Gingerbread

This has become a much anticipated tradition started by my lovely cousin, Kylie. All year we save whatever candy we can talk our children out of from the many, many holidays and birthdays that seem to completely revolve around sugar. Then, right before Christmas we come together and glue it onto whatever baked architecture we come up with that year. One year it was graham crackers. This year we got to compare Ikea, Trader Joe's, and Bed Bath and Beyond houses. Conclusions: Ikea tasted better and "pepparkaka hus"is WAY more fun to say over and over, BB&B held up better, but was hard to put together with those darned slanting walls.  All that candy is a surprisingly heavy burden for a gingerbread roof. The TJ's a-frame is by far the easiest to build, which is a huge plus.

Apparently Kylie's children are easier to talk out of the smack than mine, because holy sugar rush, Batman! She had a tableful of the stuff:

Not everyone did their part in ridding the cupboards of the sweet burdens we were hanging on to. We had a few minimalists:

 Some of it was eaten before it made it on to the house:

But Kylie made up for all of them with her unflagging persistence to USE IT ALL, BY GOD!

Which paid off tremendously with this masterpiece:

Because it was a big family event, it, of course, was not without it's drama. But being able to pour (another, please) very full mug of wine and sit back and enjoy our little village full of memories of Easter, Halloween and birthdays past was worth all the sticky fingers and low blood sugar tantrums:

Rainbows and Unicorns

Eloise's 5th birthday party was all planned out. It was a no-brainer for the girl who spent most of her 5th year crawling around on the floor and barking. The same girl who outlasted us all and watched The Puppy Bowl in it's ENTIRETY.  There really was no other choice, it was to be a puppy party. I was busy searching online for cheap dog bowls and bone shaped cookie cutters when the Oriental Trading Company catalog arrived in the mail. It took one look at the magic of the rainbow unicorn page to completely change her mind. She HAD to have a rainbow unicorn party. So, a rainbow unicorn party she had. Although I can be a no fun, vegetable and early bedtime pushing mama 364 days of the year, when it comes to birthdays, I aim to please.

Sweet Girl First Birthday

This was my first adventure in making marshmallow fondant. Somehow these pictures were lost, but thankfully I had shared them on FB and I was able to download from there, then re-upload here. I'm not sure what that does to the image quality, but that can't be good. The bottom picture is Eloise with her birthday presents doing a little baking of her own.

Superheroes

This was Gabe's fourth birthday. We didn't get a picture of the cake, but all is well because this year, it was a holy disaster. I had ambitions of doing this but it ended up being a bunch of very unappetizing tilting gray blobs with some toys stuck on. But Spiderman came!

Little Miss Sunshine

This was Eloise's 2nd birthday. We decided to add a little brightness to the dreary Pacific Northwest winter with a sunshine theme. The ice castles were just fun. In some places, you could make those outside that time of year. But, we don't get enough cold, so we set a tub up in the kitchen.

Triceratops cake

Gabe turned three years old two weeks after we moved into a new house, after one night of homelessness at the Comfort Inn with everything we owned in the world parked outside in a u-haul. How to make this boring situation more interesting, you ask? Make a very ambitious cake and throw a huge party with a house full of toddlers, of course!

Farm Birthday

Hello Kitty

Lego birthday

Gabe's fifth birthday. The cake is decorated with buttercream icing, the green plate is fondant the bricks are cake pops with a candy coating and the lego men are molded candy melts. I made the sign by downloading a lego font and drawing on fondant with edible markers.

Princess Castle cake

Star Wars Birthday

 Millennium Falcon cake for G's 6th birthday. Carrot cake with homemade marshmallow fondant. Please excuse the storm trooper trying to invade the ship. While we know it is not authentic to the story, it is what the birthday boy wanted.