Easy (but look hard) Christmas cupcakes

I was lazy this year.  We had so much going on leading up to Christmas this year, the last thing I wanted to do was come up with a desert for supper.  Enter Betty Crocker Cherry Chip cupcakes!  I wanted to decorate them pretty, but like I said, I was lazy.  I started by whipping up a batch of fluffy white icing.  I then grabbed a random icing tip from my box, plugged it into a pastry bag, then painted a stripe of Kelly green Wilton gel coloring up one side of the inside of the bag, and a stripe of no-taste Red Wilton gel up the other.  Then I filled it with my plain white icing and just piped a spiral on each cupcake.  Adorable, no?

6th Birthday Awesomeness!

My dear sweet baby is growing up!  My son recently celebrated his 6th birthday, and if you know me at all, you know I love baking and decorating cakes.  We wanted an Avengers theme so we had some inflatable mallet things and all kinds of Avengers candies and junk. So much fun with 7 boys between the ages of 6 and 8 jacked up on sugar! HAHA!  Anyhow, back to the cake: my favorite part!  I wanted something special, and I know my son could care less about eating the cake, he just likes the idea of getting one and eating the icing, however he DOES love rice krispie cake...so I decided to combine the two for a specatcular combo of a Captain America shield (of cake) and a Thor hammer (of rice krispie cake)!

16" cake pan with a heating core filled with vanilla cake (some of which was dyed blue)

It took an entire bottle of Wilton Red Red gel coloring, and an entire bottle of Christmas Red to get my batch of red icing to not look totally pink!  I also added in a pouch of strawberry jello powder to give it a little extra something.

The Thor hammer was made in two parts, the handle which I coated in melted chocolate and then sculpted some lines into, then I formed the hammer head and frosted it with the vanilla buttercream and sprayed it with Duff''s edible silver spray.  It looked fantastic after it sat for a few hours.  The shine almost disappeared and it looked pretty much like Thor's hammer!

MMMMMMmmmmmm Tasty cake!!!

Tomato cage Christmas trees!

I saw on Pinterest a while back a few assorted ideas for making tomato cage Christmas trees so I figured "hey, I've got some tomato cages and tons of clearance Christmas garland and decorations...I'm gonna try this!"  One day when a friend was over, we wrapped the lights around, then wrapped the garland, and added some balls and snowflakes. (If I do it again I will buy more greenery so I can fill it in more densely.  It doesn't look bad, but it could look better) It didn't quite look finished so I went back and added some ribbon later.  I'll have to try for better pics some time, but I think they turned out great!!

Christmas Lantern

A while back I bought this plain old black outdoor lantern on clearance at WalMart for $3.  At the time I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Well, 3 months later I figured it out.  I filled it full of assorted Christmas balls and stuck a couple peacock feathers in for good measure, tied some ribbon on top and....Voila!  Christmas decoration!  (and I only ended up bleeding on one ornament after I dropped one and it shattered)

Baby Shower Cake!

A friend asked me to bake a cake for a baby shower, and of course I'm not going to say no.  I love baking!  She requested zebra print and left the rest up to me...although she did manage to score a deal on some Wilton Sugar Sheets in an awesome zebra print that made my life so much easier!  I thought to myself "you know what would be awesome?  If the cake itself was zebra print when you cut into it!"  Of course I really had no idea how to do this so I guessed, and (unfortunately I didn't get any pictures from when it was cut into, as it was at someone else's house at a baby shower I wasn't at) according to the guests, it worked perfectly!

I baked 4 little mini cupcakes and wrote the baby's name on them and they were set on top after the cake got there.  So cute!

Notes on using sugar sheets:  It was my first time using them but I have used frosting sheets before.  Basically the same thing.  Cut them carefully and make sure they aren't too dry or they won't peel nicely from the backing.  If you find they are too dry and are cracking and not peeling off the paper nicely, stick a damp paper towel between the backing sheet and the package (not on the sugar side) and zip it shut for about half an hour.  It makes a HUGE difference!  Crumb coat your cake and then slather on the frosting nice and thick.  For this cake I used about 6 cups of frosting (including between the layers).  This 2 layer cake was 8"x8"x4" and took 2 sugar sheets to cover the sides and the top. If you are putting them on a cake you had previously frozen to crumb coat they may sweat some as the cake warms up.  No big deal, just something that happens.

P.s. This is what the baked layers looked like before I put it together.

Pinteresting Pumpkin Cookies

I admit it.  I am a Pinterest junkie.  If I could spend hours on there, I would. Also, I wish there was a button I could click when I actually complete a pin and I would be rewarded with a round of applause!  My most recent success was with a batch of pumpkin cookies.  It was soooo hard to only eat two and make sure that there will be some left for Thanksgiving supper with my family!  I will definitely be making these again! Thumbs up delish!

Original pin links up with MyBakingAddiction:

http://pinterest.com/pin/198299189813511880/

My results:

Fluffy pumpkin batter

Baked cookies were not pretty on top, but that is what icing is for!

Mmmmmm yummy! (it was hard to stop nibbling to take the picture!)

New Shoes Day!

New shoe day is equally as fantastic as new purse day...I think...  If it came down to one or the other though, I would have to choose new shoes.  They are even better when they are a surprise find, and better still when they are on for an amazing price!  The Zellers stores in Canada are closing soon so all their stores are having blowout sales.  I went to check out one near us and found they had gotten in a TON of fantastic things from The Bay to blow out during their sale!  There were gorgeous Calvin Klein dresses, cute blazers and other things that I now forget about because of just how awesome the deals on the shoes were!  There were Kenneth Cole, Nine West, and many many other fantastic brands marked down drastically.  My favorite find however, was this fantastic pair of Hopskotch2 heels from G by Guess.  These babies are amazing!  I think I peed a little when I saw that they had been tagged at just $29.99 with an additional 20% off sale on!  Seriously? These beauties are regular $70! Thank You Shoe Gods!!!  I got some other things on sale cheap too, but none worth mentioning compared to this! hehehe.