Thanks!

A big thanks to my friends Elissa and Natalie for their recent cookie orders! I can't wait to get started on them and will post some pics when they're finished. To do Natalie's order I get to go to Su La Table! It's my new favorite store and I could spend a fortune there but will try to control myself.

Thanks again for your orders ladies, I really appreciate it!

Butterflies

My friend's birthday is today and we are headed to their house for a birthday dinner. I offered to make a cake, she wanted a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. That's always a classic, great tasting cake but it looks so sad if it just has the brown chocolate frosting with no color. My wonderful friend Elizabeth recently sent me the Hello, Cupcake book and I was inspired to use their beautiful candy butterflies. After a couple of attempts I got a good method down for making them and used some of them to decorate Katie's birthday cake! I hope she likes it (and that the butterflies survive the ride over).

Cookies o' the Irish

I know...that was corny...

I whipped up a batch of St. Patrick's Day cookies to ship off to a friend. Green is such a fun color to work with, it reminds me of spring and of trees and flowers in bloom. I recently got a new Wilton tip (no.1 round) and thought it would be great to do some of the decorating with but it was WAY too small and kept getting clogged. So, some of the cookies have icing globs that I'm a bit disappointed with. Next time I'll know to thin the icing before using that tip. Live and learn.

Just because...

Just for the fun of it, here are some more cookies I made recently. I think something like this would be nice for a wedding shower or for little treats for guests to take home from a wedding. The colors could be done to match the bride's bouquet.

I added stems and leaves to these tulips, I did more petal details later.
(Sorry about the cell phone pic, I know I promised not do that anymore...)

Baby Shower

I went to a baby shower for a dear friend this weekend, it was a lot of fun and made me think about the shower I co-hosted for another friend last year. If we could, TSC (Two Sisters' Creations) would love to be "party planners" of sorts, doing baby and wedding showers would be SO much fun! Really, what we need right now is to just do one or two of them to generate advertising/interest by word of mouth. If anyone out there knows of someone who would be willing to let us take over a party we would probably be able to do it at cost if they would let us do some advertising!

I posted a pic of diaper cake Kim and I made in an earlier blog but the pic was really dark, so here's another one. Also, there's a picture of a duck cake that we made. It was a long drive in the August heat to downtown Houston and he started sagging on one side by the time we arrived. But, he still tasted good! The funniest part was trying to cut him up, we basically had to decapitate the poor thing (see last pic).

Diaper cakes are fun because you can put all kinds of goodies on them. This one had pacifiers, teething rings and socks made into little rosettes in addition to the rubber duck topper.

The cake was a marble pound cake with butter cream frosting.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

We are having some friends over for dinner tonight and that, of course, means that I get to bake something! This time I decided to try red velvet cupcakes. They always look so pretty, the red cake contrasts so nicely with the white frosting. Unfortunately, mine didn't turn out as red and I wanted them too, I didn't have liquid food coloring, only the gel. It didn't dissolve in the cream very well. Oh well, it still tasted great, the color doesn't change that. The cream cheese frosting is pretty yummy too (I had to taste test, didn't I?!). I added some red sugar crystals to the top and I think that finished it off nicely.




They aren't quite as pretty as I hoped they would be, but it is my first attempt. Next time I'll know not to fill the cups quite as full (the batter rose a bit more than I thought it would) and hunt down some liquid food coloring!

Cookies for Grandma

My Grandmother is celebrating a birthday this coming week and I thought that I would try sending her some cookies. I also decided to send some to my other Grandmother as a nice little surprise.

I had fun doing these flowers and personally think that the tulips came out the best. The other flowers looked like more fun initially but didn't come out a pretty as I thought they would. Next time I will work with fewer colors (I was a bit overwhelmed) and it won't look quite so psychedelic! In a bouquet I would stick to two or three colors and one or two patterns.




(I've got to stop taking these pics with my phone! They always come out so dark!)