butterflies, rainbows, and baby cheeks.. oh my!

I didn't decorate too much for Princess Newbie's first birthday party since it was held pretty far away in Fort Worth, which meant that I had to lug everything there from Houston and then be prepared to toss it or lug it all the way back here. So I just did a few simple things.

My favorite was the butterfly tree. I took one of the covered cans that I made last week and filled it with rocks. Then I stuck a branch in it that I had simply found in the yard. Then I stuck a few fake flowers on the branches and it was pretty much done.

I found scratch art butterflies on clearance after Easter and picked them up to use one day. It was huge pack of thirty butterflies. As people came into the party I asked them to write on the butterfly a message to Princess Newbie and then place it on the tree. I forgot to get some people to do it but I did get a few really cute ones, including one from each of her sisters (but none from my sisters).

Then there's the cake...

surprising..

and finally.. the baby cheeks.

Remember when I showed you the yard stakes?  During the party Princess Newbie decided that they needed to be removed.

and then toddled away, baby cheeks waving in the breeze... with the "i" from her name.

Simple, fun, and cute first birthday party that she will never remember.

Cake Show Part 2

We are finally home from the Cake Show this weekend and my house is finally clean! So now I can show you pictures of what I have been working on the past few weeks but they are not the best pictures. In fact, I fired my photographer tonight. He didnt even take a picture of the front of the cakes, only from the sides? Luckily the cakes all made it home with us and I'm going to take better pictures tomorrow.

So without any more interruption, here's my entries to the Sugar Arts Show this past weekend:

My wedding cake entry into the Intermediate Adult category. It has lattice work, extension work, and hail spots if you know what all that means. This cake I really bombed when it came to piping the bottom borders and the judges even commented on it. I really love the overall idea of this cake but I just couldn't bring the details together on it. It was a love/hate relationship and the judges must have felt the cold distance of our hearts because it did not place. No surprise. I do have big plans to put it on the roof of the van and gun it at full speeds down the road.

This was my entry for Special Techniques in the Intermediate Adult category again. I really loved it and there are so many details. There's even ice in the glasses and the cupcakes had sprinkles but I was beaten fair and square in this category. The women who won all had outstanding entries.  This was a great category. I love it when I have that awesome of competition.

Aw... the green cake. This is the love of my life and my favorite cake yet. It just fits my personal style and I want to marry it. The bird on the top of the cake was hand painted with cocoa paint and the flowers are all out of gumpaste. This cake did win third place which I didn't 100% agree with but I'm still happy to have brought home a medal. And I might be a little partial to this cake because of the love affair and all...

Then there's the best cakes of the entire show! The green cake on the left was done by a master baker we like to call Princess Goofy and the one on the right was done by critically acclaimed cake decorator known as Princess Girly Girl. They each won a medal for their cakes. Princess Goofy won for best blue snakes on a cake and Princess Girly Girl won for best colors on a cake.

Princess Newbie wanted to enter a cake but her drool melted the icing... maybe next year.

Overall I was little disappointed this year with the cake show. Every year I look forward to seeing the Master level enteries because they are always so amazing and complex. There were not many enteries this year and most of the people that entered the masters level competition won just because they were one of the only entries. I could have won with all three cakes this year if I had entered in the Masters level. The higher level cakes also were not challenging this year and were disappointing in a way. The begginer level cakes were so much better than several of the higher level cakes.

Also I disagreed with the judging on many of the cakes. There were some real stand out cakes that did not medal at all while cakes that had only one technique, fondant figures, won everyime. I just wish that cakes that attempt harder but not always as popular techniques had a better shot at being recognized... but Ill get off my soap box now and go change a diaper.

Cake Show Part 1

Here's just a few cakes from this weekend. More info. on the cake show will be posted after my kids go to bed but I'm breaking up the posts since there are so many pictures. These are not pictures of my cakes and I do not know who did them but they are all great!!

Squirrel!

Great details! Beginner cake

one of my absolute favorites... also a beginner cake

We loved these cookies

This looks so real!

my #1 favorite cake of the entire weekend. The details and stringwork was amazing.

Birfday wishes

Have I ever told you about my wonderful neighbor? She brings me cookies and eggs when I need them. I owe her practically everything inside of the grocery store because I have borrowed it all. She watches our dogs when we have to go out of town and even watched them when we evacuated for Hurrican Ike. For those of you that don't realize what that means, just imagine her wading across our street several times during the heavy storms to let the dogs in and out of our house. Now that's a good neighbor.

Have I ever told you about my Mother-in-law? I was truly blessed when God picked His Royal Highness for me because I inherited my Mother-in-law. She is the one that drives over 5 hours to babysit our kids!  The princesses receive care packages from her on a weekly basis and she occasionally requests an emergency picture of her grandkids to help her make it through the day. Ok, she requests this on a daily basis.  Last week she sent me a message requesting a picture of Princess Newbie ASAP.  Well, Princess Newbie had just woken up from a nap and was not a happy camper so I sent her a picture of Princess Newbie crying. The phone rang within seconds of me pressing send so that she could find out why her grandbaby was crying. I love it! The love she shows to our entire family is outstanding and I've learned a lot about service to others from her

.

Have I told you that both of them were born on this weekend about 25 years ago?

Happy Birthday to you! You are both womderful women!

Here's my gifts to you: a beautiful cake

and a picture of a gorgeous baby... just the picture.. no you can't have the baby

Newest Cake

This is my newest cake that I did for a Sweet 16 party. This picture does not do it justice. I was running out the door and just snapped a few great pictures. I even forgot to wipe the cornstarch off the front of the cake before I took the picture! I still love it.

Gobble Till You Wobble

These cupcakes are old and these photos are blurry. Now you know where I stand.

I made these cupcakes two years ago but I found the pictures tonight when I was going through the old pictures on our hard drive. This is the perfect time to show you them! You will have time to make them for your kids thanksgiving feasts, well some of you might. These would also be the perfect dessert to bring to a get together this weekend.

They are so simple to make. Frost a cupcake with light brown frosting. If you want to use canned frosting (yuck.. agh. .uck...) just mix chocolate and vanilla together to get lighter brown. Ice the cupcake with a thick layer of frosting on top.

Take gel icing colors you buy at the store and make big rainbows using different colors. Now take a toothpick and drag from the outside of the cupcake into the middle, going around the outside edge of the cupcake. This makes the tail feathers.

Next, top the cupcake with a Nutter Butter cookie. Add eyes and the red hangy thing (I don't know the name of it) using the gel icing. I added a beak using banana laffy taffy cut into a small triangle.

Voila'! Finished Turkey cupcakes. Now go out and Gobble till you Wobble!

                                                      

In the Beginning.....

In the beginning there were cakes, and cakes were goooood!

In honor of the fact that I am having a horrible sinus attack and the fact that I am busy packing for a little trip tomorrow, I'm just going to post a few photos of old cakes. El Cakes are viejo y modelo. "The cakes are old and moldy." That line from the movie, Encino Man, was the first spanish sentence that I ever learned except they said that the cheese is old and moldy. Cakes taste much better, so I went with cake on this one.

These are a few pictures from the first year that I started decorating cakes. I look back now and can see how far I've come and it makes me kinda proud. I still have a lot further to go to live up to some of my cake idols like Ruth Rickey and Bronwen Webber.  Although the learning process has been fustrating at times, it is so fun to decorate a cake that people love. Most people won't notice all the flaws that I notice but I still need to do my best.

So here's a little walk down memory lane, also known as icing overdose.....

my first baby shower cake. Really cute but do you realize that you eat a baby?

I love this christmas cake. It is really easy for beginners. I might do one again this christmas and post a tutorial.

My first two tiered cake. The icing was literally melting off the cake. Yes, buttercream icing can melt in high temps and high humidity. Welcome to Houston, we have both those qualifications on a daily basis.

Another Dora cake. This was the first time trying to make my own fondant. Dora looked like she had just run a marathon and hadn't showered in weeks. Everything had a greasy sheen to it. I never tried that fondant again!

The first birthday cake that someone paid me to do. So many flaws on this one! Can you see the cake peeking through on the bottom left of the cake? You can't spot all the flaws, but trust me... I know they are there.

Apple Spice Cake with Caramel frosting and royal icing snow flakes. Yum-o. We couldn't even wait to take a picture before we carved that sucker up.

Another baby shower cake. I really liked this cake. I can see some beginner flaws but I had a lot of fun with it and that's what counts!

I'm sure there will be more cake triumphs and some more disasters but at least I love doing it!

Tomorrow I leave for DFW area to visit friends and family. I'll be gone a week. I'm planning on taking my laptop but chances are it will still be sitting under my bed when I pull out of the driveway. So if you don't see me for a week, I don't have the swine flu, I'm just having technical difficulties.

Newest Cake

Tuesday was a crazy day. I was rushing Princess Goofy to the Doctor because she was sick and her breathing was horrible. They did a flu test and a strep throat test that both came back negative. They went ahead and started her on some medicine and gave her a breathing treatment. We were there for two hours in one small room with a baby, a sick princess and a hyper princess. Finally they told me that she had pneumonia and I needed to take her to the hospital to get a chest xray. agh!

We got to the hospital and the hyper princess just couldn't stay still any longer. She was standing on chairs in the waiting room and laying on the tables. oh well. I had enough on my plate already, I was not going to worry about her standing on the chairs.

To make a long story short, Princess Goofy's chest xray came back negative for pneumonia. The doctors are not sure why she was so sick and her breathing was so bad. She's still on some major antibiotics and lots of breathing treatments everyday. Her cough is horrible sounding but coughs can sometimes be good for your body if they are productive. I tell myself that being productive is good for my body everyday. Then I lay on the couch and eat bon bons.

So in the midst of all this, I got a call asking me to make a cake for thursday for our friend, Robyn. Anyone else and I would have said no. But this was Robyn..... She is our preacher's wife but friend first. She LOVES children and especially our children. (I knew she was smart). She has held all our children while they were being dedicated, prayed for a major healing over Princess Girly Girl, opened her house to us after hurricane Ike, and always been there for me. So I said yes. The church wanted a cake in the shape of a heart with children on it.

I had a lot of fun with this cake. I love black and green color combinations and I found out from Robyn's facebook page that green is her favorite color. Thanks facebook! See, facebook is for friends and stalkers alike. Drawing the stick figures was a lot of fun but I did get a lot of questionable characters on one side.

In the end, this cake was a ton of fun to do and given to someone with the world's largest heart. And the best thing is that princess goofy is pretty much back to normal except for the cough. She even fell out of her chair and landed on some strange man tonight when we were out to dinner. That is totally normal for her.

Newest Cake

Cakes are hard to decorate when you have a fussy 2 month old. Add bulging sides and cracked icing and it becomes almost impossible. Even though it was a stressful night, I love how this one came out last night. The sides are not perfect but overall, I think it's beautiful.

My last post was january 13th. eek! I stopped posting then so I could start working on my cakes for the cake show and had planned on casually posting personal updates between now and then. However, 1st trimester tiredness followed by both girls being sick with strep and the flu, then followed by them giving me the flu, prevented all of this from happening. So... Here I am! Back from Austin and the Sugar Arts Cake show. Life can finally get back to normal if I even know what that means. The last week before the show was crazy! I was up until wee hours of the morning every night working on the cakes. Every cake at the show gets a critique sheet afterwards with things that the judges like or what they would have liked you to have done better. The last cake had a critique sheet that mentioned several times that I needed more detail. The bad thing was that I didn't have any time to do anymore detail! I was up until 3 am thursday night working on then worked on it all day friday up until the second we left for Austin. Hopefully if I am able to go next year with a 5 month old, then I will not have the flu the week before and will have more time to get things done!

So today I'm just going to post a ton of pictures! First I'll show you my cakes that I took to the show.

This is the Peacock wedding cake. I did not place with this one and the critique sheet said that my fondant feathers were too thick, I totally agree. The judges also like to see decorations all around the cake for wedding cakes. I personally don't like that look so I do what I'm happy with. I love this cake except for the fat feathers.

This is the Yellow Rose of Texas Cake. I placed second in the adult intermediate division. The bandanna is hand piped and the plaque on top is hand painted. I really enjoyed this cake. All the fondant is hand painted as well. I need an airbrush!

These are my Ruby Red Slippers. You can't see it but they have individual sequins made from fondant covering the entire cake. This is the cake that the judges wanted to see more detail on. They wanted me to shade the bricks on the yellow brick road and add textural grass. This is the only cake that I really feel like it should have won but didn't. Each shoe took 6 hours to place the sequins on. Oh well, I tried my hardest.

Apparently I forgot to take a picture of my last entry. I'll try to get that up in a day or so.

Now I'll show you some pictures from the show. I did not do these cakes and I do not have the names of the people that did. Again, the following cakes are not my work. This pig was in my category with the shoes. It didn't win either but it should have!

This dog won the category that the Ruby Red Slippers were in.

This was a beautiful cake that didn't win anything but it should have! The fishes were all hand painted! This was one of my favorites.

Done by Ruth Rickey, one of my cake heroes. She place either second or third with this in the masters division.
Placed first in adult advanced

This cake placed but I don't remember what place or what division. It is one of my favorites from the show.

The rat cake above is one of my favorites! It is so cute and has so much detail.

The goose only won second place in adult advanced sculpted cake. It was amazing!

The Geisha won first in Adult Inter. special techniques. It was beautiful and the kimono was hand painted. This horrible picture does not do it justice!

This horse head won First in Adult Masters Sculpted cake and also Best of Show! That means she got a huge silver punch bowl and some cash. It was amazing with such detail! Definitely deserved that honor! Below is the silver platters that went to the Best of the Division and Show cake winners. Next year I plan on bringing a few of these home.