Minions

My laughable attempt at Twinkie based Minion cupcakes to eat while watching Despicable Me.

 

Jacob's birthday cake

I hadn't really planned to make a cake, since 1)Jacob's not much of a cake eater, and 2) we got Cinnabon for breakfast. But, when Jacob takes a cake mix out of the pantry on his birthday and says, "cake!" you really can't say no. So, this is what I came up with with what was in my baking cabinet. Jacob selected the flags.

Valentine projects

I covered some large size candy bars for the boys with some MME patterned paper, stamped an AE stamp and cut it out, then created rolled roses from some scrap paper.

 

For goodie bags for the guys, I filled some plain paper lunch sacks, stamped doilies with an AE stamp, added some glitter heart stickers I had picked up at Michaels last year for .49, then folded over the bag and stapled the doily over it. I did something similar for Terri's kids, but forgot to take a pic.

My other project was a garland. I had found this canvas mini album at Michaels for $3 (minus a coupon, of course) and knew I wanted to turn it into a garland. I searched for some flowers that wouldn't overwhelm it, and settled on these felt roses from Hobby Lobby ($1.47 for the package). To help the letters stand out, I misted some doilies then searched through my chipboard letters. I didn't have the letters I wanted in either gold or silver glitter, and wasn't really in the mood to paint and stickle anything, so I searched my metal/plastic letters and was thrilled to get to use some more of my MM mailbox letters. (Oddly, when I bought them 7-8 years ago, I paid $6.99 for the set. When Michaels brought them back 2 years ago, when they were well out of "fashion", they were priced at $9.99 for the set and nobody bought them. Michaels is usually hopelessly out of touch with what's current in scrapbooking, with small flashes of awesome ness, i.e. the recent deal with American Crafts and Heidi Swapp). Some close-ups:

And finally, the boys have been asking for a cookie cake, so this is what I came up with. Not the prettiest, but it was pretty tasty.

 

Pokeball cupcake

We made a batch of cupcakes with the intention of decorating them one by one from the list of ones I pinned on Pinterest. Alas, Jacob had other plans and had eaten 4 of them before we even got started, so the only one that got "decorated" was this pokeball one for Brandon

Girl Scout cakes

Cakes for the Girl Scout End of Year banquet

birthday cakes with wax paper transfers

 Jacob

Jettie

Springtime cakes and Teacher gifts

Jacob's birthday cake. I used the freezer paper tracing and transfer method from my pinterest board.
Blue and Gold ceremony.
Teacher Valentine gifts from Jettie and Jacob. I normally use packing tape to attach the candy bars to the dowels but tried hot glue this time. It didn't hold, so I'll be going back to using packing tape.

Halloween treat

Just realized I didn't post this when I posted pics of the holiday decorations. I made these treat bags for my and Terri's kids for Halloween. The idea is something I saw on pinterest, and then I came up with a topper idea. "boo" is from the Mini-Monsters cartridge. I originally intended to use my grass edge scissors but couldn't locate them, so it finally dawned on me to use the MS fringe scissors, instead. Stamp is from an Oriental Trading Company set.

Caramel Apple Treats

A gift for Heather's family. A Sonic drink carrier covered and decorated, then filled with apples, caramels and chocolate chips.

Jacob's birthday cake

Originally, I had planned to do a carousel cake for Jacob, but Michaels was out of primary color fondant and I'm not enough of a fan of fondant to buy white and die it a bunch of different colors. When I saw the Candyland cake in a magazine last month, I thought it would make a cute cake and put it in my "do this" file. So, instead of the carousel cake, I had the Target bakery put together a couple small sections of white and chocolate cake and frosting a plain white base for me. At home, it was a matter of keeping Jacob away from the cake long enough to put it together (which, judging from the finger mark down on the bottom, I failed at). The squares are Starburst (there are supposed to be blue squares, too, but I was only willing to track down two differerent kinds), the trees are dum dum suckers, the chocolate trees are mini Reese's peanut butter cups with chocolate frosting piped on, and the candy castle is cut down ice cream cones with regular frosting piped on, sprinkles and red Dots. I was disappointed about not finding candy canes and a few other things, until I got home, looked at the directions, and realized that the cake in the picture was a full sheet cake that served 30-40. My puny 1/4 sheet cake didn't have nearly enough room to put everything on there anyway. Jacob enjoyed it, so I'm counting it as a win.

SuperBowl cookies

A sampling of the 3 dozen sugar cookies that Brandon and I made for the SuperBowl. We made it easy and used the Wilton cookie icing straight from the bottles, but I gotta say, I may have to go back to buttercream frosting because the icing is almost too sweet.

"Birthday Dinosaur!"

I had planned to try my hand at a 3-d, sitting triceratops, but while at Hobby Lobby for something else, Jacob grabbed this Wilton pan and marched down the aisle, saying "Birthday Dinosaur!" and that was that. I'm sure it was actually much easier, especially since I cheated and used the tubes of the Wilton premade icing for almost the entire thing. The downside? The cake is really, really sweet. But that's probably good, because it means little pieces.
Rick is not a fan of chocolate cake, but the boys always pick out chocolate cake mixes, so I thought I would be sneaky and purchase a 6 pack of white cupcakes at the store, pull the character rings off of the bright frosting and stick a dinosaur in them. But....I had taken Rick's car to the store, which has absolutely no trunk space (thanks to some enormous speakers that make him very happy), so I had to pile the groceries in the front seat so Jacob wouldn't eat them on the way home. Somewhere between Kroger and home, they slid sideways and all the frosting went everywhere. In my desperation to salvage them, I scraped off all the remaining frosting, and piped on some matching green frosting for grass and stuck the little dinos in them anyway. They're all gone, so apparently I did ok.

Hollywood Birthday Party

Here's a few pics of the Hollywood party. The chandalier (sp?) looked awesome but I could not get a great shot of it. I think it counts for crafty b/c I made the cake, the fruit sculpture (the white things are half dipped chocolate covered marshmallows), and the HOLLYWOOD letters, plus it's almost scrapbooking b/c I did the little photos in the film strip we got at M's. Ha! :)

Chicks and Carrots

Easter cookies. The chick idea is from pillsbury.com. The recipe called for yellow covered licorice bits, which I've never seen, so I used Mike and Ike candies. Nose and feet are orange slices and eyes are chocolate chips. For the record, it is a pain in the behind to try and evenly cut a chocolate chip in half. Yellow and orage frostings are the Wilton cookie icings in the squeeze bottles (I used white and tinted for the yellow, then added red to make the orange).

Cookie Fun

Our lovely cookies. Jacob and Brandon both had a lot of fun cutting the cookies, but got bored with decorating after about 5 each. After that, Brandon became creative director and chief spinkle guy.

And yet another post!

Yep, can you believe it? Two posts in one day from the invisible half of x2. So here are the reindeer cupcakes, which btw, are tricky to fit on the cupcake rack b/c of the antlers sticking out.

I made the antlers by melting chocolate chips in a zip loc bag, cutting off a corner, and tracing over a pattern I made onto wax paper with the chocolate. I keep my chocolate chips in the fridge, so they turned that weird hazy brown, so next time I will make sure I use chocolate that does not live in the fridge so it stays brown. Nobody cared and they tasted yum. I just said the antlers were in velvet.

Brace yourself!

Rough draft of helmet cake. I literally threw on the fondant, but it does have promise. Might actually make it one day with some actual effort. Molding the cake in the plastic hat did work, so that was good to know. Never did get red fondant, though it actually looks redder here than in real life.

My fire cake! So proud. :) The flames have the shimmery Wilton gel on them that I put on with a paint brush. IRL it is mildly sparkly.

At the party. I had to support the metal fire truck (which is a "Code 3 collectible. Be careful with it b/c the mirrors will break off," blah, blah, blah) with dowels underneath, but the stupid plastic drive shaft made it sit crooked on the dowel. Now, why does it need a fake drive shaft? Who knows.

Drummer Boy Cake

It's a three layer cake like the recipe called for, but it still looks a little short...oh well, it's tasty.

H'ween Cupcakes

Going backwards a little bit, but here are my Halloween cupcakes. Really want someone to make a jumbo grass tip, though!

And We're Off

2009 Halloween cake

Heather