Any Excuse for Snowflakes in May!!!

Like every other little girl on the planet lately, Kate is really into the movie Frozen. So when her preschool teacher said she could choose a day near the end of school to celebrate her summer birthday with her class, she of course, OF COURSE wanted to bring Frozen cupcakes.

Well, she lucks out that her mother is semi-obsessed with snowflakes, because I was eager to oblige.

She really wanted chocolate AND vanilla for the cake part, so we did half and half.

I sprinkled white sparkling sugar over blue frosting then added the snow flakes made of white chocolate. (Normally I consider white chocolate an abomination, but for snowflakes I'll make an exception!)

To make the snowflakes I melted white chocolate and put it in a little plastic sandwich bag with a corner snipped off. Then I piped it onto wax paper over a snowflake pattern. (I used a pattern for DIY window clings I found here, then printed it at about half size.)

This movie is a great chance to use snowflakes in some month other than December or maybe January. YAY!

Phineas and Ferb Cupcakes

Claire and Scott had their birthdays several months ago, but they thought it would be fun to have a swim party at my parents' pool. So we waited until the weather warmed up and had a belated birthday/"Welcome to Summer Vacation!" party the day after school let out.

And what better theme to celebrate summer vacation than Phineas and Ferb?

There's 104 86 days of summer vacation...

I used the same frozen buttercream transfer technique as I used on Kate's Hello Kitty cupcakes a couple years ago. So easy! Made the little buttercream stickers on wax paper ahead of time and kept them in the freezer. The day of, I frosted the cupcakes, my sister helped me roll the edges in sprinkles, then we stuck the buttercream stickers on them! Voila!

But honestly, the cupcakes were about it. We had the same CD of aquatic-themed music from Kate's swim party last year playing. We kept things low key. The kids had a blast swimming, so they didn't need much else.

Just to keep it real, the rest of the "decorating" was this table with a few wild sunflowers cut from my parents' property:

I Can Has Cheezburger Cake?

My best friend's son wanted a cheeseburger birthday cake.  When she called me up to see how hard I thought it would be, we both took a gander at Pinterest and then decided we could probably do it.

Yesterday I went over to her house and we had a go at it:

Our hamburger cake turned out even better than we expected!

Nailed it!

But like, for reals, not sarcastic.

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If you want more details on how we made it, you can check out my friends' blog post:

http://geekilyeverafter.blogspot.com/2013/06/do-you-want-fries-with-that.html

Balancing Out All the Sugar

After attending 2 different class parties at the elementary school yesterday, taking Kate to preschool, and taking Claire to her church activity after school, there was no way I was cooking a fancy Valentine's Day dinner yesterday.

Besides, the kids were all hopped up on sugar from the days' festivities.  I really needed them to actually eat something not sweet for dinner.  And let's be honest, unless I make waffles or pancakes (which most definitely don't qualify as not sweet), most of the time when I cook something I can only get 1 out of 3 to eat it.

Unless that something is pizza.  Papa Murphy's and their heart shaped pizza to the rescue!

The overall pizza comes heart shaped.  And since it wasn't baked yet when I took it home, I got to pretend like I wasn't totally copping out on doing something nice for Valentine's Day by cutting heart shapes on the pepperoni like I saw on Pinterest!

With a Drizzle of Crazy

Random weekday cake balls:

I seriously need school to start back up...

Triple Pool Party

A couple Saturdays ago we had a joint birthday party for Kate, my niece, and my best friend's son.  They all three have birthdays within a couple weeks of each other (the other two kids are actually only one day apart - Kate is the outlier).  We decided to throw a joint birthday party now while they're young and still amenable to the idea (because they don't really know any better!).  When they're older, they will probably have a lot more opinions. ;)

The obvious choice of activity and location was a swim party at my parents' pool!  Easy and fun.  So we went with an aquatic theme.  All three of us had a little brainstorming session, and then divided up the preparation tasks.  I think it came together fantastically considering there were three different people independently preparing it!

My primary task was cupcakes:

I saw an idea on Pinterest for something similar to these that I modified slightly.  I made 72 cupcakes (2 dozen each of three different flavors of cake).  I frosted them blue and then used colored goldfish crackers.  The original source used white confetti sprinkles for the bubbles, but I had trouble finding the white without buying a whole bottle of multi-color and then having to sort out the 1/8 of them that were white.  I ended up liking the effect of the little white nonpareils as bubbles even more.  Then I just used a tube of the premade black frosting that I already had around from a previous project and a small round tip to dab on little eyes.

 

There was quite the spread thanks to both my best friend and my sister:

One of my favorite things we did were the snorkel juice boxes:

 

We were inspired by this, but we wanted juices and not soda.  There were crayons to write your name on and/or decorate your snorkel mask.  Credit to my sister for the fabulous execution on these.  She took off the straws and hot glued them back on just so.

We tried to have the food kind of follow the theme.  Goldfish crackers and chips with "dip":

Life savers and swedish fish:

For decorations we put up blue and green streamers to look like water/seaweed:

Then we put up various sea critter cutouts that my sister made all over the place:

Some were on fishing line to look kind of like they were floating/swimming:

For a little game/activity, we let the kids go "deep sea diving" for "sunken treasure" on the lawn area just off the deck.  My best friend bought Mardi Gras beads, gold coins, ring pops, and stickers for the kids to collect in goody bags.
 

 

I think the birthday girls and boy had a great time, so a definite success in my book!

Green and Pink Luncheon

Immediately following Claire's baptism, everyone came over to our house for lunch.  (Convenient that we live about 3 minutes away from the church building!)

We served food Claire wanted and the only real theme was the colors:  hot pink and apple green

 Hot pink strawberry, regular, and green mint chocolate chip cookies.

(Figuring out how to make these so vividly colored was non-trivial.  Would the masses like a tutorial?)

 Sub sandwiches.  (Thank you Costco meat and cheese platters.) 

 Pink lemonade, water, fruit (in mostly reds/pinks and greens), chips, pink and green napkin sculpture.

And of course a marker to write your name on your cup.

M's sister helped me string up these streamers:

Nothing bonds you to your sister-in-law like climbing on top of a table at 1am, right?

I ruffled the streamers on my sewing machine using this tutorial.

At the End of the Rainbow

Now that Claire's birthday THIS year has passed, I went to look for my post about LAST year and realized I never wrote about it.  So now I'm going to remedy that.

We were camping on Claire's birthday.  And that day may or may not also be a certain holiday that falls in mid-March.  I wanted to share a little game we did with the other kids who went camping with us last year.  As you may have noticed by now, I have a real love of Pass the Parcel type games.  For this one, I put glow sticks (to play with after dark at the campsite) in-between successive layers of wrapping paper.  In rainbow order:

And in the very middle, a pot of "gold" (AKA chocolate coins):

 

M and I played music and the kids passed the package around a circle until the music stopped.  The kid holding it when the music stopped got to open a layer and keep whatever prize was inside.  (In a fit of obsessive justice, M and I watched to make sure the music stopped on everyone at least once.)

The kids loved the "Pot of Gold at the End of a Rainbow" and we followed it up with cupcakes:

Photography Challenge Day #7 - Fruit

It may be so hot in the Texas summer that you can't keep a garden alive past June, but at least in the 

winter the grocery store is full of these babies:

(Also?  I really want a macro lens.)

Texas grapefruit have become part of our Christmas morning breakfast tradition.  YUM!


Before I went to the store and saw that grapefruit had come in season, I was thinking that a photo of my new jacket might work for this prompt too:

It is kinda fruity, isn't it?  But I love it!  It's a hand me down from my aunt.  I'd been craving a coat that was kinda... irresponsible.  I love my gray wool pea coat, but sometimes it's fun to spice things up.  On the other hand, I am loathe to spend a lot of money on a coat that will only get worn a couple weeks every year here in Texas unless it's pretty classic.  So when I saw this in the box of stuff she sent, it made my day.  And since my sister and I were splitting the items in the box, I was extra thrilled when my sister said she didn't want it because it didn't work for her.  What do you think?  Was my sister wiser than me, or did I luck out?

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Maows and Bows

Kate turned two!

She still obsessed with all things girly.  But she shows a definite proclivity for cats and hair bows these days.

Her name for cats is the sound they make, which she says, "Maow."  She has a little stuffed cat she likes to sleep with and when she asks us to find it in the depths of her blankets in her crib, she always pleads, "Maow."  M and I decided to name her little cat Chairman.  Now we both get a nice chuckle when we go searching for her little Chairman Mao.

No outfit is complete for Kate without a bow in her hair.  Preferably a clip AND a bow.

Whenever she sees me sitting writing something on paper, she insists that I draw her a cat with a bow.  

Logical birthday theme?  The most famous cat WITH a bow of all. Hello Kitty of course:

If you find yourself wondering how I made these buttercream Hello Kitty cupcakes, feel free to read on.  Or if you don't care, that's fine by me.  Go on your merry way.

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I used frozen buttercream transfers to make the little Hello Kitties.  I've always wanted to try this technique.  The results were fabulous (if I do say so myself) and it was suprisingly easy.

First, I found an outline image of the Kitty herself, made it the right size and copied it as many times as I wanted cupcakes.  (I didn't have to mirror the image like you normally would because Hello Kitty is ambi-drawable.)  Then I printed it off and taped some waxed paper over it.  I put it on a cutting board and then went at it with a tube of black frosting and a simple round tip.

I outlined the whole image first:

Next I switched to red frosting and colored in her oh-so-important bow:

 Then I filled the face in with white:

All the frosting color changes would have been a pain, but thanks to this idea, it was easy and not very messy at all!

Then I took the pink frosting I was going to frost the cupcakes themselves with and piped around the outside of Miss Kitty to support her little whiskers.  The main idea here is to think backwards.  Pipe the things you want to have look like they are on top first and the things you want to look like they are on the bottom last.  As my last step I piped a layer of the same pink as the cupcakes over the whole thing to give it some beefiness.  When I was all done I got my finger wet so it wouldn't stick and pushed down all over the design to make sure everything was flat and as air-bubble-less as possible.
 

Then I popped them all in the freezer for about an hour.  When I took them out, they easily came off the waxed paper in one piece.  In fact they were small enough that I could just pop them off the waxed paper and stick 'em on the frosted cupcakes like stickers.  Delicious buttercream stickers.

Just a Little Tip

When you're cooking dinner and you put one of your stainless steel pans into the oven, you should be careful.  I think we all know that we should use a hot pad to take the pan out of the oven.  But did you know that when you go to serve the food out of the pan, you should NOT steady said pan by grabbing the bare metal handle with your bare hand?  Your ENTIRE bare hand?  Yes, well.  You can trust me on this one.

Trashy

We had Claire's birthday party recently. She wanted a WALL-E party.

She asked for us to decorate the house all "garbage-y". There's nothing quite like cleaning up your house so you can fill it with pretend trash. (Maybe I should have just left my house the way it normally looks? Nah, we wouldn't want the guests to actually catch a disease...)

Here is the decor:

We went with "stacks of WALL-E's garbage cubes" per Claire's request. I'm sure our guests' parents just thought we were taking a REALLY long time to get unpacked from moving into our house over a year and a half ago... Oh well. It made Claire and Scott's day.

In fact, Scott's breakfast prayer that morning extolled the virtues of our "garbage-y" house. He has a habit of praying in statements of fact rather than making requests or expressing any kind of thanks. He opened his prayer, said, "We're going to eat breakfast and I love garbage," and then closed his prayer.

I tried to do the brown streamers on the walls for the decoration, but they kept coming out looking too orderly and nice. I had to give up and have M do it. He's got skills. He should put that on his resume. "Haphazard streamer decorating." Some things require a woman's touch, but this was apparently one of those things that required a man's touch.

Our first activity was to have the kids pot a plant to take home as their favor. Note "The Plant" centerpiece:

Good thing I still had my brown snow boots despite the fact that we've lived in Texas for almost four years now.

The kids (mostly Scott) made an exciting mess with the potting soil:

The next activity was to take turns digging through "garbage" to hunt for a Twinkie (AKA more garbage?):

And then, of course, there was (chocolate) cake:

(The caramel cubes are more of WALL-E's garbage cubes, per Claire's request. The cake itself is supposed to be one of his garbage towers in mid-build, if you're familiar with the movie. Around here, we're beyond familiar...we're intimate. It's a good movie, but anything can be viewed to excess. [Insert eye roll here])