.  As soon as it was open, chaos erupted.  The sweet children turned into little vultures.  Seriously.

My Sweet Baby Leah

Here are a couple pictures of Leah.  The first is her blowing out her candles and the second is her opening her presents.  

I am so grateful and thankful to the Lord for all of the great family and friends that He has blessed us with.  Those who don't mind enduring the Alabama July heat for a couple of hours to bring a smile and a sweet memory to my sweet baby's heart.  We are so very blessed!!

Oreo Cupcakes

These are some new cupcakes that I tried (recipe via Pinterest).  I thought they were pretty good....the icing was my favorite :)  You place an Oreo in the bottom of the cupcake wrapper.  Put crushed Oreo's in the fudge cake batter and pour on top of the Oreo in the bottom.  Bake.  Ice with a cream cheese icing that, of course, has crushed Oreo's in it.  Finally, top with a mini Oreo.  I think the things I would do differently next time is not put the Oreo on the bottom and use my regular chocolate cake recipe and instead of the chocolate chips use the crushed Oreo's.  It's fun to experiment, though!

The Cat in the Hat

These are some cupcakes (a cupcake pull apart cake) that I made for my my next door neighbor.  She is a school teacher and they are celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday in her classroom this week.  I really wanted to do the Thing 1 and Thing 2 cupcakes where you use the blue cotton candy for the hair/topping but everything I read about doing that said to put the cotton candy on right before serving.  Well, since I won't be there tomorrow, that wasn't an option.  I couldn't really find any other ideas that I liked and she specifically wanted Cat in the Hat.  After much searching, I found this cupcake pull apart cake so I did that.  I'm not especially happy about the way the facial features turned out, but I don't much imagine that the kids will care too much :)

The finished product

The cupcakes before the frosting

I've been wanting to try one of these for a while so I'm glad I finally got a reason too!

A Scrapbook Cake and 16th Birthday Cupcakes

I've been busy this week, covered up in sugar.  The upside is the house smells like a bakery (so does the car :)

Scrapbook Cake
This is a cake I did for Paige.  She is having a scrapbook party with a couple of her friends.  So, this is my attempt at a scrapbook.  I took two square cakes and put them side by side.  Then I shaved off a little of the two sides that formed the center.  It was iced and smoothed.  Then I made marks in the sides to look like pages (hard to see in the pix, easier in person).  I used edible images of two pictures...one of her and the other of her and the two friends coming to the party.  I have NO idea what happened, but the images starting crumbling and tearing as I was taking them off the backing.  I was able to use fondant accents to cover up the tears on Paige's picture, but there was no hope for the one of the friends.  Thank goodness the Easley's are laid back folks and didn't care....otherwise I would have been getting more images made.  I had also made a pair of scissors with a gumpaste/fondant mixture but they ended up being too big for the cake :(  Anyway, Paige was happy and that is all that matters!!

16th Birthday Cupcakes
These are some cupcakes I did for a friend at church.  Her daughter is turning 16 and wanted cupcakes.  She had a taste of the Reese's cupcakes I made last week and wanted those, but she also wanted some strawberry ones.
 This time I used my old faithful peanut butter icing recipe because it is stiffer but it has cocoa in it so I didn't do the chocolate drizzle. 

 The strawberry cupcakes had chunks of real strawberries baked in and they were so yummy.  The colors Taylor chose for her party were turquoise and purple (her favorite color).  So, I iced the cupcakes in purple and did an accent flower in turquoise fondant and put tiny edible pearls in the center of the flower.  These were alot of fun to do!!

A Great Combo....Chocolate and Peanut Butter :)

Well, these cupcakes actually turned out pretty good to be failures.  They are not at all what I had in mind when I started.  My plan was to dip the peanut butter frosting in chocolate to be like a dipped cone at Dairy Queen.  Not far into my icing, I realized that it was never going to be firm enough to dip and hold shape.  Yep, I tried a new recipe....it's super yummy, just not stiff enough.  Anyway, let me tell you what the final product is.  These are chocolate cupcakes with a mini Reese's cup baked in the center.  It is topped with peanut butter frosting and satiny chocolate glaze with another mini Reese's cup on top for decoration.  Not what I started out planning to do, but really, it is hard to go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter!

Wild Kratts Party !!!

The party
Saturday was Ella's 7th birthday party.  I cannot believe she is so big!  I wish I could freeze her.  There are so many precious moments each day that she amazes me and I am so proud every second of every day that she is mine.  I really don't deserve the abundant blessings that both of my children are, but I am thankful. 

Ella chose to have a Wild Kratts birthday party.  She is crazy about Wild Kratts.  If you don't know what that is, it is a show on PBS where two brothers teach you about animals.  She loves animals of all sorts!  Then these brothers turn into cartoons and go on a creature adventure.  She blows me away every day with some new animal fact that I know I have never heard of before.  She really has learned so much.

On with the party...there are NO Wild Kratt party supplies out there.  None.  So Momma had to get creative.  I did eventually find a place on Ebay that I could order invitations from.  They sent a digital file and I had to get the invites developed like pix.  So I joined one of those online pix places that give you 50 free prints so I got them for free (except for what I had to pay ebay).  Gotta love that!

The invitation

The front door decoration

 The decorations
I found animal plates for the kids as well as animal print plates for the adults at Wal-Mart.  They also had animal print napkins and cups.  I found these zebra print tins at Hobby Lobby and put the silverware in them.

The decorations

 I found these precious candles online.  Had to have them :)

Cute candles, huh?

 Also found these animal print slap bracelts in Oriental Trading magazine.  They have cute party stuff, usually sold by the dozen, and usually for cheap prices.  It's a good resource if you've never used it.

Slap Bracelets

The games
Ella wanted to play a couple of games.  She made this one up herself.  The kids loved it and I was so excited that they had so much fun and it came straight from her imaginative brain.  She wanted me to make them all different types of animal tails.  Right.  Instead, I found these animal print bandanas in the Oriental Trading catalog and we tucked them inside the back waistband of their pants....a tail.  Then they spread out over the yard and on "Go!" they chased each other around trying to steal as many animal tails as possible.  Once everyones tail was gone, whoever had the most won.  They played that a couple of times because they loved it so much.  I don't have any pix because I was the referee but Charles videoed it and it was hilarious!  The other game, they pulled out an animal pix that I had printed out on the computer out of a bag and had to act out the animal....like animal charades.

The winners won these "trophies" I found at the Dollar Tree.  I thought they were perfect for this themed party and I found gold star stickers to put on them to make them feel like more of an award.

Bandanas...um, I mean tails

Trophies...a giraffe and a rhino

 The cake
Ella wanted cupcakes.  But we needed a cake too...I don't know why, I guess I just had to.  So I made a six inch chocolate cake with the Wild Kratts logo on it. 

The logo cake

Of course, I used animal print cupcake papers for the cupcakes.   For the cupcake toppers, I cut and pasted some pix of the Wild Kratts from Google Images onto a word document.  Then I took them to Office Depot and had them laminated.  I then taped them to a lollipop stick to put down in the cupcake.  A little time consuming but super easy and cheap!  One of the designs was just Chris and Martin, one was of the support staff (Aviva, Koki, and Jimmy), and the other was Chris, Martin, Aviva, and some creatures.  The other design I used (which didn't photograph to well) was of some stickers that Ella had gotten for Christmas that had animal designs on them that changed when you changed direction of the sticker.

 We had neopolitian ice cream (strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate) so that is the icing I used for the cupcakes.  The strawberry cupcakes had half with strawberry icing and half with cream cheese icing.  The chocolate cupcakes had chocolate icing.  I am just now really getting interested in cupcakes so this was a chance to experiment with the icing design.  They didn't photograph as cute as they really were.

Ribbon Swirl

Ice Cream Swirl

Classic Cupcake Swirl

The cupcake tower

The total cake package :)

Snack table....grapes, cheese, chips, dip, sodas, and cake...and note the animal print balloons :)

 And finally....

The fake blowing out of candles...I missed the first shot so we did a re-do!

Needless to say, if you didn't leave feeling like you had been on a creature adventure....it was your own fault!  Ella had a blast as did her friends, and that made me happy :)