Cake #5- Lightning McQueen

Whew... that was A LOT of work!!! This is Aiden's birthday cake that I spent all afternoon making. He's happy with it, so I guess that means I am too!!! He stood there and watched the whole time. I got a little frustrated because he wouldn't keep his fingers out of the icing bowl!!!

The back tire is a little messed up and there is a little color discrepancy on the front of the car. I'm not really sure why. I left the house for 20 minutes to pick up Sophie from school and then picked up right where I left off and the color was a little different. Also... I will NEVER make red icing again. My very smart Sister-in-Law told me to buy it pre-made, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Next time I will order it if I have to, but I definitely will not make it. It took so much color that the icing was a little wet. I tried to thicken it up by adding powdered sugar and then it just looked a little grainy. It was still too wet, so the icing was a little more difficult to work with than the other colors... Oh well... that's what learning is all about!!!

Pine Cone Birdfeeders

Aiden found some pine cones in our back yard and has been begging me to help him make bird feeders with them, or "make bird food" as he would say. So this afternoon, we sat down and did just that. These were really easy and inexpensive to make. They only cost me $2 and we could have made a ton of them for that price! As it turns out, we got tired after making just 4 of them.

The birdseed cost me $2. The pine cones were free from my backyard. I used left over string from a roman shade I made earlier to hang the feeders and skewers that were left over from kebabs this summer as a perch. The peanut butter, I would have had to pay for, but Aiden took this jar outside last week and I found it outside a couple days later. (I wouldn't have purchased Jif for the birds!) Apparently he was preparing for this project long before I was!

Aiden's favorite part of the project was putting the peanut butter on the pine cone. He got it everywhere and wasn't even tempted to taste it because he doesn't like peanut butter.

Here is the finished product. Since it rained last night, we're going to wait to hang them up until things dry out. It will be fun watching them to see if the birds eat the seeds!

Cake #4- Playing with Fondant

I've been wanting to try playing around with fondant and I had a little extra time today, so I thought I'd give it a go. This is a six inch round cake that I covered with white fondant. Then I made some blue fondant stars (Thanks to the play dough cookie cutters!) and stuck them on. Overall, this was pretty easy to do. The fondant recipe worked out well and it's pretty easy to color although I was in a hurry and still had a few streaks in mine.

My critique: I think I made my stars a little too thick. As I mentioned, I was in a hurry and so I didn't take time to trim down the round cardboard cake board that is under the cake so you can see it. (Nor did I wrap it, but I'm only going to serve it to my family!) This was a very quick job (less than 5 min to decorate) and I'm sure I could do a little better if I gave it a little more time and effort!

I have read that covering small cakes is easier than covering large cakes with fondant. I could easily see how that could be true. As for this small cake. Covering it was super easy and I have to say that I prefer this to using traditional decorator icing.

Fishing at Grammy's House

We spent last weekend visiting our family in Wichita and El Dorado. Grammy's house has a pond behind it. The kids spent a lot of time fishing over the weekend. Neither one of them caught a fish. Fortunately, Travis caught a few so the kids could see and touch them. Wow. I never thought I'd raise two city kids, but it seems as that's what's happened!!! My kids have pretty much only fished at Grammy's house. I think we're going to have to change that!

Aiden had amazing patience and persistence. All he wanted to do was fish.

Waffle got to spend some precious time outdoors while the kids fished.

Travis caught this bass one morning while waiting for Waffle to do his business.

Cake #3- The Anniversary Cake

Yep, that's right. Our 8th anniversary is coming up next week. I thought I'd make a cake to celebrate with. I decide to make a round layer cake and then decorate it. No too difficult, right? Well, there is a very good reason you're not going to get to see a picture of this one! Major FAIL!!! Hahaha. At least I can laugh at it. I couldn't get the cake to stop leaning (I thought I had the layers level), which made me pretty frustrated, so I just decided to use left over icing from my last cake to decorate it. Instead of making new icing for this disaster. I used orange and light green (which were our wedding colors). They don't belong together on a cake. Enough said. The next cake will be Aiden's birthday. It should go better. We'll see!!!