A wrap up of this year--part 2.

(Spongebob voice) "Part 2?! Part 2, part 2, part 2.....!!" Yes, I am a Spongebob fan. But, before you start groaning, just remember how old Spongebob really is--10! Yes, Spongebob turns 10 this year! I was barely in high school when it first came out, and now I'm in my mid-twenties. And, yes, again, he has really been around for that long. I can't believe it either. The other day, Andrew and I sat down and turned the TV on to find out Powerpuff Girls was actually on CN. So, we were all like "Yes! Finally, some good, classic stuff." (At least, for us.) Then, CN just had to do it--they announced it was a 10th anniversary of the Powerpuff girls and was having a special "new" episode on next. We looked at each other saying "10 years?!?" No, that can't be. It's true, though. Just look it up on IMDB.com.

Anyway, I digress. On to cakes!

These are some really cute turkey cupcakes for Thanksgiving Day. The idea came from the book Hello Cupcake. It's an adorable book with the cutest cupcakes you have ever seen. So, I decided to make these for my family for Thanksgiving. My mom made some place cards with some Bible verses about thanks and giving thanks for last year and used them again this year. I had a whole lot of help with these cupcakes. Two of my little cousins, an older cousin, and a date of another one of my older cousins helped. Andrew just, well, I don't know where he went. He just kind of disappeared. Haha...


They were cute, but I couldn't find all the stuff to make them. The caramel frosting turned out to be more of a ganash instead of a frosting and the mini cupcake wouldn't stay on top of the big cupcake. So, I had to use a lot of toothpicks to get all the stuff to stay on. It was a little morbid to be poking toothpicks into the turkeys' forheads, but what else could I do. It was either a headless turkey or jab a toothpick into them. They were still delicious though.



This was pretty cool too, and heavy. I am a member of the Madison County Band here in Huntsville. It's a concert band and one of the officers found out I make cakes. Well, I may have helped a little with that. Anyway, Andrew and I were asked to make a cake for our Christmas concert reception. A cake that would feed 120-200 people! The biggest cake yet. So, we decided to make a gingerbread village cake. It turned out to be more of a town square, but it was still cute. Unfortuately, nobody touched the cake! Everyone was all "It's too pretty!" lol. So, I was told several times that I was going to have to cut it myself and eat some because nobody else would. I didn't want to because that cake was 4-11"x15" cakes with tons of plain/vanilla frosting and tons of gingerbread, etc, etc. I was tired of cake. Just thinking back now to that night is making me a little nausous. I ended up doing that anyway, and a few people ate some, but we were left over with a ton of cake. So, it got wrapped up and frozen for the next week for our Christmas party...still only three or four pieces were eaten. Ahh..oh well. It was a nice $200 center piece. lol.



These were delicious cupcakes that I made, also for work. They were my own (sort of) concoction peppermint cupcakes. Regular cake mix with peppermint extract and peppermint flavored frosting with crushed peppermint candies. I ended up, coincidentally, making them and giving them to everybody on National Cupcake Day. After that Monday had past, I found out about National Cupcake Day and was wishing that I had done something. Then, it hit me--I did! Yea! Yes, it's the little things. Especially when I am at work and staring at my computer screen all day. I think these went over better than the halloween cupcakes. My manger/boss guy kept saying all day, "I need another cupcake." It was funny. They were surprisingly refreshing, too. Most all cupcakes I've made and eaten needed a glass of milk or water to rinse it down. Not these, though. The peppermint left your mouth refreshed and actually wanting more...a lot more!



This was a simple little baby shower cake for the youth pastor's wife at my church. The ladies throwing her the party just wanted something simple and traditional. I wanted to put animals on the ark, but I decided to simplify things for myself.

Still more to come later.

A Busy Weekend

I hope for other posts, I can come up with better names than that. But, seriously, this weekend was busy. We did three separate gigs--cupcakes for a co-worker's birthday at my job, birthday cake for my nephew's 16th birthday, and a birthday cake for a girl in my husband's and my Sunday School class. Wow, pretty much a Friday, Saturday, Sunday kind of delivery schedule.

For people's birthdays at my day job, the secretary girl gets some form of cupcake/pastry for that person's birthday. So, this time it was her birthday and I volunteered to make the cupcakes. Well, I told her after a previous birthday, that I would do it because she got some Wal-Mart cupcakes. Now, don't get me wrong, if you like Wal-Mart cupcakes, then I'm all for it. However, I am spoiled and think Wal-Mart cakes taste like they were made by a press on a conveyor belt. When I eat one all I can think about is somebody pulling a lever down, a big metal press coming down onto the conveyor belt, then lifting up to reveal a "cake." I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody who works for a department/grocery store bakery. I'm not meaning to, it's just my opinion. Anyway, back to my cupcakes. I had no idea what to do for this girl's birthday cupcakes and I was suppose to deliver the next day. Yeah...nothing like waiting until the last minute to finish a project. I started out making a swirly flower design with a couple of leaves around it on pastel pink, white, pastel'ish yellow-iced cupcakes. This looked horrible and very messy to me. Then, I tried a generic flower design (on a plate) and didn't like it either. So, I scraped off the icing from the cupcakes I did the swirly flowers on. Then, re-iced them in the pink I had left over. At this point, I was back at yellow, white, and pink. I arranged them in a circle and asked my hubby to come and tell me what he thought I should do. He said that they looked kind of like a sunflower. I went with that to sprinkle some left over crushed oreos from the construction cake on a yellow one, arrange the white ones as a stem with a few leaves, and the pink ones as random flowers with a few leaves. This did not work out either and I was getting more and more frustrated by the minute. I left it alone for a while and decided to take the "leaves" off and eat the one with the oreos on it. Eating seems to always help me calm down, and a hot shower helped, too. Andrew and I started taking the leaves off and realized that they were too soft and green spots were left on the background color. So, being the wonderful husband as he is, Andrew said he would go get some chocolate to make green happy birthday letters from so we could try to hide the green spots. The letters ended up being a lot smaller and a lot darker than was planned. But, thankfully, when I came home for lunch the day, and minutes before, I was to bring the cupcakes to work, it dawned on me to mix up some colored sugar to match the green spots. It worked perfectly, the green sugar blended nicely with the random spots and made them disappear. The letters were still a little dark, so I sprinkled some of the sugar on them. The pink ones with the green sugar didn't look all that great to me, so I set them aside as the "ugly extra ones." Turned out that everybody loved the cupcakes and the "ugly extra ones" were the first to go. Go figure... Out of 18 cupcakes and 9 co-workers (including the birthday girl) I took home 3 cupcakes. Needless to say they're gone, too.

On to Saturday, it was my nephew's 16th birthday. He hasn't gotten his license, yet. But, I think he'd be a good driver. Well....hopefully. Anyway, I asked him if he wanted me to do a cake for him, and of course he said yes. But, to my surprise, he just asked for, as he put it, "one of your famous butterfinger cakes." I thought he'd want like a decorated cake or a car cake or something like that, but he wanted a butterfinger cake. If you don't know what a butterfinger cake is, it's just a german chocolate cake with sweetened condense milk poured over it (while it's still hot) and a cool-whip and crushed butterfinger candy bar topping. It's more of a leave-in-the-pan cake. So, that was easy, especially compared to the cupcakes I did the day before. I did just that and wrote "Happy 16th Kyle" in cool-whip and melted chocolate. Oh my goodness, there were 13 people there and I made an 11x15 cake. It was huge. By the time I got the cool-whip and butterfingers on there the cake was about 3" maybe 3.5" tall. When the party was over, 3/4ths of the cake was gone! Andrew had a sugar rush and tummy ache on the way home, but my nephew ate more than anybody...I can only imagine his pains. He said while he was eating it, it would be worth it. I was glad he liked it, he had been craving one for a while and was very satisfied.

The last cake we did was for a girl in our Sunday School class. She wanted a huge chocolate bar from somebody else in the class, so I decided to make a chocolate bar cake. I tried a chocolate cake recipe for the first time, which turned out pretty good. Then, Andrew made some of his marshmellow fondant and I made some molding chocolate to make the fondant a chocolate flavor. I also used some of the molding chocolate under the fondant layer on the cake to make the indentions like a candy bar. The cake turned out pretty good. I probably could have used more indentions than I did, but again, I was finishing this cake at the last minute. Literally, I skipped first service to finish the cake in time for the Sunday School during the second service. Oh, by the way, she didn't come to Sunday School. lol. I think she was major tired from her soccer game the day before. It's ok. I gave her what was left that night. She is so sweet though. I didn't want her to feel bad about that. I just wanted her to enjoy her birthday cake.