Pikachu Cake & Mississippi Mud Cake

 I don't usually make a lot of desserts for other people,but recently I made two.

The lady who does our homeschool evaluations does it in exchange for my making a birthday cake for at least one of her kids.  She had a specific Pokemon card she wanted me to use as inspiration and this is not exactly the pose Pikachu was in on it, but I think he's cute!  I did it after watching a youtube using the same image.  Much easier than I expected!

The background of the card was a sort of mottled forest, so I tried making a mottled green for the base color.  I iced the cake in a light green and then made three darker shades and made random dots with those colors and then smoothed it all our.  The sides turned out better than the top. 

Annalise helped a lot with these little Poke balls.

They sent me this picture after they cut into the cake:

Another friend felt daunted by having to make a Mississippi Mud Cake for a birthday dinner (the Dina on the cake is actually from Mississippi).  It was not a hard cake to make, but there seem to be endless variations of it online.  I picked one that looked like it would be included in a fundraiser cookbook and they all seemed very happy with the result.

Rainbow Cupcakes

I made cupcakes for a fundraiser bake sale a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to make something cute to increase the likelihood that my donation would all be sold!  However, I didn't want to do something really time consuming.  Enter Rainbow Cupcakes:

These are extremely easy to make and when I checked halfway through the bake sale, they were all gone!  Their construction is simple: ice the cupcake sky blue, pipe on two white "clouds" and bend over a section of rainbow candy to make the rainbow.  I used Airhead Xtremes Rainbow Sour Strips.  One package is enough to make 24 cupcakes - if you cut the strips in 3 pieces.  They cost about $1.50, I got them at Walgreens.

A sea of rainbows!

The cupcakes were actually also blue - I found a blue raspberry flavored box mix in the Publix discount bin for 75 cents.

A Cake for a Cut

This is the cake I bartered with for my haircut.  My friend's daughter is very into the movie Frozen.  It was not a hard cake to make - except that I had been running a 100 degree fever that day!  I made 7 minute icing (on an outrageously humid day) because it is so white and it turned out pretty good.  The ice shards were made with the microwave hard candy recipe that I use to make cinnamon disks.  I didn't flavor the candy because the flavoring I had planned to use had a tint and it wouldn't have looked right.  As it was I think it complements Elsa's dress just right.  They added the figurine after I delivered the cake.

I am feeling better, not all better, but not as bad, and the girls have gotten the bug.  They had to miss the Awana awards night tonight.  They were really looking forward to it, so that is a bummer.

Larry Boy Cake

I sometimes barter with cakes - once I make a birthday cake in exchange for a hair cut. This week - I made a birthday cake in exchange for a homeschool evaluation. The party theme was The League of Incredible Vegetables. My friend said either that or "Larry Boy". I looked into both and decided to make Larry Boy. Here's how that went!

First, just to kind of get a grip on how hard it would be to put him together, I made a construction paper Larry Boy.

Next, I picked an image to copy and marked off measurements.  This Larry Boy was 20 cm tall.  To keep things simple, I just made him 20 inches tall.

Then I sketched out the image in full size.  (Minus the plunger ears.)  Natalie thought he needed glasses - can you tell?

I baked two cakes - one 13x9 and one in 2 9in pans - and made 2 1/2 batches of marshmallow fondant.  I did not make too much!  I didn't have much left over!!!  For the black, I used cocoa powder in place of some of the sugar in the recipe and then added a little Wilton Black Food Coloring gel.

I made the ears by making rice crispy treats (without the butter) and pressing it into my wide mouthed funnel.  It was just coincidental that the funnel was exactly the size I was looking for.

Here he is!

He's not perfect, but he does look silly.  :)  And he's more accurate than Bob the Builder.  The plunger handles are pretzel rods.  The top piece on his hat and the belt buckle are also made of rice crispy treats.  And I didn't forget the rest of the B - the birthday boy turned 4 :)

My friend thought I'd be disappointed when they cut into him, but I feel like making a cake and having most of it eaten is pretty gratifying :)  Everyone liked him a lot.

Annalise Gets Her Ear Pierced and other things that happened while Rob was in Haiti.

My parents went home today.  While they were here, I did more arts and crafts with my dad than probably ever in my entire life!  He helped me build a big sign that says "Main Gate" for VBS and a puppet stage.  The Main Gate sign looks really great, I forgot my camera every time, but I will get it up here pretty soon.  Those days that we worked on the sign, my mom stayed home with the kids and helped them with their school work.  This made it clear to my why I've made such slow progress on VBS things.  It took 3 adults to do what I've been trying to do.

Another thing my dad and I did together was to learn how to use a popcorn machine.  I watched a youtube video on how to do it first and we figured it out.  The VBS promotions team passed out small bags of popcorn after church on Sunday with small flyers about VBS snacks.  It was a successful event and we've had several snacks donated already.

I can't express how much help they were - I have felt so overwhelmed by all the VBS preparations - from feeling like there are things I can't fix, to being nervous about trying to fix what I can, to having people ask me to make final decisions on issues that affect a lot of people, to just basic normal VBS stuff.  It was a real treat for me to have extra hands to help kids cross parking lots or just to have the option to leave them at home while I ran an errand.

A few weeks ago, Annalise asked if she could get her ears pierced.  Rob and I talked it over and we told her she could when my parents came.  The time came, she still wanted them, so we went to the mall.  She was completely confident until the last 5 seconds before the lady pierced the first ear.  The lady assured her it would hurt no more than being pinched by an old brother (the pain level of which Caleb was eager to demonstrate).  After she pierced the first one, Annalise felt her trust was violated.  She burst into tears expressing very clearly how much worse it had hurt than any pinch, any shot, anything ever!  In short, no amount of reasoning would convince her to get the other ear pierced.

However, once we left, she calmed down and was much more reasonable.  We went back the next day with two big ice cubes and numbed her ear.  She didn't even feel the 2nd one.


We ate it after Rob got home, but I made Natalie's birthday cake while he was still traveling.  After wanting a pink elephant cake and an Angelina Ballerina cake, she most recently wanted a pink kitten cake.  I copied one I saw online.

We also got free Klondike bars - because Publix forgot to take down a sale sign - and went to the open air market in Naranja.  My neighbor got me into going there because the produce is good and inexpensive.  There is also a pet store in the building next to it and they had probably a thousand birds - no exaggeration.  Finches, parakeets, cockatiels, macaws, parrots of all types, canaries, ducks, chickens, and pigeons.  The chirping was deafening!

Well VBS starts in 12 days.  My next big hurdle is the team meetings on Saturday.  Then decorating the sanctuary.  I think I will enjoy that some though.  The 4th of July parade is a week away.  If I can pull it together I'm going to make a roller coaster costume for the parade.

I'll have more Haiti pictures soon!

King Cake and Tomie dePaola

Last year we made gumbo (read "time consuming)" and iced a small regular cake with a glaze and colored sprinkles. This year, I made a creole crockpot meal (read "easy") and spent the effort on the king cake. Here it is:


The recipe I used listed it's level as "difficult". Mostly it was time consuming. It took 2 days and four rest periods. But, I think it was not any harder than other breads. I think I made a mistake in not covering it better during the overnight rise. The dough was dry and the resulting bread was dry too. Other than the ring splitting and coming apart during the proof, I think the rest of it went ok.

I already had green and purple/lavender sprinkles on hand. We made yellow/gold.
By the way, it wasn't cold, Annalise just found the sweater and wanted to wear it.

Guess who found the baby this year!


Since Mardi Gras preceeds Ash Wednesday and Lent, I decided to combine this with this book we checked out from the library.

I am becoming a big fan of Tomie dePaola, who is Catholic. He has so many great books. This one is a retelling of an ancient fable about a boy who becomes a juggler and realizes at the end of his life that all can be done for the glory of God. Annalise likes it a lot and I think she finds it very moving because the man dies at the end. It has inspired Caleb to want to learn to juggle! We also like it because it is set in the Reniassance and March 25th is the Reniassance Faire at PEP and we all have to dress up - and its illustrations provide some reasonable ideas for costumes.

Ballerina Cake

Not long ago while I was doing laundry, washing dishes or sweeping the floor, I began to consider a question we used to ask in algebra class, "Will I ever even use this?" It seems funny, in light of my life now, how much we worked at equations and how I stressed over the fact that my school didn't offer calculus. Do I even use it? After some thought, I realized I do use an algebraic equation to determine how much my total will be at Target taking a 7% sales tax into consideration. Most of my other math duties are confined to addition and subtraction.

But I did have another opportunity to dust off my hard earned (though comparably meager) math skills: making a ballerina cake.

I am posting this cake in it's full glory because I could not find another place online where someone had made it - other than Family Fun related websites. I am sure the reason is - the cake as made in Family Fun is 3 feet tall and includes two whole cakes and 16 twinkies - it is a behemoth of a cake! In fact, when preparing to make it, I could not even find anything suitable to use as a cake-board for a 3 foot tall cake.

However, I was already committed to making this for a friend's daughters, so I found my biggest round baking pan and started reducing. Here is the un-iced cake:

The original recipe called for the head and arms to be baked in a 12 inch round, my biggest round was 10 inches - which is .83(repeating) of 12 inches. So I had to reduce each part of the cake to 83(repeating)% of it's original size to maintain proportions. I have learned the hard way not to just guess! Icing is forgiving, but only to a point!

I baked about 3/4 of the chocolate cake in the 10 inch round and the rest in a loaf pan (made most of the legs). I trimmed reduced the 8.5"x11" cake to 7.5" and a smidge over 9". The extra pieces went to make the feet and the twinkies were not needed at all.

Interestingly, the cake itself was 83% of it's original size, but elimnating the twinkies and other extras, reduced the cost by almost half.

The original cake called for chocolate icing, but the birthday girls are fair skinned, so I adjusted.


All iced, no decorations:


The finished product:


A couple of other reducing notes. The recipe suggested Junior Mints for eyes, but at the smaller size, they were way too big. I piped some white ovals and added a blue baking sized M&M. I made the mouth with an Airhead and piped on the laces on the legs, the recipe called for wrapping them in red shoestring licorice, but I thought the red didn't really match. I also sprinkled the leotard with lavender colored sugar, it looked really nice. The recipe called for "3 small packages of cotton candy" for the tutu, but I used about half of one 2 oz container. I guess cotton candy is not packaged uniformly!

And a note about the tutu - the cotton candy melted after we moved it (too hot in the van?). I added more, but the girls' older brother periodically passed by and took samples, until by the time they ate it, it was all gone again.

A Fishy Fourth

Lately Caleb has really been into fishing, so he wanted a fishing party for his birthday. Not fish are cute, interesting things, but fishing, as in catch them and eat them. He told my parents that when you catch a fish, "you cut its face off and then you cut the sides off and eat them". This kid's paying attention!

I didn't find a lot of creative ideas online for a fishING party, so I counted on the kids playing a lot (they did!) and we made paper boats and floated them in the wading pool...and my kids (who basically get soaked every time they go outside) splashed water on all their friends. But the paper boats were a hit, so that is good :)

Here it is, FISHCAKE! I copied a picture from a coloring book, which is better than trying to reproduce a popular cartoon character.

Rob taking pictures, me distracted with Caleb blowing out candles, and Annalise....

tasting the icing!

She also got into the cake while Caleb was opening gifts too, here is the result.

For party favors, the kids got to fish in Lake Babygate.

You cast in...

and pull out a keeper! They are fish shaped bags, which was the most complicated part of this party, I thought my pattern would work, but the mouths did not look right, they all looked like they had trunks, but then again, none of our guests complained :)

Another Cake Wreck

A friend of mine, who knows I like to make cakes, asked me to make a Bob the Builder cake for her son's 3rd birthday. I didn't want to use fondant, because usually people don't like the way it tastes, so I considered other options for making Bob as Bob-like as I could. I worked on him for about 2 hours (that is, she baked the cakes and I made the shirt, hat brim, belt, and shoes ahead of time) and after 2 hours I stepped back, pretty pleased with my work.

Unfortunately I didn't have a precocious 8 year old to critique my work! After the party, I showed my picture to another friend's son and he declared "That doesn't look like Bob the Builder!" and he was mostly right because the worst part of making a cake to look like a popular cartoon character is that unless they look EXACTLY like the character, they really don't look like the character! But also, the main things that kept him from looking just right were his eyes and ears, which I think in hindsight I could have (and would have) fixed, if I had not been blinded by 2 hours of mixing frosting colors and bending over smoothing out bumps. I am, however, VERY pleased with how everthing from the neck down turned out.

So here he is!



My friend was torn between wanting a dirt cake and a Bob cake, so I told her I would do Bob standing in mud. I think that turned out very nicely.

His shirt is made out of orange and cherry Starburst candies and his hat brim is made of lemon Starbursts. I microwaved them (full power) for 7 seconds. The belt and shoes are made of caramels, which I also microwaved 7 seconds, but really they are pretty malleable straight from the wrapper. His ears are also made from caramels (with icing on top). The eyes are peanut M&Ms - in hindsight I think I would have just piped the eyes so they would have been thinner. Here's the picture I used as a guide:

Also when I was 98% finished, I caught their cocker spaniel taste-testing the hat! Out of instinct, I screamed "NO MAKO!" ha! I was able to cut away the bitten spot and re-ice it. I think you cannot really tell where it happened:


Happily the birthday boy was EXTREMELY pleased with the cake, especially with the toy tools that were on the belt :)

18 Months

Annalise is 18 months old today! So we had a half birthday cake. Actually it's half of the cake I baked a week ago (I froze half) for our anniversary.
Doesn't it look funny to see a baby wearing a watch? But she insisted!!!
It took several tries, but she blew them both out, and very drily too I might add. I didn't notice that much until Caleb asked it he could blow them out (we missed his half birthday because we were in Orlando) and he was a spluttery blower! ick!

And if you're not tired of caterpillar pictures yet...I have more! Right now we have (at least) FIVE caterpillars on the milkweed plants! Three of them are bigger, probably 3rd instar, and two are very small...
this is one of the smaller ones, I think it is 2nd instar though. 1st instar is only 1/8 of an inch and this was easily 1/4 inch long.

And we have many more eggs that have not hatched yet. The ants and the aphids seem much too preoccupied with milkweed itself to bother these guys much - although the flower part of the milkweed is just covered in aphids. I am curious to see how much damage 5+ caterpillars can do to two milkweed plants! We may have to wait for the plants to regrow all their leaves if these guys all make it to the chrysalis stage.

My Own Personal Cake Wreck

I recently added a link to Cake Wrecks to my sidebar because I get a kick out of visiting that website and seeing the hilarious misspellings, lapses of judgement, and unbelievably ugly cakes...all of which are professionally made.

I made a cake for a baby shower today and almost had my own cake wreck! I lifted Caleb up to see the cake and read the words aloud to him...words I didn't even notice when I took this picture:

I know our friends will be so proud of their new baby loy.

Argh...well it turned out to be an easy fix.

A Year Already!

Happy Birthday baby girl! Annalise is ONE! And this day reminded me of something Lori said about a year ago, that is, when Caleb turned one, he seemed so big! And now I realize what a baby he still was. It is so different this time around.

For one, when Caleb turned one, it felt like this huge accomplishment, but this time, I am a little more aware of what's next, so I'm not as eager to spike the football. Still, I liked the second year with Caleb better than the first, and I'm excited to hear what funny things will come out of Annalise's mouth and see what sorts of things seem to come naturally to her.

Our day started off breaking in the new carseat! And oh, what a tough day it was for Caleb. He really felt the sting of losing premire status today. He wanted so bad to ride in the new carseat, but our denial of that was only a foreshadowing of what was to come. By the end of the end of the day he was so over tired, over excited, and overwhelmed!

We went to the Splash and Play at Pinecrest Gardens. We were the only family there inspite of the picture perfect weather.

They both had so much fun!

Here is her birthday cake and cupcake - I like how the cake turned out...although it isn't exactly like the one I copied. The ears were the only real challenge. They used black string licorice, which of course no one sells in stores and can only be bought online in 15lb packages. So I melted some chocolate chips and piped them on, but halfway through the chocolate started to set up and the second ear was kind of bumpy.

Caleb was right there when we needed him!

A little hesitancy...

But not for long!

She doesn't need to know how to talk to say, "I want more of that!!!".

Once again, Caleb was right there to help at present time! He was also very helpful in trying out the new toys, which he declared as "MINE!" even though they were both pink and one was a purse.

Oh and as you can imagine, Mako *LOVES* being chased by the popcorn popper. But lucky for him, his birthday is next for our family (traditionally celebrated November 12th, although we don't know the actual date). And this year we will make a cake and if he's a really good dog, he might just get a little piece of it!