Follow the Yellow Brick Road

The Young Women leaders decided to use the Wizard of Oz theme for our New Beginnings Program this year.

 

 For info on what New Beginnings is click here. The main focus of the evening is to recognize the girls accomplishments in their Personal Progress, talk about our new theme for the year, and get the new girls, who will be 12 this year, excited about what Young Women's and Personal Progress entails.

 The theme this year is "Come Unto Christ." We got a lot of our inspiration from the blog, The Dearth Duo. It was fun to plan this but also challenging to come up with the program.  I'm not so good at that stuff but if you want a copy of it click here.
*We made our balloon rainbow by following this tutorial.

Food Table. I didn't get a close up of Aunty Em's bread and jam but it was so yummy!

 

Fruit Rainbow

Ruby Red Slipper Cookies

 Somewhere over the rainbow cupcakes: I used the Airhead sour licorice to make the rainbow and frosting to pipe the clouds. For the stripped ones I painted stripes of gel color on the inside of a parchment bag, filled it with white frosting and piped it out.

 To print the cute toppers, tags, labels, and everything else we used go to The Dearth Duo blog here.

 

Yellow Brick Road Rice Crispy Treats

 As part of our program we had the Presidents of each class (Beehives, Miamaids, and Laurels) present our new 12 year olds with gifts that represent each class and also explain what they mean. These bee cookies are what the Beehives presented to them.

 We also came up with an incentive program for the year.  When the girls accomplish a experience from one of the values they get to chose a treat from that jar.

 This was one of the take homes we did. I got this tag and the tags on the jars from Kinzieskreations blog.

 

Here is a pic of our program.  Thanks Dearth Duo blog for making it so easy! We also printed our invitations from her site.

This was our other handout. We made bottle caps charms for the girls backpacks, scripture cases, or where ever else they wanted to hook them. I found the bottle caps and clear sticker covers at Hobby Lobby. We pounded out the bottle caps so they had a rounded edge by covering them with a board and using a mallet.  Don't pound too much! We found the Come Unto Christ images on Etsy.
Thanks ladies for all your help!

Happy 1st Birthday Aryana!

 My awesome neighbor let me help her with her daughters 1st birthday celebration.  She wanted to make it easy so we reused a lot of Lucy's decor from her 1st birthday like this banner(sorry you can't see it very well in this pic), pom poms, and cupcake toppers. 

Smash Cake

 

Cupcake Toppers

Check out this adorable girl!

Love this action shot! She was going to town.  I haven't had a baby do this yet so it was so fun to watch her! Happy Birthday Aryana!

Snowmen snack #2

 I guess Ethan and I are loving snowmen for our snack theme this year. There are just so many fun ideas out there. We decided to do these this month.

 Snowmen juice boxes.  I wrapped it in white paper(leaving the straw behind exposed), drew a snowman face, and added a ribbon scarf.

Snowmen Soldiers

 We made white chocolate popcorn for these.  It's so easy.  I used 2 bags of microwave popcorn(I prefer to use salt and butter flavor) with 2 or 3 squares of melted white almond bark. Mix in a big bowl and then spread on a big pan to dry.  The cups were easy to decorate.  I used a marker to add the face and taped twine on for the scarf.  In case your wondering how I transported these, I covered each one with Press n Seal.

 We also added a face to some clementines so they had a healthy snack too!

I also did a few of these to give to the ladies I visit teach at church.  I filled the bottom of some big cellphone bags (12X24), cut the excess off and folded it over with tape.  On the flip side I used a marker for the face, tied ribbon for the scarf, and used glue dots to attach the buttons.

Winter One-derland Party

 I made these for my neighbors little girl Lola who turned one.  The theme was Winter Onederland. Her colors were pink, silver, and white.  So cute!

 I made marshmallow fondant for one of the toppers using this recipe:
Marshmallow Fondant
4 cups Loosely Packed Mini Marshmallows

• 2 Tablespoons Water (less if adding flavoring)
• 4 cups Powdered Sugar, Plus Additional For Dusting
• 2 Tablespoons Vegetable Shortening
• 1 tsp clear flavoring (vanilla, peppermint, etc)  if desired

To make marshmallow fondant, place marshmallows and water in a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave 1 minute on high; stir until marshmallows are melted and blended.

Place confectioners’ sugar on top of the melted marshmallow mixture in the bowl. Fold sugar into marshmallow mixture with a shortening-greased wooden spoon. Place shortening nearby your workspace so you can reach into it with fingers.

Grease hands and counter generously. Dust counter with extra powdered sugar.

Turn marshmallow mixture onto counter; it will be sticky. Knead like you would dough, until fondant pulls into a firm, smooth ball, that can stretch with no tearing. Add enough confectioners’ sugar in between to avoid sticking. If the marshmallow fondant is tearing easily, add 1/2 teaspoon of water at a time. *Being in the South I didn't have to add any extra water or sugar. It was perfect.

Always cover fondant with plastic wrap. Any unused fondant can be stored in double plastic wrap so it does not dry and crack.

*I rolled out the fondant and used a snowflake cookie cutter to make the shape.  I then spray painted it with edible silver color spray I found at Wal-Mart.  Once that dried I used pink frosting to make the snowflake design,.

 For the second topper I used white chocolate and piped snowflakes onto wax paper.  I looked up snowflake images online to copy some designs. I used silver pearls to accent some of the flakes.

 I baked strawberry cupcakes and made regular white cream cheese frosting:

Cream Cheese Frosting:

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup butter softened

1 tsp. vanilla

4 1/2 to 4 3/4 cups powdered sugar

               and

Strawberry frosting
1 stick butter
16 oz. powdered sugar
1/4 cup mashed strawberries
6 ounces of cream cheese

1 tsp. of vanilla.

As you can tell this frosting doesn't pipe too well because it's more sticky but it tastes yummy!

Happy Birthday Lola! Thanks for letting me be a part of your special day!

Lucy's Very Pink Pinkalicious Party!

 Lucy is obsessed with pink and the Pinkalicious books which I think are pretty darn cute myself so this was the perfect birthday theme for her.  We had so much fun planning this together!!

 I tried to copy the cupcakes from the book but they didn't really turn out as cute.  I could have added a mini cupcake on top of these to give them more height for the swirled frosting. Oh well, good thing Lucy is only 3! We made vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and strawberry cupcakes with strawberry cream cheese frosting. I found the cupcake toppers at this blog. I also used them on the banner.

 Cupcake Marshmallow pops.  Lucy really wanted these. She loves marshmallows and have I mentioned she LOVES pink. I used pink chocolate to cover half the marshmallow, sprinkles, and a red M&M or red hot for the cherry. To get the marshmallow to stay on the stick I dipped the stick in melted chocolate before inserting it into the mallow. Let dry and then dip into pink chocolate.

 The lighting wasn't so great on these but they were probably my favorite thing, cupcake sugar cookies. I found this cookie cutter at Crate and Barrel years ago but have since found them all over.

 I used a lattice tip (or any flat tip) to pipe the liner on. Then I used a star tip (16 or 21) to add the swirled frosting, then added sprinkles and a red M&M.

We had to have some fruit but I couldn't resist adding pink chocolate. Someone help me! Have you thrown up yet from all the pink? Lucy and I had fun reading this book to all her friends at the party.  She has the important parts memorized, "pink more pink" and "you get what you get and you don't get upset." =)

 Banner #1

Banner #2. This is actually the same banner that my dear friend Alicia made for Lucy's cupcake baby shower. Yes I keep everything party related, you never know when you might use it again. We also made a pink punch (raspberry sherbet and Sprite) because we needed one more pink thing and more sugar.

 A Pinkalicious party isn't complete without the star wand.

Happy Birthday Lucy-lou, aka our Pinkalicious Princess!

Happy New Year!

 I made these for a New Year's party my sweet friend Melissa had.  Not my best frosting job but the kids didn't care.

Here's to a Happy 2014!