Happy Birthday Peter!

I did this last minute for Patti's husband on New Year's Eve. I volunteered to just bake the cake but I just couldn't give it back to him plain so I busted out some quick chocolate letters and confetti designs. Peter said he was happy to finally get an Amy cake. What a sweetie!

Baby shower cake pops

My mom and sister helped me make these cake pops for my sister-in-law's baby shower. We had a great time doing this together. We are so happy that Janae is having a girl after 2 boys. I couldn't get over how fun it was to see the pink with the brown this time. I will never get tired of those colors together.

For the cake flavors we did coconut, chocolate and strawberry. We then covered them with pink, white, or milk chocolate melts. The toppings were sprinkles, crushed oreos, toasted coconut (for the coconut cake), chocolate shavings, crushed M&M's, or just a simple drizzle with the contrasting chocolate colors.

*See the Cake Pop post for step by step directions.

We used crushed oreos for the dirt to cover up the green foam that is holding the sticks in place.

This is Cami's beautiful silver stand. She usually puts flowers in the vase but I thought it would be fun to put the cake pops in there. Those are my kind of flowers anyway.

Snowflake cookies

When I arrived to my mom's for Christmas vacation to relax and just enjoy the season, she had other ideas. She busted out these beautiful snowflake cookies from the freezer and asked if I wanted to help decorate them. Of coarse I couldn't resist. The relaxing can wait, right? My mind started reeling of all the possible snowflake decorations and to this day whenever I see a snowflake I think oh now that would make a cute cookie. My mind is warped, all it likes to think about is sweets. So my mom and cute sister-in-law, Janae are so good to put up with my craziness. They frosted the cookies and let me do the decorating (the best part.) Thanks for the memories girls!

Christmas treats

I did these treats for a Christmas party with some friends. I had a fun time trying to get this tower to look alright. I used my 2 cake platters with a silver vase I had stored, which I filled with candy canes.

The caramel pretzels I did in two steps. A couple nights before I made the caramel. I use my mom's caramel recipe: 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup karo syrup, 1 cup whipping cream, 1/4 cup of butter, and 1/2 tsp. vanilla.

Add sugar, 1/2 cup of the cream and karo to heavy pan over low heat. Wash sides with hot water and don't let boil until sugar dissolves. Once sugar is dissolved turn heat up to medium. Add other half of cream slowly then add butter. Cook to 242 degrees. Add vanilla. Pour into greased 9x13 pan.

I take the caramel out of pan and place it on a cutting board and cut small strips. I then wrap it around the pretzel (I got this idea from my sister-in-law, Amber.) I then cover it with chocolate right away and set it on wax paper and either cover with sprinkles, crushed peppermint (looks prettier than it tastes,) or let dry and drizzle red and green chocolate over them. These are fun for all holidays or occasions. You could even use a nicer store bought caramel since the taste of the caramel is overpowered by the pretzel and chocolate. I just like working with my mom's caramel and it's fun to cut and wrap any extra caramels in small wax paper squares to give as gifts.

The chocolate covered strawberries are self explanatory. I do like the taste of the Wilton chocolate melts over any other milk chocolate you can buy in the store, unless you want to pay for good chocolate then Peter's is by far the best.

I love the chocolate covered cinnamon bears. They are also very easy especially if you don't dip the heads. Once dipped I place on wax paper to dry and then drizzle the other chocolate colors using my Wilton chocolate drizzle bottles. I found the fun star glass bowl at the Dollar Tree.

200+ Christmas Cupcakes!

This was a huge undertaking but I enjoyed every minute of it especially the memories that were created working with these 2 cute girls. They must love me for getting them involved in this. I was asked to decorate 220 cupcakes for our church party. I didn't have to bake them just decorate them, sounds easy right? Well I knew I would need help so I asked Danielle and Alisha to be my helpers. We had a few others come in for a few minutes and help as well (even Alisha's husband helped with some.) They must have thought I was crazy. So the night before Danielle came over to my house last minute to help me get things organized. We put ribbon on all the platters and started making the cream cheese frosting. We ended up having to make a Wal-Mart run at midnight to buy more red food coloring. I am so thankful for Danielle. She is one of those amazing friends that would be there for you any night you needed to make a midnight Wal-Mart run. I love this girl. So I didn't get to bed until 2:30 the next morning, but hey all 10 batches of frosting was made. I was at the church at 9:30 am and didn't finish decorating until 5 pm. I am so thankful for the 2 Lisa's in my life. My sister-in-law Lisa for watching my kids all day so I could do this and also for the Lisa in my ward for bringing me food to get me though the day since I forgot to eat breakfast and for getting all my ingredients to do this.

We had 24 tables to display our cupcakes on. We borrowed several peoples cake stands for the center pieces and displayed 8-10 cupcakes on each one.

These were some of my favorite cupcakes. I got the idea online. The H's were done with chocolate letters but before they dried I put sprinkles on them. I liked the texture it gave them. The first HO's frosting was done by painting stripes on a parchment bag with the red and green food coloring and placing white frosting in the bag and then piping the 1M swirl.

I also got this idea online. His snout is a Nilla wafer, nose M&M, antlers is a pretzel. I can't take any credit for these. I showed Danielle how to do them and she did all 24.

We didn't have enough room on some of the platters for 8 cupcakes so we put some on the tables. Is it obvious that I like doing chocolate letters on cupcakes?

Some of the other designs we did were:

wreath- used star tip for leaves, sprinkles for berries, and tip 3 for ribbon at the top

holly berry- M&M's for berries, leaf tip 352 for the leaves

ornaments- peanut butter cup with broken off pretzel coming out of the top for the hook

1M swirls in every color with either sprinkles or crushed up peppermint

lattice

pokadots

star tip- plain or swirl

This was the cutest cake platter (Danell's) it looks like a bell. The picture doesn't do it justice but I had to put it on here because one day I want to own one just like it.

**Thanks to Danielle for taking these pictures. Your camera is amazing and you are much better at taking them than me. Can I hire you and Lisa to take all my pictures?

I wish we would have thought to get a picture of the mess in the kitchen with cupcakes everywhere but we were too busy to think that far ahead.