I just love my nephews ...

I hope that one day my nephews will look back at photos of their birthday parties and say, "Woah! Look how cool my birthday cakes were!!" I remember when I was growing up, my mom used to make me the best birthday cakes and that memory still makes me smile. So hopefully I can pass that feeling onto my two little nephews and they can always smile about it.

This February was Sean's 3rd birthday party and it had the fun theme of Toy Story :D I decided to finally venture out from making cupcakes and try a birthday cake.

Plus, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make a bunch of Toy Story cupcakes... but that is besides the point.


I know that is my nephew, so obviously I am going to think he is adorable. But seriously, I have never seen a kid with such amazing and adorable expressions!! Ahhh I'm obsessed with this dude
How I made it:

It actually was not that hard to make, but it definitely took a long time.

I just made a funfetti cake (store bought! you need to at least make something easy for yourself) with a vanilla creme cheese frosting, about 2 store bought little tubs.

For the bed, I actually baked a cake inside of a bread loaf pan. I cut it down to a rectangular shape and placed it on top of the main cake.

Here are the fun parts: I went to Michaels Crafts store and bought fondant. They carry it in their cake section in a box, and it is under $5 for a whole bunch. Fondant is actually pretty easy, you just have to think of it as if it's play doh. Fondant comes in a plain white color to begin with, so i just cut away little sections, put them individually into little plastic bags, and put a drop of whatever color I decided into the bags. I closed them up, and just sat there and rolled the fondants around in their baggies until they became the desired color.

For the bed, I just rolled out a rectangular shape for the "mattress" and laid it on top of the bed. Fondant is really easy to mold, and I just played around and shaped it. I used mini cookie cutters for the stars on the mattress, and took a little piece of cake, cut it into a "pillow" and just wrapped white fondant around it. Note: I used some frosting to get the fondant to successfully stick to the cake.

To make the words, I cut the red piece of fondant into a triangle and then just used a frosting writing pen to apply the words.

The most expensive part were the characters. I bought them from K-Mart for about $20 total. I wasn't able to make those out of fondant .... I can only do so much before going crazy :)

The little balls surrounding the cake are malt balls from the store :) Also totally cheap (plus you can eat the rest ;) )

It was really fun experimenting with the fondant. I personally am not a huge fan of the taste of it, but everything else was SO good.

Hope this gives some of you guys some ideas for parties :) Just remember, the little things you do in life make a huge difference in the end. The desserts for the boys' parties are my way of showing them my love for them .... love you two!

P.S. If you ever need ideas for something, Google it. Everyone asks me where I get my ideas from, and I'm just honest and tell them I found it from Google images and tried my best to copy it.

P.S.S. Did you know "Google" is considered a real verb now?

Okay.... I need to go to bed before I keep thinking of things to add. This is what happens at 1am.... eek

Washing allergies away?

The Mr. and I got maliciously invaded by allergies the last few days. We were doing great, both happy to be done with our colds, and then WHAM ..... can't breath anymore. So off I went to Kaiser to go pick up those lovely allergy medications for us when I quickly became visually surrounded by various types of these ..
The good ol' Neti Pot. If you haven't heard of this contraption, it became increasingly popular about a year or so ago when Oprah had Dr. Oz on her showing raving and ranting about it. He had some studio audience members come up on stage, tilt their heads to the side, and basically pour some water from the pot into one of your nostrils.

Basically, the poor guests looked like this:

scary, huh?

Everything I read about Neti Pots is positive. I seriously don't think I can recall seeing one bad thing about these. They are at health stores, at pharmacys, Targets, etc. and are the new "in" thing when it comes to cleaning out the bad stuff. The good ol' Oprah effect. I never would have guessed that she could get people to consciously pour water into their noses and have it come out the other nostril, only to get everyone to fall madly in love with the product.

Here is my dilemma: I am scared of these things! I just feel like it is so odd that I'm not sure it is worth buying?

I always come up with weird little ideas and fears, over-thinking little things and constantly debating. My first thought is, what happens if you start laughing when you pour it in your nose? Do you start spraying it everywhere like a kid shooting milk out of his nose because of uncontrollable laughter? This is what I always think of when I see these things! I know that probably won't happen, but come on ... haven't you thought the same thing? (Just smile and nod people)

I just don't know if I have the guts to try this out. Then again, I feel so miserable at this point that I will probably give in. Every year around Feb/March I get terrible allergies and they usually turn into infections if I am not careful.

Has anyone else tried these little suckers? How were they?? And if you have laughing stories... please share :) Haha

He is a Good Time Cowboy Casanova

Where have I been ? I don't think I can even put my last few weeks into words that make sense, so I'll just list what has been going on instead:

- sick
-hubby became sick
-hubby got me sick again (don't you love being married?)
-successfully fought off a sinus infection before it became unbearable

-worked usually at 4:30am or 6:30am
-came home from work, napped and "restarted" my day
-school Monday through Thursday from 2-7ish
-came home, relaxed my brain by playing some computer games or catching up on my tv shows
-slept

*constant repeat*

It has been so difficult to get used to this new schedule of mine. For the past eight or so years of my life, I have been a night-owl. Go to bed at 3am? Yep. I was always the closing shift lead at Starbucks, having my hours range from getting home around 11pm to 1:15am, which would then leave wonderful room for sleeping in the next day, and then school in the afternoon before the work shift began all over again.

Now, I am changing everything up. Because I am taking credential courses at school, they are all mostly offered after 2pm and go quite late into the evening; this consequently means I needed to suck it up and finally become an opener at work. I had to some how find a way to accept the fact that my old bedtime of 3am was going to quickly become the time that my alarm would annoyingly buzz next to my ear in hopes of waking me up. This was not a fun realization...

Unfortunately I've become dependent on my naps to get me through my days. I know it probably isn't the healthiest thing to nap constantly so hopefully this will change with time. Then again, gotta do what you gotta do .... right? I also am somewhat addicted to my naps because it gives me an excuse to cuddle with this little dude of mine.
(Please ignore how terrible the photo is ... I think Kevin took that when I was exhausted from a 4:30am until 12:30pm work shift and getting ready for the nap of the day)


************
Onto happier subjects!!!

So I finally began promoting my love for cupcakes. As you have probably seen in the past, I loove experimenting and just having fun baking those precious and tasty things. The fun thing? I actually had an old friend from high school/softball ask me to make her some Valentines cupcakes for her boyfriend. Totally stoked!!


And here are some others that I was experimenting with for Vday


I had so much fun doing those. I just figured ... why the heck not, you know? I think there are so many little things that we do everyday that we should all do more often. I also began to experiment with cakes and made my nephew Sean a Toy Story cake..... I'll post another update tomorrow with those photos :)

Hope everyone is doing great <3

A Summary of my Week

A Look Back

Today while watching The Cake Boss on TLC I began to have a massive craving for cupcakes. This craving then led to thinking about our wedding cupcakes .... which then led to:

Me: "Hubby? Can we get married again?"

Hubby: "...no..."

Darn it.

Needless to say, I am now thinking about our cupcake wedding cake and how much we loved it. For all of my new readers I thought that I would share it with you digitally, unfortunately not in reality..

First off, we went to this amazing cupcakery in Studio City, CA called Big Sugar Bakeshop to taste test our cupcakes. I think we tried about 8 different cupcakes, and besides feeling completely sick afterward, we were in sugar heaven.

The first cupcake that we chose to be in our cake ensemble was their Boston Cream Pie cupcake. Oh my HEAVEN. It is a vanilla cupcake with a vanilla bean pastry cream filling and chocolate ganache. Ammaazzzing

The next one we chose was just a plain chocolate cupcake with vanilla icing; we wanted something that was more simple for the picky eaters :)

And to top it all off? Big Sugar Bakeshop made us a mini cake to go on the top of our ensemble. We chose a vanilla cake with a lemon custard layer inside. Also, SO delicious.

The finished product was more amazing than we expected. Everyone loved being able to come and just grab their cupcake(s) and enjoy.

*Sigh* I miss that day :) It was truly wonderful

Here are the pictures of our wonderful cupcake wedding cake: