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Yet Another Catch Up Post

Here are a few cakes I've done and haven't blogged about.  The Barbie Doll cake is actually a Bratz Doll Cake.  I made it for my niece MPie.  I love my airbrush kit.  The whole dress is covered in pearl and was so pretty.

She looks like she's dancing in a garden of little flowers!

The cupcakes were simple and classy.

Batman and Robin cake for a birthday party!

Pocoyo and Terminator cake for a Daddy and Daughter combo party.  If you haven't seen this show, you totally have to.  The episode I used for inspiration was a dance-off.

The back was "torn" looking to look like the cake is a robot inside.

A nautical Steampunk Octopus cake.  This was really fun to do and I used my airbrush on the whole thing.  The octopus and gears are gumpaste and the cake is wrapped in a mixture of modeling chocolate and fondant.

The gold was very shiny and the silver was standout, the copper was my favorite though.  I bought a wood grain impression mat for the sides and I didn't really like how it turned out.  I had to airbrush the "seams" of the wood to make the lines visible.

I love the gears on the side!  I made them using the daisy cutter and a round cutter.  First, cut a daisy, then use the appropriately sized round cutter to cut the tips off.

I made these cupcakes for Icing Smiles, this great organization that gathers volunteers from all over the place to make cakes for gravely ill children and their siblings.  These cupcakes went to the Ronald McDonald house and I just happened to have a Cat in the Hat movie that I was able to give them for a fun themed movie night.  I really look forward to my next cake with Icing Smiles. The staff there is awesome and I love giving a little of myself to bring a smile.

A Cake and an Angry Birds Universe Party!

  

I have been really slacking on both making cakes and taking photos of said cakes.  I just haven't had that drive to accomplish recently.  However, I have done a couple and one of them is this Rawr Dinosaur cake for a friend's child.  The dino is made out of rice krispie treats and fondant.  I used the #3 tip to make the "scales" impression and brushed on green petal dust for a nice shimmer.  It was fun to make and I loved making it!
Now, the most exciting part is that my son's birthday is coming up!  I love to plan birthday parties and being that my kiddo is turning 5, and wants an Angry Birds party, I'm really excited.  There's so much to work with when planning an Angry Birds party, so much inspiration to draw from!  I have of course used Pinterest to find many things and in the process of doing lots of AB crafts, I have found myself inspired.  (AUTHOR'S NOTE:  I did plan on covering his party in a few blog posts instead of all crammed into one so I can explain each thing, but then I put this blog on hold and didn't keep up, so here it all is.)

  The first is the Pig Pinata.  I had originally asked a friend to make the pinata, then realized that that is a pretty labor-intensive task to ask a friend to do and started off on my own.  I used a large paper lantern they had on clearance at Target ($7.50, and it came with the bottle lamp kit).  It's a 12" I think.  Anyway, I used that for the basic shape and put 3 layers of newspaper paper mache on.  The first layer was pretty tricky and the lantern warped a bit, but I figured it was really not that big of a deal.  If I had it to do again I'd do the first layer in a few sessions and not hang it to dry.  After putting on about 3 layers, I did a layer of white computer paper.  The paper mache glue I used was just about half and half white flour and water, sort of the consistency of pancake batter.  Tear the paper into 1" strips about 6" long, dip them in the glue, and squeegee the excess off with your fingers prior to applying to the lantern.  I left the hole in the top open and poured the pinata filler in.  I used toys instead of candy and the slingshot fodder (more on that later).  I bent the two little metal circles up so they would serve as easy hanging handles.  I hung it by bungee cords and stuck a crown made out of paper on it.  King Pig, yo.

The cupcakes were fun to make, and not as technical as I'd feared.  They are different flavors (as shown on the following picture) with fondant.
The smash cake (okay, yes, he's old enough for just a regular cupcake, but how boring is that!?) was the Black Bird, the bomb.  That's Stinkie's favorite.  He was impressed.

The goody bags were just plain paper bags.  I cut out the faces and glued them on while watching Stinkie learn how to roller skate.  Cuz that's how I roll.  Inside the bags are slingshots that I bought off Oriental Trading company and some felt masks I made.  The slingshots were not the greatest quality but they held together and served their purpose.  I made these baked cotton balls for slingshot ammo and loaded the pinata with the balls.
Here's the kids eating cake and wearing their masks.  Too fun!  I used this pattern for the masks but then altered it, because I didn't really like how low it came on my kid's face.

A green paper lantern bought on clearance turns into a pig with the addition of a nose!
Stinkie wanted all the different Angry Birds games represented.  Well, maybe I wanted to do that.  Okay.  It was all me.  He couldn't decide so I went with and Angry Birds Universe party.  Blame my inner Martha.  So anyway, here's the different tables.

Space Table, with Galaxy Playdoh (black Playdoh with tons of glitter mixed in) and Red Vines.  I made these signs for each of the tables by printing stuff off the internet and coloring them in with crayons.  Haha.    There are paper lanterns painted as planets hanging above the Space table.  You can see the food table in the background.  The food was pulled pork (get it?  Dead pigs.  Har de har har.) and rolls with fruit skewers.  The fruit skewers were a chunk of fresh pineapple, three blueberries, a strawberry, and a green grape (representing the yellow, blue, and red birds and a pig).  They were a big hit but took a lot of time.

Some of the plushies were homemade using the link here, and some of them were bought from Costco as dog toys.  Hey don't judge, the kid toys were $10-20 a piece, but the dog toys were $10 for 6!  And yeah, I totally bought the table toppers from Party City.  I had a lot of tables to fill!  I like the AB tablecloth but it would have been fine to use regular tablecloths.

Anyway, I needed the plushies because I made bowling pins out of knockoff Sprite 2 liters and some coloring sheets that I taped on.  The cans in the foreground I saved from making crockpot chili, spraypainted dark green, then painted noses on.  So easy, and boom, there were two neat little games.  The kids used their slingshots on the cans.  I took a kickball and painted the face of a red bird on it for the bowling game.  I put enough water in the "pins" to fill them about 1/5-1/4 full.  You can buy the kickballs already made but I saved $7 doing it myself.  Dang.  I didn't get a picture and now it's sitting out in my back patio all covered in mud.

For the Angry Birds Seasons table, I did Easter, Christmas, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween and Valentine's Day.  Easter was the cookie pops I got from the dollar store and the egg streamer shown.  I made it out of paint chips and talk about a pain in the rear.  Christmas was sprigs of pine and a wreath (not pictured).  Valentine's day was the hearts I cut out with a heart punch.  St. Patrick's was little felt leprechaun hats I made out of scraps and hot glue.  There's one hidden in the cookies. Halloween was some paper lanterns with Halloween stuff on them.  The "Angry Art" was coloring pages took out of dollar store AB coloring books and a bunch of crayons.

The following pictures are here for two reasons.  To show you the Angry Birds Rio table (drinks) and how massively it was raining while I set this whole thing up by myself.  Whoa.  I thought we were going to be rained out completely, but the rain stopped 5 minutes before the party started and tons of friends actually showed up!

The monkey and the birds were little blowups that I got in a grab bag from another mom here in the Richmond area for $5 from her kid's Rio party.  I used that table as the hydration station.

Wow.  See the puddle!?  The entire ground was water.  You can see the leis hanging there, and there are hair clips set in the centerpiece for the taking.

Not pictured are the glass marbles.  I used a 1" punch to cut out printed birds and pigs, then glued one to the bottom of those clear rocks you can get at the dollar store.  You just put a drop on the bottom of the clear glass marble and press it onto the picture, then paint clear nail polish over the paper after it dries.  In hindsight, it was probably not the best idea to provide kids with slingshots and glass marbles.  Nobody put the two together though until after the party!  You can see them in the foreground of this picture, on the purple tablecloth.  I used them as table scatter.

Also, the ruffled streamers are like the ones I made last year for his Mario party.  You just get two colors and ruffle stitch them together.  I'm so glad I did this because the humidity was through the roof and regular streamers would have collapsed.  The stitching makes the streamers much more hardy.

  That's all I can think of for now!  And now I have to get to posting all the cakes I've done since his birthday!  I have definitely slacked off and now I'm just doing cakes that strike my fancy.

TaaTaa, Friendlies!

On a Hiatus

It's been a while since I posted (goodness!  A really long time)!  I have done a few cakes (and even forgot to photograph some of them) but mostly I've been taking a break.  There has been some pretty heavy family emergencies that have left me not feeling much like making cakes, and I've been recovering for a few months.  I think I'm finally feeling better and I'm ready to start up doing all this again!

Let's see, the last cake I posted here was WAY back in March!?  I guess that sounds about right.  I ended up taking an emergency trip to Oregon in April and then was blessed to be able to visit again in July for my mother's 60th birthday and bake her a cake.  That was one of the ones I didn't catch a picture of :(.

Well, enough about that, and onto the cakes!

This Mario cake was so fun to make!  It is chocolate on bottom and yellow cake on top, with vanilla buttercream and fondant accents.  I love how the Mario came out!

Another Thomas the Tank Engine cake!  I swear I've made more Thomas cakes than anything else!  They added the train after delivery.

Noah's Ark cupcakes for a baby shower.  I thought it would be crazy to make but it ended up being exhilarating.  I wish I had gotten better pictures.  Everyone raved about the new recipe I'm trying out!

I have a few cakes in the works for this weekend and I'm really happy about it!   

Princess and the Frog go Bowling!

Let me start off saying that I had a major case of zero confidence when I started this cake.  The first thing I made was the crown, and I got to use my brand new silicone flower/leaf impression mat.  This thing is awesome.  So anyway, it was really fun.  It's been a while since I made a cake and I got back into the spirit of things really quickly.  I made up the bowling pins by making a template out of paper and using that to guide my cuts on the gumpaste.  I made the bottom part of the pins long, so there is gumpaste sticking into the cake as well as wooden picks.  I thought it would give a little extra stability.  The characters were fun to make.  I was giggling as I made Ray, the Cajun firefly.  I love the teeth.

I used my old recipe and I have to say I think I'm going back to it.  It took me over a year to develop it and it is dense and moist.  The new recipe is a little easier to make and it is more consistent, but goodness, this cake was good!

The bowling ball is two little cakes I made in my Wilton Wonder Mold, layered with buttercream and carved into a ball, and covered in marbled marshmallow fondant.

I also made 16 cupcakes to complement the cake.  The cake pops in this photo were made by another amazing cake lady!  It was fun to talk cake for a while.  The kids had a ball eating the bowling pins and the characters.

Sunflowers and Ladybugs!

This cute little sunflower and ladybug cake was FUN to make!  It was my first time making sunflowers out of buttercream, but it proved to be simple enough.  The ladybugs were so interesting to place, and the little crawl marks made me giggle.  Cakes like this are why I love to make cakes.  The cake itself is yellow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.

Butterfly Rainbow Cake

This cake is for a wonderful lady's 80th birthday!  While it didn't come out exactly like I had imagined it, I was still very happy with it.  It was about 2' tall, 9" round at the base.
I cheated on the butterflies.  I used paint chips and a great little Martha Stewart punch.  I know, I should have made the 100 butterflies out of gumpaste - but I'm lazy, and nobody minded.  It's buttercream frosting and filling covering chocolate and almond cake.

Sakura Cake

I really enjoyed making this simple Sakura cake.  Cherry blossoms are too cute and pretty!  The cake itself is my old yellow recipe.  There is a monogrammed letter at the top, "K" for Kristen, my sister-in-law.  I was given zero direction for her birthday cake, just that it was her 30th birthday (yay!)  I frosted the whole cake (the light pink) and used my airbrush to pearlize the whole thing, then added chocolate frosting "branches" and border dots.  I liked the idea of the randomness of them.  The flowers are fondant with chocolate buttercream centers. As a finishing touch, I airbrushed some silver on the branches for highlighting and pearlized the blossoms.

  One tip I would like to share about tiered cakes is how to stack them without making it impossible to remove the top tier without tearing off the buttercream on the top of the bottom tier.  I make the dowels just a tiny bit taller than they should be and put a massive amount of (sifted) powdered sugar where the top tier will rest. The powdered sugar absorbs perfectly into the bottom buttercream and makes it a little more durable.

  YAY for cakes!

Jerry Garcia

There are just so many Dead fans in my life it seems.  My wonderful, awesome hubster turned 37 on the 9th and I wanted to make him a cool cake, so I picked this one!  I built up the features using cake spackle (cake mushed up with some buttercream), dyed the frosting, and smoothed it on with my fingers.  I was a pure mess by the end of it.  The hair I just applied with different size round tips.  I wrote lyrics real quickly around the sides to "Saturday  Night".  It seemed to fit!

Happy Birthday Honey!  I love you!

Disney Pixar Cars Party on the Cheap!

My niece Dollbaby is turning 6 already!  Almost time for a new moniker, I guess.  Well, anyway.  She had her birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese this year.  I'm not too hip on Chuck, to be honest.  It's loud and assaults the senses as well as dims imagination (all in my opinion, of course.  Kids go crazy over it!)  Their parties are always a hit with the kids, but are very cookie cutter.  When Dollbaby called me to describe in detail what she wanted her cake to be, I was shocked to find out she wanted a Lightning McQueen cake!  This is the princess girl, the makeup and skirts girl!  Cars?!  What is going on?  But deep down I was thrilled she is growing up and getting different interests.  Do we perhaps have a tomboy in the horizon!?  Be still my heart!

  I started using Pinterest to keep track of ideas.  The first thing is the invitation of course.  I got my inspiration here.   I am pleased with how it came out, though I'm sure they could have been nicer and I didn't include an envelope.  They are pretty big too, like 8" tall and 4" wide.  I like that though, it adds to the awesome.  I made the insert on my computer using a really old program I had on hand called CD Stomper.  It's a really cool program, but the downside is that you can't convert the file type (.cd2) to pdf for printing by, say, Office Depot.  I printed off the inserts (2 per page) and cut them out.  The red is just construction paper.  I thought about buying red cardstock but DANG, I'm not paying $13 for 500 sheets of red paper when I only need 16.  Cheapo here, people!  The construction paper was $2 and I have half the pack left for other crafts.  I cut the construction paper along the tall side to fit the height of my inserts and marked where to place the inserts.  I used a glue stick for pasting and my scale (fancy engineer's ruler.  I used to do engineer's work) to smooth.  Then I used the scale to make crisp clean fold lines on each invite.  The checkered "wrap" I just printed off using my computer and a Nascar .jpeg (here) and cut into 2" strips.  I used the glue stick for those too.

The "seal" is just some old blank business cardstock I used a sharpie on with my ruler to make the borders and then drew a 6 on, and separated then glued to the left flap.  The whole invite is held closed with some light strength spray adhesive.  I think it's a little too strong, and next time I would use something like maybe that blue tacky silly putty type stuff, or something that is specifically for this type of thing.  We live and learn! Total cost for invites: $8 (estimate including ink, red paper, glue stick.  I had the spray adhesive on hand)
  The next thing is the party favors.  Since we are having the party at CEC, I thought that having something to identify the kids among the masses would be good.  I found the idea for pit passes on this blog and thought it was perfect.  I love the color scheme there too, and it is what I went with for inspiration.  I did want the passes to be more Lightning McQueen instead of generic racing, and that was easy since I  was making them from scratch!

I used the CD Stomper program again...and ran out of red ink quickly!  Holy cow!  I need to get a program that makes stuff I can convert ASAP.  After I got all the ones I could out of my printer cartridge, I hot glued some string to the backs.  Easy peasy.  Total  cost:  $0 because I had stuff on hand, but probably closer to $3 with ink and string included.
  Dollbaby's Mama (SIL) and I thought it would be cool to do a craft, since the party is 2 hours and each kid only gets 20 tokens.  The original idea was to have the kids paint their names onto shirts using pre-cut and ironed-on freezer paper stencils like I did with Stinkie here, but that is just too messy for CEC.... especially considering that the paint can't be washable!  So we got together one morning with two Hot Wheels monster trucks, white t-shirts in sizes 4 and 5, freezer paper, Xacto blades, an iron, and some paint.  First thing, we ran the trucks through some black paint and used the tires to make tracks.  While those dried, we cut out names from the freezer paper.  I just used a kids marker to write the names on.  I ironed the names onto the shirts and SIL painted.  She was so excited!  It was her first time doing the freezer paper stencils and they are pretty stinking cool.  This is how they came out:

I found that cutting out all the little insides of the O's and D's and whatnot made them too easy to lose, so I left them connected to the stencil and just made the final cuts right before ironing.  This was great.  We made 15 shirts, total cost $23 (with paint and freezer paper included).  Yes, spendy-ish, but I really wanted something to make the party pop and something that the kids could wear and remember her birthday party!  Here's my kiddo in one of the shirts!

This was especially great because there were so many kids at CeC and it was EASY to spot all our party goers and call them by name!
  Instead of goodie bags, I thought it would be cool to have reusable goodie BOWLS!  Cars has this 50's feel to me (and records are cheap and flashy) so I went with record bowls.  I mean, holy cow, 10 records for $1 at one of our local thrift stores (not Goodwill!  That place was 79 cents PER record!)  I picked through the ones without sleeves for the red, white, and black labels.  To make a record bowl, you just preheat the oven to around 300 and put the record in on a pizza pan for maybe 30 seconds.  Unless you have fingers of steel from baking for years like me, you'll want to wear gloves.  It will be weirdly floppy.  You can use a wide mouthed jar or another bowl, something made of glass or metal, to shape around.  Whatever you pick, shape your record how you want it and hold it in place until it cools (about 30 seconds).  I used a bowl to easily shape the records without scorching my hands.

Total cost: $2!!!  For 20!  OMG!
  I did buy a checkered flag tablecloth from Amazon.com that was spendy.  Oh well. We live and we learn.  I bought two red tablecloths from the dollar store to make sure we had enough area covered.  To tie the table design together, I made a runner.  It's a road.  Totally.  It's black construction paper I had on hand from Stinkie's last party where I bought tons of paper reams and didn't use the black.  So it was FREE, because I also had white paint on hand from other projects.  And it looks awesome and will tie the checkered tablecloth to the red seamlessly.  I love it.  I made a stencil out of another piece of paper so each piece would be identical and taped them end to end.

Total cost for tablecloth/runner: $8.  It could have been less but I bought the crazy expensive tablecloth :(.


 I made some custom scratch-its with my Microsoft Word business card document template and business cards.  I printed them off and put some packing tape over the image, then glued that to a slightly larger piece of construction paper.  The silver scratch-off part is just silver acrylic paint.  That's it.  Three coats or so until I couldn't see the image anymore.  Mater was the loser, McQueen was the winner.  I had three prizes and three winners!  They were just dollar store items, so total cost for this was $3 for prizes, minus ink, card paper, construction paper, paint, and tape.  All those things I had on hand.

The pennant banner was a pain to figure out because I couldn't find checkered paper OR fabric.  Eventually I found checkered felt at Hancock Fabrics in the kid craft section.  Thank goodness!  I cut triangles out of it and hot glued it onto a ribbon.  Boom. Done.  It came out awesome.  You can see it in the pictures but I didn't take a picture of it by itself.  We hung it by the balloons attached to the buckets and anchored the ends.  Great way to hang a banner over a table without walls to attach it to!  Total cost: $7 minus hot glue and ribbon (on hand).
There was a tattoo station.  I found 50 Cars tattoos at Michael's and promptly returned the $3 for 12 tattoos I got at Party City.

Total cost: $5.


These tissue pompoms were awesome. Just tissue and a rubber band.  They really made the centerpieces.  I didn't make them, the mama did!  The pails were borrowed from her work, so they were free!  The little flags sticking out of the three smaller ones were received free from a mommy website I frequent.  Total cost for centerpieces with balloons (blown up by the awesome CeC employees): $8

Here's the spare tires.  They are just chocolate covered mini donuts!  I wish I had crafted a sign for them but they were still cute.  Wonderful!  Donuts:  No idea how much they cost.  Mama bought them.

Here's the whole shebang.  Hang on to your lugnuts, it's awesomesauce.

So pretty much as original as a CeC party can be, right?  Dollbaby seemed to be having the time of her life, and all the kids love CeC.  The parents seemed blown away by the coolness, and can you blame them?  I almost felt bad for the other birthday groups....almost :)

Total cost?  $59!  Plus a few more for goody bag junk (candy).  It may not sound cheap but putting on a custom shindig isn't cheap.  I think there could have been a better deal on the shirts but they were bought on the fly.  I think I could have pulled it together for under $50.  Next time, Gadget!