Happy Birthday MOM!!!

I know it has been a long time since I posted something, but I have a good excuse. My mom and sister have been visiting me here in Florida. I grew up out west in Utah, and I only get to see her about twice a year. So when I do see her, she gets all of my time and attention. She is the coolest mom in the world. We have a great time just talking and laughing.

We did do some fun things, like visit Kennedy Space Center on the 4th of July and pet baby alligators after an exciting airboat ride through the Everglades. We saw 6 alligators while out on the boat, one of them, a huge alligator about 10 feet long swam right up to the boat where my mom was. It was a little frightening, but very fun.

Toward the end of the trip, we celebrated my mom's birthday. She and her mother (my grandma) are the ones who have taught me all about cake decorating. My mom has spent hundred, if not thousands of hours making cakes, with my Grandma, with me, with my sisters and for neighbors. So for her birthday, she wanted me to make her a cake and teach her all that I know about fondant, because with as many cake as my mom has made, she has never used fondant.

We had a wonderful time, talking and playing with fondant. It was the most fun I have had making a cake.

She designed her own cake. We decided to go with a Mary Engelbreit-ish style. We both love her work. My mom also loves cherries, so she came up with the idea of a bowl of cherries on top. I hope you enjoy seeing the cake as much as we had fun making it.

The cake was Red Velvet with Almond Buttercream icing. The cherries were made of fondant and we used stems from real cherries. Yummy!!!

Happy Birthday MOM!!!

A Girly Girl Cake

This cake was really fun to make! I made it for my friends daughters 8Th birthday. She had a Fashion Show party and wanted a purse cake. This is my first purse cake and my first pillow cake, it's also the first time I've done zebra print. It was so fun to make and it took me forever, but I learned a ton!


The purse cake was a White Chocolate Sour Cream Cake or WCSC cake as they are called by professionals, and the pillow cake was Vanilla Cake. Both cakes were covered with pink Buttercream icing, then covered in fondant and decorated.
Because I was also helping at the party, I was in charge of cutting the cake. I must admit, it is really hard to cut my own cakes. All that work, but it tasted so good!

Bakugan! Bakugan! Bakugan!

My son just turned 8 yesterday! I can't believe how time flies. We celebrated with a mishmosh of party themes. He couldn't decide on just one, so we combine them all and had a great time. His cake of choice was a Bakugan cake. I wanted to make it super cool for him, but also didn't want to spend his entire birthday making his cake. So I decided on kind of cool and more time with him. He loved it and said it was the best cake he had ever had.

Night at the Museum

This cake takes a little more explanation then most of my other cakes. I made this cake for my son's best friend. The Dino and the gray rocks are a toy, I didn't make them. I wish I could say I had. The boy sitting on top of the T-Rex is the birthday boy, the boy about to get eaten by the T-Rex is his oldest brother. The boy in the blue soccer uniform is his other brother, who lives for soccer and is a very good player. Since I was making a Night at the Museum cake with the Dino in it, which is what he asked for, I thought I would make it a little more personal. Have a Delicious Day!

A Bubbley Blue Cake

This cake was so fun to put together. I made it for 2 cute girls who are having a combined birthday party. They both love the color blue and wanted a blue cake. So this is what I came up with. I hope they have a wonderful birthday.

A Whimsical Fairy Cake

This is my first Topsy Turvy cake. I made it for a bridal shower. The fairy is made out of gumpaste and the flowers, frogs, and rocks are made out of fondant. The waterfall is buttercream. I never counted the number of flowers on the cake, but I would guess A LOT! This cake took forever to make, but it was so fun to put together. Enjoy, and Have a Yummy Day!

Beach Cupcakes

These Birthday cupcakes are for a very cute 9 year old girl.

The Flip-flops are made of chocolate.

Everything is edible except the umbrellas.

Enjoy!

Fondant Flowers

I have had so much fun this weekend with my new fondant flower cutters. My colors turned out weird on this pic, but it really is the same purple as in the pictures below. The cutters came in 4 different sizes, and I just had to try them all out.


Once the flowers are dry, they last for a long time.
I have really had fun making them.
Enjoy!

While I had the fondant out I thought I would try fondant roses. There are different ways to make fondant roses, but I think these are very sweet.

My Favorite Cake Ever!

For my birthday this year, my sweet husband gave me plane tickets for me and our daughter to go visit my mom across the country. We spent 3 days and had a wonderful time. My daughter saw snow for the first time and got to play with her Gram. We had a great time just talking and laughing.
When I got home, this great cake was waiting for me, my husband and my son had spent the day making for me! The cake was perfect because it was made with love. This is my husbands 1st cake and I thought he did a great job! It was just so nice to know he was thinking of me and went to the effort of making something he knew meant so much to me. The frosting is homemade and he even did the lettering! He had seen me put frosting in a ziplock bag and cut a corner off and use that to put frosting on cookies, so he thought he would try it. I love my family!

Keep Moving Forward

I have been thinking a lot about about the statement "Keep Moving Forward". If you are not aware, that statement comes from the Disney movie, Meet the Robinson's. Which I think is one of the most underrated Disney movies ever. There are so many great lessons to be learned from this movie. So how does "Keep Moving Forward" relate to cake decorating? Maybe it doesn't, because cake decorating is certainly not life or death, but as I look at the picture of this cake, as the decorator, I only see the mistakes and the flaws, all the things I wish I could redo. They are so apparent to me that they seem to scream at me. But if I take a minute and pan out, away from the cake, I can see the beauty of it. If I try to see it from an outside point of view the cake is beautiful.

Sometimes in our lives we spend so much of the time looking at the mistakes and the flaws in our own lives, we miss the beauty of the life we live. As the saying goes, We are our own worst critics.

So how do we pan out and change our perspective? I think that comes from inside ourselves. For me I try to see myself the way others see me. I try to uplift the people around me, I try to leave them better then I found them and I try to Move Forward.

Everyone makes mistakes, everyone is going to have a bad day, everyone is going to need to "vent" to someone. But then if we continue to move forward, if we dust ourselves off, I believe our world grows larger and our view broadens and then we can step back and see how far we have come. Then we can turn and see the beauty that others see.