A Diego Birthday Cake

It is a nice compliment for someone to ask you to make a cake similar to one you've already done. Which is exactly what happened with the Diego cake I made for my son's birthday! A lady I work with told me a while ago she would probably get me to make her grandson's birthday cake since his mom had just had twin girls and would be busy with them. His favourite right now is Diego and so she asked if I could make one like Anthony's birthday cake. I starting thinking right away on how I could improve the cake. I did make a few changes, but I kept the same layout, just changed the bottom tier to a 10 inch round cake instead of square.

This time I decided to put the Bobo Brothers on; the mischievous monkeys that are always causing trouble for Diego. Luckily you just have to yell "Freeze, Bobo Brothers!" and they start behaving again. I wish that worked for my kids!

Paw prints around the back for Diego to follow to help the animals in trouble.

Rescue Pack and Baby Jaguar were a must since they are Deigo's faithful sidekicks. I was a little hesitant to put Diego on in case he broke in transport. So when it finally stopped raining long enough for my co-worker to come and pick the cake up, this is how it looked!

I told her she would have to send me a picture of the cake with Diego on top, and here it is!

Little Joshua was "absolutely thrilled!" with his cake. Apparently he dragged each new arrival over to see it! That is probably the best part of making a birthday cake for a little boy or girl - their reaction! It is an important day for them, so might as well make it extra special!

Care Bear Baby Blanket

I love Care Bears, always have, always will! They were super popular when I was little and for my 4th or 5th birthday my Grandma gave me a Care Bear book. It had stories, colouring pages, a photo gallery of all the Care Bears and their cousins. I spent hours looking at it; wore the pages right out! So, when I saw this Care Bear panel there was no hesitation! I knew I was going to buy it. Actually, I bought two. With the coordinating fabric and fleece, of course! It is all or nothing with me! I also have Care Bear pillow squares that I think were bought on a separate Fabricland shopping spree. It was many years ago, I can't remember! But don't worry, I have plans for it all!

My sister was looking though my stash a quite a while ago and came across the Care Bear panels. She really like them too. They are Care Bear after all, who wouldn't like them? I told her that if she ever had a baby girl I would make one for her. And so, if you read the post a couple down you will know she recently had a baby girl! I kind of had it in my head that the baby was going to be a boy so I wasn't in a rush to make the blanket. Until, that is, a couple days before my niece was born and I had a dream that it was a girl! One of my first thoughts was - I am never going to get that blanket done on time! And I didn't. At least not for her baby shower, but I did get it done for her Baptism!

I hand quilted it, and got it done the night before! I may be a bit of a procrastinator, but I always meet my deadlines! At least almost always! Lucky for me baby panels are pretty quick to do. If you don't do the hand quilting, and just do ties, panels are probably fastest way to make a baby blanket. And there are so many cute baby panels hanging on the walls at Fabricland. The hard part is picking one out!

I love how hand quilting puffs everything up!

And matching fleece for the back!

As soon as my sister pulled the tissue paper out of the bag she knew what it was! There may have been a few late nights, but it was well worth it!

Lunch Bag

I've thought about making myself a lunch kit for quite a few years now. I actually stated one when I was in grade 12, but didn't like it so I never completely finished it. Several years later, I was surprised to find one of my brothers using it for his school lunches. Even if it was ugly and didn't close, I guess it still worked!

I started looking around for patterns and the best one I found was this one by Virginia at Gingercake Patterns. It was exactly what I was looking for. I wasn't too keen on spending $8 on a pattern for such a simple project, but I had attempted to make my own once already and it didn't turn out so well! And I really liked this one!

I bought one of those pre-cut bundles of coordinating fabric from Walmart, sat down one evening and sewed it up.

In the end I'm glad I bought the pattern, it is cute, easy to follow and it turned out how it was supposed to! And now I have an awesome lunch bag, and the pattern to make more for my family! No more paper bags in this house!

Baby Shower!

My sister and brother-in-law recently welcomed a baby girl into their family. I finally got to meet her last weekend at her baby shower. She is a sweetheart!

You can't have a shower without a few games so we played the "Nursery Rhyme Quiz". There are several versions of this on line. I found one I liked and printed it out.

I had the guests bring baby pictures of themselves and we had a fun time figuring out who was who. It was a little tricky but everyone did a pretty good job at guessing!

We also played a baby version of pictionary. I wrapped up a bunch of baby/little girl things (socks, hair elastics, bubble bath, pants, shirt, shoes, sidewalk chalk, a couple toys, headbands, baby food, etc.) and then wrote what was in the present on a paper and taped it to the outside. The person drawing picked a present, read the paper and had to draw it. The rest had to guess and the one with the winning guess got to unwrap the present for my niece. It was a lot of fun! There are lots of talented ladies out there!

Naturally, I had to make a cake!

The fondant kind of faded on the drive there (a couple hours drive), which surprised me because it pretty over cast. I should have added more dye to it from the beginning to make the fondant brighter, but I thought I had already added a lot and it was getting really late so I called it good enough. I actually had my husband helping me out. He rolled the little balls and did an excellent job! And a rubber duck is the perfect topper for a baby shower cake!

I forgot to plan the punch, so the night before the shower, after I'd finished the cake, I was searching for a quick and easy punch recipe that was pink and I came across this recipe. Best punch ever! When I got to the city I had to stop for a few things - include the punch ingredients. I couldn't find cranberry ginger ale (they probably don't sell it in Canada!) or raspberry sherbet, so I bought 7-up and berry sherbet. It was so good. Probably the best punch I have ever had, and I've had some awesome punches! I am a huge ice cream person, (and chocolate person! Although, strangely, chocolate ice cream is not my favorite!) so this punch recipe was an amazing find for me! I really can't believe I'm only finding about about it now! And you can use a different kind of sherbet for every occasion! And it gets all foamy and like a bubble bath...

so, of course, I stuck another duck in it for my new niece!

Graduation Cupcakes

A lady at worked asked me if I would make cupcakes for her son's graduation barbeque. She wanted 60 graduation themed cupcakes with green and yellow icing to represent the school colours. Sounded straight forward enough and I was excited to do it. I'd never done anything for a graduation. I decided to make fondant diplomas, tied with licorice, with the words "Congrats", "Cole", and "2014" made out of chocolate.

For the most part everything went as planned, but there were a few mishaps. First, my husband was digging around in the deep freeze and accidentally shook up my container of chocolate "congrats". He said he check them and didn't think any of them were broken. As I expected, every single one of them were broke. Luckily, they don't take long to make so it wasn't much trouble to do them again. I still had to melt chocolate to make the 2014's anyway.

Then when putting the last pan of cupcakes into the oven I managed to catch the pan on the oven door and spilled pretty much all of it into the oven. That caused some delay while I scrapped burning cupcake off the element before whipping up a new batch.

It was fairly warm in the house while I was decorating and I could barely touch the chocolate words or else they melted. I broke a few that way. That is why I always make extra of everything! I had to very carefully maneuver the words in to place with the spatula I was using to lift them off the wax paper.

By 1 in the morning they were all boxed up and ready to go!

I thought they turned out pretty good but had to wait until Monday to hear how they went over. And I was so glad when my co-worker came in said they went over very well! Only 3 left! So, Congratulation to Cole on his high school graduation!