Happy Easter!

Matthew 28

Jesus Has Risen

 ¹ After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

 ² There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴ The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

 ⁵ The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

 ⁸ So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them,“Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Although the death, burial, and resurrection should be reflected on weekly, since today is Easter I've been thinking about it more. We're so blessed that Jesus' story did not end at the cross. He conquered Death, giving us renewed hope! A chance to have everlasting life. What an amazing blessing! 

Last year, I was learning more about decorating cookies. I decided to make some for Easter. I think they were a big step in my cookie decorating. I was getting closer to getting the consistency right for the flood icing, which is pretty important. 

 I was so excited about these! I had the time to work on them and got better results than ever before.

I ended up giving these to a co-worker. This year, she wanted some more! Of course I was flattered and eager to make some since I enjoy it so much!

Alright, so they're basically identical to the ones from last year... But they were still fun to make! I like the purple tulips more than the pink ones. (I didn't make purple last year). I was kind of rushed making these too. Cookies just take time! I managed to get them baked one day this week. Then Thursday I needed to decorate them if I wanted to get them to her before Easter! My husband was giving me a hard time. So sweet... he wanted to hang out with me :) I did them as fast as I could, which still took a while. I ended up putting all the flood icing in a Ziploc bags and cutting holes in the corners. Ended up working quite nicely. Then no clean up!! (well less than usual ha)

Yesterday, I had one of my last cakes here in Mobile. Weird.... Anyway, it was for a little boy's first birthday. Baby and young kids' birthdays are the best. The mother gave me the colors and let me decorate as I pleased. That sounds all fun and dandy except I'm the most indecisive person ever!! Obviously, I came up with something pretty much as I was decorating the cake, and loved it!! I'm so excited how these turned out!!

 The colors were lime green, blue, and aqua. The cake is really light blue; although it's hard to tell. There's a little smash cake also.

This is the set of cutters I won from Cup A Dee Cakes. I used the one on the top for the decorations at the top of the cake. Seems so simple but that cutter helps a lot in achieving that design! I also used one of my wonderful pearl molds for the border. Love it.

Well I actually need to go pack up some of my cake things. Crazy. Wonder if my parents are aware it's all going to their house. No way that stuff is going in storage :)

And, I think I'm going to have to throw away my cake dummies... No need for them really, but kinda sad.

Exciting News

I'm going to see how much I can squeeze into this post...

First of all, I would guess you're wondering about the exciting news!! Well I missed April Fool's to pull the "I'm pregnant!" gag... hehe! No, we really do have big news. My husband and I are getting to move back to our hometown! Both of our families are there and we're so excited to be moving back. He got a fantastic new job which he is incredibly excited about and there will be new opportunities for me!!

Now down to business... We have a house to sell! I'm telling pretty much everyone so I might as well mention it here, just in case there's someone who needs/someone who knows someone who needs a house. It's a 3 bedroom/2 bath 1300 sq. ft. house in West Mobile built in 2003. We love it, but must move on.

I won't bore y'all with all the details, so if you're interested PLEASE let me know. I will get you all the info you need!!

Now on to cakes and cookies, of course!! I was pretty excited about these cookies. These are the first cookies I've done for a lingerie shower.

Here are a few of my favorites...

Here's a pretty basic birthday cake. It's for a boy, so they're not much on decorations...

Here's a groom's cake. It's chocolate cake and peanut butter icing. Yummmmy.

 Nothing too special, but it smelled delicious.

 Before we leave town, I have a few cakes I want to make for some people.  This is the strawberry margarita cake. I made it a couple weeks ago and thought it was delicious! I had to share! I ended up having a few layers...

 Top it off with lime cream cheese icing and you're done!! Oh my goodness, it's so good!

 This was for a friend of mine's wedding shower. She's actually the one who trained me at my job when I first moved to Mobile! I was attempting to mimic a design I saw that had the dots sparse at the bottom and more as they went up the cake. Not sure I pulled it off. I wish I had done a little more to the cake. Maybe a ribbon border at the bottom or something. Bummer. I really liked the colors too. I don't think the cake met it's potential :(

 So I finished up the cake, packed it up and drove 15 minutes to meet my friend...

 BOOM!

Lovely explosion.

 Not just in one place either. Nice huh?

I've been told the sun will have that effect. Heat, etc. But it gets much hotter in these parts than it did last weekend. Not sure quite what happened. I sure prefer that it happened on this cake and not the wedding cake the weekend before! 

 And check it out! Only one burn ;)

It's been a while since I've burned myself. 

Here's another cake I wanted to make for someone before I left. It's a peanut butter cake with chocolate buttercream icing. I like the piping. I never do stuff like that.

 Of course, then I swamp it with ganache! But I had some left over and there was no need to waste it!

I hope the recipients enjoyed!

Was that enough in one post? We'll see what else I have time to make before I go! Buy my house!!! :D

OH YEAH!! I actually won a giveaway from a blog! I feel so special. I'm even mentioned in the post!
Check out Cup a Dee Cakes!! Here's the post where I'm listed as the winner! Hooray!

Cupcakes and Cookies

It's been weeks since I've posted. I don't like it when this happens because I don't even know where to begin... I finally recovered from my wisdom teeth removal. yay! It took longer than I expected. Glad that's over. Good thing I only had some cupcakes to do the weekend following...

These are Pinkalicious cupcakes if you weren't aware. I sure wasn't. Some book the kids are reading these days :) 

 This is the awesome cupcake carrier my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I finally had a chance to use it and I am completely in love. I've used it lots since. Obviously it works well for cupcakes, but I took out the red trays and put cookies in there. Wonderful.

Speaking of those cookies, I made those around the time I made these cupcakes. 

 I love doing baby shower cookies, but I've learned I'm not very creative... stripes and dots. How else to decorate!? Especially for boys... But I really like the colors. Unfortunately I had to color more after I outlined them so I didn't quite match the original colors. Bummer.

 I had fun with the pictures... until I got to the carriages and they were still drying so this is the pic they got :)

 Then I stuff them all on one plate for the shower. There were over 50 cookies.

I made these for a lady at the Chamber of Commerce. I'm an Ambassador and we have bi-monthly meetings. This lady had a baby in December and we're just having time to celebrate (after her maternity leave, etc)! So we did a little shower at our meeting. I brought these cookies and no one believed I had made them! I work for Panera, so they all thought they were Panera cookies.... Oh no. Panera doesn't make 'em like this!! It was funny because the ambassadors really don't know how I'm obsessed with baking!

Well that covered a little bit of what I've been doing in March. I'll start another post so this one doesn't get too long.

Gone Fishin'

I had three cakes for this weekend and I'd love to share them with you! The pictures, of course... :)

First was for a little boy's 2nd birthday. Unfortunately he got sick this week with something that is very contagious, especially to little kids so they had to cancel the party. But the mom still wanted to celebrate on his birthday so I just made a smaller version of the original cake. It was a fishing theme.

 My brother found an app that lets you put pictures into frames like this. This is what I was talking about on my last post. I see these all the time and really like them!! Now if only there was a way to do it on my computer. I do have photoshop, and I'm sure I can do lots with it that I don't even realize.

 The fisherman just hanging out :) 

The 2 is on the boat since it was the boy's 2nd birthday.

 Another angle on the turtle so you can see his shell better.

I drew on the "circles" with an edible pen, as well as the eyes.

 A bucket of fish.

 The bucket really had individual fish in it. I thought they were cute.

 The ducks and unfinished turtle with some rocks.

 The rice crispies boat. It wasn't very smooth when I covered it in fondant because of the rice crispies, but it was what it was (haha sounds funny in the past tense).

My almost-completed boat and fisherman.

I would love to take a class on making figures/animals/etc. Obviously, mine need some work. They don't look like they'd be hard, but not 

as easy as you'd think. What bugs me is how you can see there's a seam, for lack of better words. Check this out: 

See how you can see the "seam" right across his face and on his body? That's no good.

But overall I was happy with how it turned out :)

I also ended up doing some last minute fish cookies to go with:

These were interesting. I found a fish cookie cutter the day before the cake was due. The mother had mentioned fish cookies but we weren't sure if we could find a cutter. So I end up doing some... then I wasn't sure how to decorate them! The shape of the cutter has that bump on the top and a wide tail and 2 fins on the bottom. I ended up doing this. What do you think? I might just be used to them now and think they look ok, but first thought, are they weird?? 

Also, I was trying to go with natural, earthy colors so I picked burgundy. I'd already used a lot of green and blue. When I mixed the burgundy it came out pink!! Oh my gosh... but it did darken once they dried. It was much brighter than this. And I had a blue dye that's kinda close to a gray. It turned out purple. So I added true blue to it to get that color. Strange. 

I was going to put all 3 cakes on this one post, but since I've said so much already, I'll split them up :)