Cake Review 2010

Alright folks! Here is the 2010 cake review. For those of you who are not familiar with my obsessive yet wacky personality: I stay up late the night before a birthday to make themed birthday cakes for my kids or other good causes. They wake up in the morning to a cake a fondant creation. It is far from professional, but it's something fun that comes from just me.

James's birthday is today (six years old!!) He wanted an Atlantis Lego birthday party. Aside from the disproportionate props, it turned out pleasing enough for James. Everything is edible except the legos (which I refuse to make out of food since Lego already makes what I need - thank you Mark for putting them together) and two pokemon cards that I covered with fondant for the treasure chest lid (which are now in the garbage, don't tell D.J.)

I made this bakugan cake as an incentive for a client. I don't think he expected anything like this. Everything is edible except for the toothpick holding the rice krispie head onto the cake body.

Mark doesn't really like cake (neither do I) for birthdays. But he asked me to make an Eiffel Tower cake for him anyway. Like I said, I'm not professional and am not very good with welding, so I made a paper Eiffel Tower to put on top of apple crisp.

Spencer is into football. He had a football party, so I thought the U of U football field would be appropriate. I think the real football field might hold a cake football better than a sheet cake, as it was sinking slowly. All is edible except the straw goal posts and the straws holding up the scoreboard.

D.J. wanted a Lego Harry Potter birthday party this year. He challenged me by asking for a scene with dementors, where Harry helps himself out with a patronus (a stag, which I made by making hard candy). Thanks to my Mom and Mark for making trees out of tootsie rolls and hard candy leaves. Thanks to my Dad for very carefully placing the graham cracker sand along the shores. Thanks to all who helped figure out how to make dementors stiff. They are made of cheesecloth dipped in sugar water, which didn't have enough sugar water. We tried spray starch, which just made them soggy. So we ended up hot gluing them, sticking them on skewers and hoping for the best in the morning.

Our elementary school had a cake auction. Since Diary of a Wimpy Kid was so popular, I thought it would be fun cake to make - and relatively easy.

Mini cakes for the cake auction.

Whew! For those who wanted to look at other cakes I've done, here are links to two other cake reviews:

I Think Mark is a Great Photographer, Among Other Things

Alright this one I took, but it just shows that his artistic talent goes beyond photography and reaches in pumpkin carving. (Go Utes!) I should probably note that we will not be starting up a photography business, as that seems to be a new trend these days. We'll just stick to hobbies that make no money but bring great pleasure. I know, shame on me for not being entrepreneurial.

Rocky Mountain National Park

In the hills of Centerville

Cool mushroom at Rocky Mountain National Park (hereafter RMNP)

Cool kid at RMNP

We went on a hike that included seven or so beautiful lakes, this one had lilly pads!

These last two pics are from Fish Lake National Park (I think) where we climbed through mud and rain, but had much fun!

Merry Halloween!

So, I'm a little behind. Whatever. The kids had a great time with their halloween costumes. James went to a theater yard sale with me (poor kid still has to go nearly every where with me), and there was a clown suit, just his size. So he decided he could shelf the Iron Man idea until next year. He makes a pretty cute clown!

One of our favorite movies for the year was Despicable Me (thanks Uncle Jesse!) As we were running through the costume ideas, after about 20 "no's" to my ideas, we finally struck gold (hee, hee) when I mentioned the minions from the movie. I looked online at premade costumes, but I just can't spend that much for two hours on one night. So we made our own. Perhaps my boys will look back and think their mother was just a cheapskate, but they didn't seem to mind in the moment! We discovered that many people had not seen the movie, so they didn't quite get it. Some people guessed that they were Spongebob Squarepants (oh, the horror), or Bob the Builder. We had fun with it anyway! D.J. is the top picture, Spencer is the bottom.