Creepy Cookies

Remember when I told you about the boy's dark sense of humor? This is how he decorated the cookies that accidentally broke in the baking process.

Catching up

This seems to be the only picture I saved from my girl's 6th birthday

There were cupcakes too, lost to time and a broken phone, I suppose.

Her 7th birthday was Star Wars themed. She was very inspired by the character, Rey.

Without the time or energy to repeat tje Millennium Falcon from a few years ago, I came up with a simpler starry cake.

Mickey Mouse

This is a picture from Christmas day.  We completely surprised the kids with a trip to Disneyland. Under the tree were packed suitcases and tickets for a 6:20 am flight! It was an amazing, truly magical experience we will never forget. Up until our 4 days at Disneyland we weren't really big fans of the Disney brand. But now we're hooked! Eloise requested a Mickey Mouse themed birthday this year. Thanks to Pinterest, and Rose Bakes for inspiration, and an incredible record-breaking snow storm

That allowed me the time it took to work on this, I was able to make my largest cake yet.

Zombie Brains!

My boy is drawn to anything dark and creepy, and I am constantly trying to help him find balance, reigning in his inclinations without shutting down his amazing imagination. His 9th birthday request was a decapitated zombie head. First of all, that sounded like more if a challenge than I could handle at the time. I also tried to help him understand that while that is an epic idea, not everyone may find that appetizing. Our compromize was brain cupcakes. Chocolate cake with pink fondant brains, oozing with strawberry jam.

Since it has been so long since I updated, I thought I'd mention Gabe's 8th birthday was a break from tradition (at his request) and a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake.

The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake

So, I've been doing this wrong all this time? And chances are, you have too. Brilliant!

Raspberry Chocolate Cupcakes

 Two of my dear friends from college and I had a weekend at the beach planned for spring break. It just happened to fall on Nancy's birthday, so I wanted to make something extra special for the occasion.

As usual, Pinterest came through for me with this amazing recipe for the cake. The only thing I did differently was I added a little of the raspberry juice from the frosting to the ganache filling.  For the frosting, I used this recipe. I've always been a huge fan of buttercream, but until now I had never tried

 it with the meringue, which I guess is the European style. It gave it a little more body, held up longer and had a more subtle flavor. This was just the perfect amount of sweetness, which didn't overpower the hint of raspberry flavor. I am a convert! 

I decorated the tops by melting some chocolate chips in the microwave and then piping out the shapes. I had a lot of fun with that part, churning out all kinds of crazy shapes with swirls, scribbles and several words. It was very easy and fairly impressive. I am definitely trying that again.

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: