Joel's 1!

Well yesterday we attended Joel's 1st birthday party. :)

He was so handsome:



Paisley wore a dress that my mom had passed on to me (my sister and myself both wore it, I believe):







Annalise was there:



As was Meredith:



And Cashlin:



And Libby!





Joel enjoyed his cake:





I designed a new applique (which I hope to sell, but still need to work it out a little more). Made it for Joel, along with a matching card.

Mmmm cake

I made another cake for my class this week.

This time it was a butter pecan cake, with chopped walnuts in it (didn't have pecans), with a Mocha (chocolate and coffee) swiss meringue buttercream icing. I"m looking forward to sampling it today!! In class tonight we had to decorate using clowns. I think they detract from the cake though :(.




The icing is SOO good. I tasted the remnants after icing the cake. And at class tonight... everyone could smell the tastiness, and many were tempted to stick a finger in.

Today I'm hosting friday coffee play group. So they'll be the lucky people to get tastes of it. We've kinda outgrown the coffee shop, so we're starting to do it at people's homes.

Cake disaster

Currently I am taking the Wilton Cake Decorating classes. Which is great, because I have never successfully iced a cake. Either it's all crummy, or the layers slide apart. It's always a disaster. So in preparation for this week's class I needed to bake a cake (hey I'm a pro at that, never failed at the baking part), and then base ice it.

Here is cake #1, first cake baked, using my new bake-even strips:

Unuseable.... it still was domed, and then it cracked. Realized when I washed up the pan, and took the bake even strips off, that whoops... .was supposed to saturate them in water. At least I didn't start a fire with them (which a former student did, by not saturating them).

Onto cake #2:

Whoops, forgot to put wax paper on the bottom of the pan.

Cake #3:
The cake baked fine, had a small hump, but not bad. I managed to get it to the board, and into the freezer without it breaking. I then base iced it during Paisley's morning nap, and it was perfect! I mean absolutely perfectly iced. Then I went to mix all the other colours I would need for the class... and realized, it was supposed to be base iced in light blue, not in white. So I scrambled to mix up some light blue icing, and Paisley woke up before I managed to get it on the cake. So after getting her up, I put her in her exersaucer so I could finish icing (she's not a big fan of being IN the exersaucer, would rather play on the outside of it, but she actually was content in there for about 10 minutes). I got the cake iced, then was in the smoothing process when she started to have a meltdown. So the light blue icing wasn't perfectly smoothed, but it was good enough. Here is the result after I brought it to class, and decorated it there. Not great, but I think it's a good starting point for the class.


This week we're making figures... so I have to either bake a cake, or bring in cupcakes. I think I'll do a cake again, but this time I'll remember all the steps, and it should be good the first time around. I couldn't believe how many things went wrong last time. A baby can sure frazzle your thought process.