My Niece Holly's Bridal Shower Cake

OOOOHHHHHHHH I had sooooooo much fun planning and creating this shower and cake for my beautiful niece Holly!!!!  My mother is the best party planner I know and I am so happy that I even inherited one percent of her creativity gene!!!  

Holly's color theme for her wedding was red and white.  The cake was a white cake with strawberry cream filling.  The recipe was from the Wilton website.  It was pretty tasty!!! I used gum paste for the cutouts and they didn't come out very red for as much coloring as I added, but it still turned out pretty!!!

The bride and groom silhouette was from the Wild Card cartridge.  It even looks like Holly and CJ a little!!!!  Super cute!!!

The Doily and the heart borders are from the Cake Basics cartridge!!!

I cut out the flowers from the Wilton gum paste flower making kit!!!  Love this kit.  I've only used the really simple ones.  Some day I will be bold and try the other more intricate flowers.  The only reason I don't try them now is I feel I have no time.....too rushed trying to get everything put together.  Maybe someday I'll just make a cake for the heck of it without all the pressure.  Yea, right!!!  Who am I kidding???

And here is the cake I am most proud of so far.  I think it is just gorgeous, especially for a beginner and novice who has no clue what she is doing.  The green leaf border and white center of the flowers is royal icing which is a little dryer and sturdier than regular icing.  It hardens nicely to keep a nice shape.  It is easy to make.  I got the recipe from the Wilton website.  They are my go to site!!!  I am still not very good at smoothing out the icing, but I'm getting a little bit better from the tips I get from my friends Teresa and Alesha!!!

Here's the invitation that I sent for the shower.  It matches the cake!!!

Here's one of the prize gift bags and goody bag tags I made using my new Cricut Imagine.  It is one of the newer Cricut machines that prints images using an HP printer built inside and then cuts the image just like the Cricut Expression machine.  I love this machine.  It is absolutely amazing!!!!  The "Sweet" image was from the Imagine More cartridge!!  I made little red and white chocolate heart molds for the goody bags!!!



Firetruck Birthday Cake

My good friend Jenna's two son's birthdays are on the same day, but 3 years apart.  So for their 4th and 1st birthday party, we made this adorable firetruck birthday cake!!!!  Whoa!!!  We went through an entire county's egg stock to make this cake!!!! I have not had much experience in baking.  And so far my chocolate filling and frosting have been a complete disaster!!!  I have given up on chocolate until my neighbor Teresa comes over here the next time to supervise.  She swears she has a no fail recipe!!! 

The firetruck, hydrant and hose were all cut with the Paper Dolls for Everyday cartridge.  The red, orange and yellow fondant was precolored and Jenna did a great job adding the black food color to the white fondant. I thought it would come out all marbled looking like before, but it didn't.  Who knows???  With fondant and gumpaste you can only use the gel based food color like you find in any craft store, not the water based like in the grocery store.  I wait for the baking supplies to go on sale and add a 20% off entire purchase coupon on top of it.  The baking supplies hardly ever go on sale, so when they do, you gotta stock up!!!  Every now and again you get super deals that way!!! 

The fondant is still coming out shiny, but when on the cake, it is not noticable.

The font layers were cut from the Birthday Cakes cartridge! (notice the T in the top lefthand corner, I had to go back and add it after cutting the first part, oops!!!)

The flames were cut from the Going Places cartridge.  It was designed on my Gypsy, which is a handheld Cricut design tool that work with all the cartridges.  It was a campfire with log design, but with the Gypsy you can hide certain parts of an image and not cut that portion, so I hid the log part because I just wanted to use the flames as a border for the cake.  Super cool feature!!! 

Ta-da!!!!  It turned out pretty cute, huh???  Jenna then added letter candles to spell out her son's names and a few extra plastic fireman theme decorations.  We just rolled up the extra fondant into balls for the bottom portion of the border!!!  Some people think it looks like M&M's or some other candy, which is not a bad idea, actually!!!  It was such a fun party and the cake even tasted pretty darn good.  Thank goodness!!!  Thanks Jenna for letting me take part in creating these special memories for your family.  I had so much fun working with you on this!!!