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!

In a Baby Carriage

This is a baby shower cake I did for a co-worker of my friend, Christy.  She wanted chocolate cake and buttercream icing.  She is decorating the nursery in pink and purple so that's the colors I used for the cake.  She insisted on a very simple cake with NO fondant.  I did use edible pearls...one in the center of the bow and one in the center of each decorative dot.  The piping around the bottom is much more froo-froo than I usually do, but I saw a cake that I liked with a similar design but, of course, mine didn't turn out quite the same.  Nonetheless, I hope she likes it!

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 :)

Ice Skating

My cuties :)

Trying to hold Leah up without falling myself!

Ella getting used to the ice

There was alot of wall hugging ;)

The previous pix and this one are both dark...clearly I need to figure out zoom and flash

Me and the babes!

Just wanted to share a few pictures of the girls (and me) ice skating.  I always do what I can to get out of it, but the girls just won't have it!  I must admit, though, that after I get out there I do have fun....I think I could have a blast if they would just close the mall and let me have the rink to myself :)  Ella did pretty good and I must say, Leah did much better than expected.  Truth be told, we should probably go more often.

Zebra Cake

This is a cake I did for Ella's friend Eva.  She is VERY into zebra print stuff and her mom just wanted a sheet cake so this is the result.  Pretty simple!

16th Birthday Cake

This is a cake I made for a sweet girl's 16th birthday.  She knew she wanted colors of black, white, and turquoise.  I ended up finding this cupcake wrapper at the store and she loved it so I used it as the inspiration for her cake.  I also used these cake wires with fondant balls as the cake topper.  She was super excited about the cake and said the flowers were her favorite part.  Yea :)

Christmas Fun

Just wanted to share a few pix of Christmas.  The weekend before, we went to Point Clear for the night to see the Christmas lights at The Grand.  We love staying there in the summer and have been told that it is quite beautiful at Christmas so we finally decided to see for ourselves.  It was great.  They have three fireplaces in the lodge lobby and they were all three blazing.  There was this beautiful Christmas tree also.  After they fired the cannon (which they do each day at 4pm...the hotel was a hospital during the Civil War and has lots of history) we got to eat cookies and drink hot tea (for me) and hot chocolate (for Charles and the girls).  They had the grounds very lit up and it was magical.  Ella and Leah climbed some of the trees.  They have these amazing Live Oaks and they are the perfect trees to climb (and they always do).  The next day, after we left, we took a detour to the beach.  (I can't be that close and not put my feet in the sand.)  It was an absolutely beautiful day!  I could have stayed all day.  The girls got their love of the beach from me because they were all too sad to have to leave.  It was a quick trip, but lots of fun. 
I've included a couple of pix from Christmas day just because I thought they were super cute!

Christmas tree in the lodge lobby at The Grand

Ella climbing her "favorite tree"

Leah has the same monkey gene

It was a gorgeous day at the beach

Missy with her present

Hilarious!  It was the end of the day and Leah had on her new bike helmet with her feety pajamas sitting at the kitchen table working on her new camera.  What a sight!