Pokeball Birthday Cake

The kids had a joint birthday party for friends and they love Pokemon, so we had a Pokeball cake!

I used boxed cake mix and added oreo cookies to the mix before baking it in a baseball shaped cake mold. After the cake baked and cool, I frosted half of it with white icing. Then I tried to make red icing, but it turned out pink no matter how much food coloring I added.

Since there was less than an hour before the party was going to start: DISASTER!! But only temporarily.

Luckily, I spotted some cherries that we had in the fridge and they were exactly what the cake needed. And let me tell you, the fresh flavor that they added to the cake made me want to find a reason to use them on cake again!

The black banding part of the cake is made of crushed oreo cookies.

There were no leftovers.

So it was a success after all! Whew.

After we ate cake, the party was pretty much over. So. I cleaned up the yard. 

Moms always get stuck with the clean-up duties, but I made the best of it:

Resurrection and Cake

Last night, I resurrected some posts that got jacked up in the Blogger whatever-that-was a couple of weeks ago. That was fun. I was already having issues without all the technical difficulties going on with the blog. Apparently my Backpost Series threw some added wrenches in the mix. Oh well, some good words were lost, but others have been found. It's all good.

In other news, both my kids had birthdays in the last couple of weeks. I bought a cake for one and made a cake for the other. Funny how having a birthday on the weekend changes things, huh?

I'm trying not to beat myself up about the whole bought a cake thing. I work full time and have a very full life. Of course I'm going to have a hard time baking a cake during the week. I baked cupcakes for daycare, but pulling together a cake on top of that just ended up being too much for me. I'm not afraid to say and write for the world to see (haha) that I'm not superwoman. I can't do it all. So the boy got ice cream cake and chocolate chip cupcakes for daycare.

He's 3. It's cake. He was happy so I am, too. My husband thinks I beat myself up about this stuff too much. I think he's right.

My daughter's cake was a bit different since her birthday fell on the weekend. I had time to make up a cake without having to pull an all nighter. She wanted strawberries and oreo cookies, so I produced this:

Along with the ones on the outside, I added strawberries and oreos to the inside of the cake, too.

I was delicious (if I do say so myself!). We all had a hard time stopping at one piece.

And the best part about the whole thing is that it was super easy to make. I used a box of vanilla cake mix and made it up as directed. Before adding it to the pan, I mixed in 1 cup of oreo cookies and about a half cup of strawberries (it could have used more, I think). After that, I poured the batter into the pans and sprinkled more oreos on top.

The pink frosting I used was Pillsbury Strawberry flavored frosting. It had too much artificial strawberry flavoring in it for me, but the kids loved it. Definitely going to make that one again.

And, since I mentioned the cupcakes, here they are:

The other kids at daycare think I make the best cupcakes on the planet. We should totally make more desserts for kids. They totally appreciate it and will show you by making a big fuss about when they can have more. It's a good feeling. :)

What have you been making lately?

And out of the shadows comes...

Me!! :)

Hello! It's been so long and I've missed you!! Thank you for waiting around for me to get back.

The last months have been C-R-A-Z-Y! As I mentioned in the last post, we had two family members who were injured in the course of about 1-2 weeks. There were added duties and emergency road trips to be had. One is well again and the other has a very long road to recovery (LOVE YOU). And, in the interest of maintaining their privacy, I'm not going to go into what happened exactly. Bad stuff occurred. Now they're working to get well again. And we love them. And miss them. And stuff.

Any how, I'm glad to be back, that's for sure!

I thought the day after Halloween would be a fabulous time to return to blogging. You know, that way I could show off these babies:

Asajj Ventress

Anakin Skywalker

That's right, I made costumes this year. Star Wars Clone Wars costumes, to be exact. It was a lot of fun even if it was one more project (or three) that was keeping me away from here. And I've noticed that the more sewing knowledge I gain, the less sewing disasters I seem to have. And less disasters means it takes less time to get projects completed. Go figure. :)

(Plus, believe it or not, they don't sell Ventress costumes for kids. At least none that I could find. So there weren't a lot of options there. )

Making the Ventress costume gave me the opportunity to practice freezer paper stenciling technique again. Although, I'd like to say that I found out that freezer paper generally doesn't stick well to felt. Lucky for me, I had my face 10 centimeters away from what I was doing and noticed the freezer paper not doing it's job (yer fired, freezer paper) before I smeared paint on parts of the fabric that I didn't want it.

Also, french seams are freaking amazing and surprisingly easy. Learned that tidbit sewing the Anakin costume. :)

Julie 1 - Crafting Disaster Fairy 0

It was a good (holi)day.

So, what were you guys for Halloween? I'm excited to find out. Here is my costume:

Monster

While I made this one, I totally got the idea from Polkadot Robot. I had fully intended on buying one from them rather than making one myself, but I spent too much time deciding on a costume which didn't leave enough time for shipping to Alaska. You should totally stop by and check out their hoodies, though. They have some really cute characters to choose from.

PARTY POSTING: Rainbow Cake!!

**Told you I'd be making up for lost posts. You get two today--one with a tutorial!!**

You know one of the things that I love about having kids?

Rainbow colored birthday cake.

Isn't it beautiful!?! I love rainbows and I love cake. So it just seemed like a good idea to put one together. I'm glad my daughter had the idea. Got to love the limitless imagination of a 4 year old. :) I was just happy to be able to fulfill the request.

The whole process was a little bit of extra time from a one-color cake and a whole lot of extra mixing, but all around pretty fun.

It looks so innocent in the vanilla frosting, doesn't it?

And it turned out...rainbow-ish. Yeah, yeah, it probably would have helped if I hadn't accidentally reversed the order of the colors when I poured the cake batter into the pans. Know what? It still tasted just as good as if the colors had been in order. So I'll take it!

Here's how: Rainbow Cake Tutorial

Step 1)  Buy a box of white cake mix, vanilla frosting, olive/vegetable oil, and eggs. Also purchase gel food coloring. Must be gel and not the liquid kind we're all used to. GEL, people. That is where the vivid color comes from. I found it at Fred Meyers (Kroger) in Alaska, you can probably find it at some other comparable grocery store where you are.

Step 2)  Preheat oven and prepare the cake batter as directed on the box. Don't forget to only use egg whites or else your white cake will turn out yellow. I don't know if using them would effect the final color of your rainbow cake, but I figure that it's best to start out with a blank slate and opted to make the traditional white.

Step 3)  Split the cake batter into 6 equal portions. You should now have 6 separate bowls of white cake batter.

Step 4) Add the food coloring and mix well. I found that I had to add a lot of red to make the batter not look pinkish while I didn't have to add much blue, purple, or yellow before the color looked right. Just add the food coloring until you have your desired  color.

Step 5)  TAKE THE TIME TO DO THIS STEP! Grease and line with parchment paper two 8 or 9 inch round pans.

I found that even when I followed the directions and let the cake cool completely, the bottoms were still stuck to the pans. Lucky for me, I was planning on icing the cake anyway but if I hadn't then I'd have been really pissed. Save yourself the pain in the ass. Just line the pans ahead of time.

Step 6)  Slowly pour one color of cake batter at a time into the center of the pans.

For a rainbow, use the following sequence:

Pan 1 - Red, orange, yellow

Pan 2 - Blue, green, purple

(For a cake like mine, reverse that order.)

Step 7)  Bake as directed on the box. Remove from the oven and let cool completely in the pans.

Step 8)  Once completely cool, invert Pan 2 onto a cake platter or plate. Spread frosting on top of the layer.

If the cake puffs up in the middle too much to lay flat on the plate, then you can trim the first 1/4 to 1/2 inch off of the top before inverting the pan.

Step 9)  Invert Pan 1 on top of the frosted first layer using the same method to level the cake as in Step 7.

Step 10)  Frost the cake starting from the middle on the top and working your way to the outsides.

Step 11)  Enjoy your creation!

My daughter cleaned her plate completely, but her brother left this behind:

Yes, those are crumbs on the floor. 

Yes, the dogs liked the rainbow cake, too.

And after all that, if you're still feeling fiesty then you can make cupcakes too!

I love how little bubbles of the other layers of color rose to the surface while the cupcakes were baking. I almost didn't want to cover them with frosting because I liked the effect so much. Then I remembered who I was baking these for...

I don't think the kids at daycare would appreciate the colors on top as much as the frosting so I went ahead and covered this up:

Original un-tweaked recipe can be found here: Omnomicon's Rainbow Cake.

Thomas the Train and Friends partied at my house

Back in May I was all "Let's make as much stuff for the party as we can!" Remember that? Weren't those good times?

Well I was soon brought back to reality from that when one of the kids came down with a sickness. I was busy cleaning up messes, wiping noses, and making a sicky feel better. And then I had to go back to work and face a mountain of stuff that needed to be completed before June 1.

So we went on down to the good old party store and bought plates, napkins, cups, a table cloth, balloons, and most of the stuff for the goody bags. There was no bunting. There were no "I'm the birthday kid!" badges. And the kids still had a whole lot of fun. So those things didn't matter to them as much as they did to me. Go figure.

But! I did manage to make a few things. So as promised, here are a few of the things I made for the kids' Thomas and Friends birthday party.

Ticket Invitation

As you can see, the invitations were shaped like jumbo sized train tickets. I printed them out to be 3 inches wide by 6 inches long. I was hoping to make them actual ticket size, but when I printed them that small the font size was almost unreadable. I think they still turned out really cool. Definitely something for the scrapbooks!

I got the idea from something similar that I saw for sale online when I was looking up games for the party. Since we were aiming to save money, no one had gotten sick yet, and I'm creative I decided to give the idea a shot before dropping any money on buying some.

Ticket invitation version 2: Not chosen

So I made two variations of the ticket invitation and let the kids pick which they wanted to give to their friends. Both kids picked version one. Can't argue with that.

Next I made some signs. My favorite was the big arrow that said "Party Over Here!"

Hey, I think there's a party...over there

I taped it underneath our street sign and called it good. We needed something to make our road stand out because the street sign is camouflaged by tree shrubs (one is pictured to the right of the signs). It seemed to work--no one had any trouble finding us!

I made another sign with our station name, but didn't get a picture before we took it down. Oops!

The party was supposed to be outside, but it rained all weekend so we had to have it inside instead. I had some pony beads set up on one side of the table, coloring books at the head of the table, and foam visors with stickers for the other side of the table. The kids still ran around in circles but it wasn't until after they made something first. Some of the kids worked, ran, worked some more, and ran some more. I have pictures, but don't want to post them because my kids aren't the only ones in them. Just trying to be courteous to the other parents. The main message of this paragraph is that crafts saved the day and my sanity. Crafts are the freaking best, aren't they?

We ate pizza, cake, and ice cream. Here is the cake:

Please, no one send this picture to Cake Wrecks, m'kay?

After I finished the sillouette part and it still looked like a train, I didn't want to mess it up. Not that anyone would have cared but me. Wouldn't that be some funny gossip to listen in on?

"And you should have seen that train wreck of a train cake she was serving at the party, Becky! It looked like she had her 2 year old ice that cake! Who cares that it was served to 2-5 year olds and was eaten in 10 minutes? Simply unbelievable!"

I know the parents that all came to our party and I don't think for a minute that any of them would say that, but isn't it fun to make fun of our insecurities this way? It's always easy to do after the fact. :)

The last fun thing that we did was get a disposable camera that had Thomas and Friends characters and sayings pre-printed on the photo paper. That way we took a picture of each kid, developed the pictures, and then had photos of the kids with Thomas and Friends characters on them to give away with "Thank You" written on the back. Those were a big hit. I recommend shelling out the extra $20 for that. Totally worth it.

So, yeah, we had fun and ate cake. The kids both got way too many presents. They're lucky kids to have so many people that care about them. Thanks to anybody who is reading that came.

Anyone have any good train party ideas?

Kids Birthday Party Teaser

My kids both have birthdays in the month of May, so we're doing a joint birthday party this year. It's something I said I would never do before I had kids.

But hey, now that I actually have kids and know how reality works, we're going to do it.

To make myself feel a little better, I figure they're still young so they don't care that they have to share. When they're older that may change, but we're taking advantage of this now! I'm thinking the parents of the kids' friends probably appreciate that, too...but I care more about how my kids feel than they do so that's not really a deciding factor more a delightful consequence.

So, we're having the birthday party at our house and it's a Thomas and Friends theme.

I've made the invitations to look like train tickets (pictures coming soon!) and we'll have all sorts of Thomas and Friends decorations. Some will be handmade and others will be purchased. I'm not going to lie about which is which either. :)

More to come soon.... (That's the teaser part of this post. Muahahahahaha!)

Happy Mother's Day!

I have been saving these for Mother's Day so the surprise wouldn't be ruined.

This year was a homemade kind of holiday.

Here are the presents before I wrapped them up:

My mother got her ninjas
(and a picture frame like my grandmother's below)

My grandmother got a picture frame with a picture of the kids and some of the batik fabric that they painted and a necklace with their names in shrink-a-dink. 

Sorry no pictures of the necklace--I made it about an hour before we left for lunch on Sunday. 

And since my sister's birthday is May 10th, I brought presents that I made for her, too!

Mushroom in her favorite color: purple

 

Credit card case made out of the tester batik fabric
(the other one is for me)

Everyone was very happy with their gifts. Surprisingly happy, if you ask me.

Is anyone else ever surprised at the appreciation your family shows about receiving your handmade gifts? I don't know why, but I always doubt my presents until the recipient actually opens them. It's weird. I love getting handmade gifts so why wouldn't I expect others to love getting mine? I don't know, but it makes for some sweaty palms until the gifts are opened! That's for sure.

How did you show your mother how much you love her?