Candyland Cake

As I mentioned yesterday, we have 2 summer birthdays.  Well, the second one is my daughter Nicole’s B-day. 

She turned 9 this year.

She also happens to be in love with anything made of SUGAR.  She LOVES candy, licorice, suckers, marshmallows, and anything and everything that is sweet!  But her absolute favorite thing is GUM.  I really think she is a relative of Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  She LOVES gum and can’t get enough of it.

So this year I thought it would only be fitting to make her birthday cake full of her favorite things—LOTS OF CANDY.  So I decided to make a CANDYLAND CAKE.

My friend dropped by and took a picture of me in my kitchen of chaos!  (Apparently I am a messy baker!)

But all my messy kitchen was worth it as this is what I came up with:

I think it turned out great--and she LOVED it!

It was a very SWEET birthday for a very SWEET little girl!

Assemble the Minions!

I have a so many posts to do to catch up with all the projects and things we have been doing over the summer.  It has been a very busy few months!

First off—We had a couple birthdays over the summer!  We have 2 birthdays within 2 weeks of each other.  Our first summer birthday is for this little guy:

He turned 5 this year.

His birthday was at a super busy time for our family.  So this year I needed to go SIMPLE. 

We decided to have take him and a few friends to our local Jump Around Fun Zone.  So I needed a cake that could transported easily and eaten without a whole lot of hassle. 

I had seen THIS idea a while back and new it would be perfect for my little man’s special day.

So I made these little guys using twinkies, black gel frosting, smarties for the eyes, and brown sprinkles for the hair.

And these little guys transported great in a little 9x13.

And they made this birthday boy very happy!

(And next time Mom will remember to turn the cake around before taking a picture!)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY LANDON!

Pirate Chest Birthday Cake

Did you  know that we have a pirate in our family?  Well, we do.  Our 3 year old thinks he IS a pirate.  He wears a pirate hat EVERY DAY!  He cries when he has to take it to go to places where pirate hats are unacceptable like bed or church.  We read pirate books and sing pirate songs and watch pirate movies.  He even speaks in pirate.

And of course we have all kinds of pirate things to wear:

So when this little pirate turned 3, the choice of a birthday cake was easy.

As always I turned to Family Fun for my cake ideas and found THIS.

And I turned around and made this:

I think it turned out really cute. BUT I'll have you know that chocolate gold coins are impossible to find around here! And when I did finally find them in the bulk section at the 4th store I went to--they were THE MOST EXPENSIVE CANDY THEY SOLD!!! $9.99/lb!!! Its a good thing I found some gold rolo candy to make up the bulk of the gold and then interspersed a few gold coins here and there--cause they were not cheap or thrifty people! But I love my pirate--and so I bought them anyways.

I changed up from the instructions for the strapping on the chest--they have you using fruit by the foot which I didn't like the looks of--so I melted a few kraft carmels and rolled them out and cut them to look like leather straps.   

Then I used colored sixlets for the studs. If I were to do this again, I think I would use whoppers or something brown so it would look more authentic and less colorful.

 

But our little pirate LOVED his cake and that is all that matters.

And I just have to take a moment and tease my hubby (because sometimes he sneakily reads my blog) that once again he has cut off my head in every single picture he took of the birthday party.  Its a good thing I know he loves me or a girl might get a complex of so many years of being headless in all the pictures he takes.  And that is why, my friends, that I am the picture taker in our family.   :o)

Happy Birthday to my little pirate!

Under Construction Cake and YW in Excellence

I am a leader in our Young Women's program in our church.  So I get to work with the youth and I LOVE IT!!!! 

A couple weeks ago we had a special evening for the girls and their parents--it is called Young Women's in Excellence.  It is a time to honor the girls and all the wonderful things that they are doing. 

This year we chose our theme to be:

"Under Construction"

Meaning that we are all here on earth under construction--trying to build ourselves and mould ourselves into the person that our Father in Heaven wants us to be.  And to become like Him.

While looking for things to decorate with--another leader found these awesome little construction trucks--and one of the girls painted them up.

Everyone decided that they would look SO GREAT on a cake.  So we started brainstorming about construction cakes.  One of the girls said "We should put a Temple built out of sugar cubes on the cake too!"  (A Temple is a special building of worship in the LDS Church and we just recently had one built near us in Vancouver, Canada--so everyone--including the girls, are SUPER excited to have one so near!  If you want to know more about Temples please visit THIS SITE)

So with those ideas I took the challenge to build a cake with the cars and a temple for our special night.

So here are a few pictures of the Temple construction:

Building Supplies:

Laying the corner stones on my cardboard foundation:

Building the walls:

Front of the Temple:

Laying another piece of cardboard on top of the walls to hold up the roof. 

Top View:

Front view:

With roof and spire on:

Its supposed to look like this:

Of course it isn't perfect--but I didn't think it turned out too bad for working with sugar cubes!

Here is the cake.  I made two cake mixes in my jelly roll pans and layered them with frosting in the middle.  Then covered the whole thing with green frosting and green coconut--to look like grass.  Then I put a dirt road in using crushed up Oreo cookies.

Then comes the heavy machinery--didn't she do a great job painting them?

And here is the finished temple site.

Digging dirt to complete the road:

Hauling stones for the temple:

Oh yeah--and I made the little cones out of orange dots:

So while I was making the cake--the other ladies were decorating the room.  And I only snapped a few pictures!  It was AWESOME!!!

Each girl got to where a hard hat in the value colors:

Our fearless leader:

Awesome signs:

The whole crew:

Some more yummy treats one of the girls made:

Some fun paint buckets of goodies that the girls got to take home:

And the cake right before we ate it:

It was a great night and one that I hope the girls remember for a long time.

Tinting Coconut

So--this may be sort of a silly post--as maybe the whole world already knows how to do this...but while making my little guys B-day cake I needed colored coconut and had never done it before. So maybe some of you are like me and hadn't done it before either.

(Of course I knew it was going to be easy and involve food coloring--but I am an anal person and wanted to get the proportions JUST RIGHT--so I found some instructions--and they worked perfectly. So I thought I would share them with all of you other perfectionists out there!)

So this is how it is done:

You will need:

1 cup coconut

1 tsp water

1 ziploc bag

a few drops of desired liquid coloring

Put the water and coloring in the ziploc bag first and sort of spread it all around. Then you add the coconut. TOSS it all together until it is equally distributed.

And there you have it:

The perfect shades of coconut to do this:

And this: