These adorable elephants were for a baby shower!
I used the same basic design as the elephants for this circus party, but in boy colors!
I’m so obsessed with these I will probably do some for my own someday baby shower. (No I’m not pregnant so don’t get excited.)
Filed under Cookies
Remember these cookies I made for a baby shower last year? Well this little guy just turned 1 on Saturday!!
His favorite thing is Yo Gabba Gabba, so naturally the parents went all out!
After much deliberation, we decided on one large cake for the guests, and one personal little cupcake for Baby Jude! It was his first time having sugar, and we had some dietary restrictions, so I made him a Dairy Free cupcake with Vegan Frosting… recipe will come later this week!
Without further ado, here is the cake I made for Jude!
On the sides of this tall cake I did each of the characters…
(oops we had a little cake accident next to Toodee up there..)
I surprised the parents and made the inside of the cake like a rainbow cake, but in the colors of each of the characters… the Brobee layer is even striped!
Poor little guy was exhausted after such a fun party!
In case you were wondering, yes there were a lot of colors on this cake!
Here is how I made the stripes for the green Brobee layer:
Pour a small amount of batter into the center of the pan. With the other color, pour a small amount of batter directly in the center of the pan again, right on top the first circle. Go back to the first color and do this again, right in the center of the circles. As you add more, the layers push out and create the above ringed affect. When you cut into the cake, you will see the vertical stripes! (This can be done with black and white or chocolate and vanilla to look like zebra stripes!)
Filed under Cakes
So I have been a little marshmallow crazy lately, thanks to Shauna Sever‘s book Marshmallow Madness. Instead of drawing this out, I thought I would just share some pictures of the many mallows I have been creating lately…
Milk Chocolate (my brother’s favorite):
Key Lime Pie:
Bubblegum (my coworkers’ favorite):
Vanilla (my husband’s favorite), but pretty colors:
So far my favorite is funfetti!
Filed under Marshmallows
A young lad in a family that we are very close to graduated high school (from my high school!) last week. He is the youngest son of my old swim coach. I offered to make cookies for his graduation party, and his mom gladly accepted.
I was discussing designs with my mom, and I knew I wanted to do something swimming related because the entire family was very immersed in the swimming world. My mom told me that he was “not that into swimming” and that it was mostly the older brother who had been interested in it. She said the younger only did it because his dad was the coach. I thought she was crazy, but I had kind of put off the idea anyway…
Then came the high school swim team’s awards night. My swim coach was retiring after 18 years of coaching high school, so a sort-of surprise party was arranged to bring in as many old swimmers as possible and flood the audience at the awards night. (I made and brought 6 batches of kettle corn for the event!) It was there that his youngest son, who’s “not that into swimming” won award after award, and it was obvious that he was one of (if not the) fastest/best guy on the team. I concluded that my mom was undoubtably wrong and that I was doing some sort of swimming cookies after all.
(When I told the graduate this story, he laughed and said he was more into swimming than his older brother!)
I ended up just doing one swimming themed cookie, because too many designs would have made me crazy. These are my high school colors, with a “splash” of “pool” blue.
I made graduation caps, stars, circles with our high school initials on them, and fancy plaques with the graduate’s name.
At my high school, the girls wear red robes and the boys wear black.
Here are the swimming cookies. For those not immersed in the swimming world, the red and black dots are lane lines that are strung the length of the pool to separate the lanes. At my high school, our swim team had a tight budget, so our school colors lane lines only came out for special occasions like a swim meet.
Here are all the cookies on the platter. I love how the blue gives it a pop!
Oh yeah and I did one 2012 cookie. I wanted to do more but I thought it would be too fragile.
Go Lancers!
What are the chances? Two back-to-back circus birthdays for 2 year olds? One is for a boy and one is for a girl. You will see the girl’s circus birthday later this week.
I want to start by saying I LOVE the circus. I went every year as a kid. Even when I got older and didn’t yet have kids to take with me, I still loved to go. Oddly though, I don’t like clown stuff much. I don’t mind the actual clowns at the circus, but I don’t like clown dolls, pictures, figurines, etc. And I’ve never even seen It or Chuckie or anything scary. I don’t know, they just weird me out. Sometimes when I do to Chevy’s, there’s this clown there who makes balloons for the kids. She kinda creeps me out too. Maybe I just prefer a safe clown distance when they’re real.
Anyway, I didn’t make clown cookies. I didn’t have a good cutter… and what I was envisioning was not translating to paper well and not really “findable” through a google search. For some reason people think clowns in cookie form need to be wearing pointy party hats, although I’ve never seen a real-life clown wearing a party hat. Ever.
So I made circus tents. I found a few images through google search that I liked, but they were made with royal icing, so I had to adapt to my own style. Here is what I came up with:
I am SO in love with how they turned out!
We also did some #2’s for the 2-year old birthday boy.
I bagged them up to be favors, and attached these cute little tags the mama found. It’s hard to read in this pic but it says “Thank you for coming to my party.”
I also made cupcakes for this circus party. There were red yellow and blue striped cupcakes with cute little toppers…
…as well as a few balloon decorated cupcakes for a special display.
and here is a picture of the whole treat table!
I love Easter colors!
The butterflies are a new cutter I bought recently. Much cuter than the round-winged Wilton butterflies I had before.
I wanted to make only eggs, but my friends (who I do a cookie decorating party with) wanted other shapes too…)
I love sprinkles. It’s like glitter. Makes everything better.
The rest were done with stencils and Wilton color spray.
I icing them solid white…
Then layed out the stencil on top (sorry no picture)…
Then went outside because the color spray flies everywhere… and kept spraying until it got a nice dark color. Waited a few minutes, then removed the stencil to find these beauties!
I bought my stencil on Amazon. This paticular one can be found here.
And this is why my husband does not help me decorate…
…and yes there is a “base coat” of sprinkles under the icing…
Filed under Cookies
For a little guy’s 2nd birthday, the theme was Rio the movie. I’ve never seen it, but it’s about a blue parrot. Looks pretty cute, I need to add it to my Netflix queue.
I made Rio cookies, along with 2’s on little circles, and packaged them up similar to the bridges I did recently.
I also made parrot colored cupcakes… I used the same technique for these as the rainbow cupcakes I made here and here.
We’re back with my BabyCakes! These are what I refer to as cake balls, not to be confused with cake pops.
Here are the first ones I made a while back… along with some tips and some mistakes. (Number one tip being use a piping bag/zip top bag to fill the reservoirs.)
These were for a 15 year old’s birthday party, and the request was for red velvet. My manual that came with the babycakes had a recipe for red velvet, so I used that.
(I have never made, or even EATEN red velvet until I made these. Not bad, not bad… maybe that’s why the world is currently obsessed?)
The recipe made about 40 cake balls.
For the icing, I wasn’t sure what to use. For the lemon cake balls, I used my regular cookie icing. It was light and soft, and perfectly complimented the lemon.
For these, I wanted something heavier/thicker, but still somewhat soft. (As opposed to hard chocolate shell or something like that. In the end I had a combination of the two. I mixed together candy melts with a tiny bit of milk, then melted it in the microwave. The mixture was thin, so I added a bit of powdered sugar to make it more like icing. It was actually easier to dip these balls into than regular candy melts.
I don’t know exact measurements, but I would say I used about 1/4 cup candy melts and a teaspoon or so of milk. I melted for 20 seconds, then stirred until it was completely combined. I added about a spoonful of powdered sugar, but more can be added to get a good consistency. Too thin, add powdered sugar… too thick, add a few drops of milk. Pretty sure you can’t really screw this up.
The end result was colored (from the candy melts – no food coloring needed), vanilla flavored, dried well so that they could be handled, and was soft to bite into. Like a frosting shell. I will definitely be making this again for cake balls!
Here is the inside! Pure fluffy cake…
psst! – Kendra, see my little clippy on the piping bag up there? These things are heaven. Don’t leak and easy peezy to get on and off.
Filed under Cakes
I have been busy busy making sugar cookies lately. Like really busy.
Just thought I would share some pics rather than go into tons of detail about everything… enjoy!
Above are pictures of bridges and hard hats I made. I work at a bridge building company and some boy scouts came to visit to learn about engineering. These were their take-home treats! The hard hats are trimmed baseball hat cookies.
Above are some monkeys I did for a little boy’s first birthday party. Brown food coloring and I are not friends. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
The circles and onesies were for a baby shower. Too many boys I tell ya, we need some girls!
The California’s were for my husband to take to work. He works for a company that makes camping and tour reservations for national and state parks. California parks just opened yesterday for reservations so he thought these would be a good addition to their potluck. He also works as an intern for the state of CA a couple days a week, so he brought a couple in for his coworkers there.
These were for a surprise “baby is coming soon” party we had for a male coworker. They don’t know the sex yet and s/he is due in March, so we went with green!
Made these bunco cookies for my grandma. The little guys are so fun!
These cookies were for Cody’s Catholic confirmation. The silver crosses were iced first, sprayed with Wilton luster spray, then the rest of the cookie was iced.. Very carefully, haha.
There will be more cookies and other treats coming soon…
PS. I have been so busy that I didn’t have time to do St. Patty’s Day cookies. 😦
Filed under Cookies
Cookie Carrie 