Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sunflowers and Ladybugs!
Butterfly Rainbow Cake
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!
Saturday, February 11, 2012
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!
Saturday, February 4, 2012
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.
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 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!
Shopping and Cars Cakes
Interesting sidenote: I thought the cake that was due was a Barney cake. I even made green frosting and frosted the cake before I realized! So I scraped off the green and made up a fresh batch of soft pink. I'm so glad I caught my mistake! I really like the way it turned out. I did shopping bags with tissue "paper" (actually gumpaste) on my American Girl cake and I really love the way fondant and gumpaste move and lay.
 |
| Looks like he's saying "Ka-CHOW!" |
The Lightning McQueen cake is for my niece Dollbaby. Her mom and I have been planning her party and working on the decorations for a while now, so this was like the climax of all that planning. My hubby hung out with me in the kitchen while I caked it up. We had a good time talking and just being around each other (he's been working 7 days a week, 10 hour days for a while now, and he's going to school two nights a week!) I didn't have a real "plan" for this cake, other than the few things that Dollbaby told me she wanted. She said she wanted red on top, blue on the bottom, lightning zigzags, and "a Lightning Mcqueen on top, but not a plastic one. One made out of frosting". Oh my. Me thinks I have spoilt the child! :) It makes my little heart pitter patter. The McQueen on top is made out of smooshed cake and frosting (think: inside of a cake pop) and is covered in fondant. The cake itself is iced in buttercream with fondant decor. I wanted it to be an impressive size, so I went with three tiers, 10, 8, and 6 inches. The middle tier I tied to the party decorations (I'm going to write another post about that later. The party is today so I will take lots of pictures!) The candles were pretty cool, they are spirals and I got them in the cake decorating section at, you guessed it, Walmart.
Well, lovelies, I'm still covered in powdered sugar and I am going to get cleaned up. Till next time!
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Princess Birthday Cake
The flowers have inedible gem centers. I just liked the look so much more than piped centers, it gave a certain pizzazz.
I think I like the back better than the front!
I have a lot of cake stuff coming up and I'm feeling the pressure! Tomorrow is a Barney cake, then a Lightning McQueen cake for Dollbaby's birthday, and next weekend is busy busy busy too! Everyone is having a birthday in February!
Ah yes. I made this little smash cake for Stinkie's friend last weekend. I also made another cake, but I lost my iPod so I didn't get a picture of it :(. That's okay, everything was SO frustrating about those two cakes, so I'm not incredibly happy with how they came out. It's okay. Both cakes were loved by their owners, and this princess cake made up for it!
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