robbie's 2nd birthday!

last year when i was planning my oldest son, robbie's 1st birthday, i found out that i am not a fan of parties in a box - not that there is anything wrong with that. i just like creating things. it's how my mom showed me love, and it's how i let my kids know i love them. whether it's baking, scrapbooking, making homemade baby food, or just making dinner, i like making it myself.

now, robbie's first birthday was a pretty simple idea. everything was either red, blue, or yellow and anywhere i could put a number 1, i did. i never even thought about getting online for ideas.

this year, robbie is obsessed with airplanes - theme chosen. i decided i would need a little more help with this idea. luckily, there are tons of party planning blogs. who knew? (i'm now addicted.) i found some great inspiration. one of my favorite things would set the entire mood for the party - boarding pass invites! my aunt personalized these invites with a special logo that we used everywhere we could.

next to cake, i think balloons are my most favorite birthday party staple. i knew i wanted airplane shaped balloons, but surprisingly, i had a very hard time finding some. that is, until i came across pamela standen. she has an ebay shop and has every kind of balloon a balloon loving girl could want!

i really wanted to make coordinating shirts for the family. robbie's said, "today is my high flyin' 2nd birthday!" my husband, ryan's shirt had four airplanes on it - one for each member of our family. my youngest son, cash's shirt said, "fly lil' brotha." my shirt said, "i'm so fly!" everyone's shirt had matching airplanes.

i know that you party planning people will not believe this, but i just discovered amy atlas. where have y'all been keeping her? i love her! this was my first attempt at an amy atlas inspired table.

robbie can eat his weight in strawberries or bananas, so of course his cake was strawberry and the cupcakes were "virgin" bananas foster!

i was very excited about this find from hobby lobby. i easily turned these boxes into luggage with a little scrapbook paper!

i was most excited about making these. i saw them on another blog and fell in love. marshmallow pops are so easy to make and can't help but be cute. i got the most compliments on these.

the kids first stop on their "trip" was to the cookie decorating table. my mom baked her famous sugar cookies in the shape of airplanes. we set out all types candy and sweet decorations to brighten up the cookies. i thought that the kids would put them aside and take them home in their goodie bags. what was i thinking? of course they'd gobble them right up. my mom's sugar cookies never last.

my mom is amazing. she made this plane that the kids sat in or strapped on in front of this backdrop to which i added the vinyl airplanes. as you can see some of the adults even enjoyed it.

we bought balsa wood airplanes thinking that the kids could have an airplane flying contest - if we had time. well one kid found them early, and that was it. planes were flying everywhere for the rest of the day. they were a huge hit!

i loved these cloud balloons. these pictures don't do them justice - at all. i really wish i got a better picture.

more balloons and the sabas airways runway

a cute little addition at the front door.

my mom painted these planes that she found at michael's. they are bird feeders!

i had these signs all over. there was this luggage drop off, a sign for the lavatory, baggage claim, where the goodie bags were found, and a departure sign above the door to the garage.

and of course, the cake! this was my first attempt at making a figure.

erica's patron cake!!!

erica contacted me b/c she wanted to make a patron bottle cake. she said she didn't have a lot of experience. i think she lied. her cake turned out crazy good! i love the color of the bottle and all the tequila necessities!

wedding shower fiesta

this cake was for a couples wedding shower. i received the order almost a month out and i could not wait to make it. i love the way it turned out. it is one of my most favorite that i have done!

bay area mothers of multiple buy and sale

i will be here on saturday, april 17 from 8am to 1pm. the buy and sale will be at the sagemont youth building at 11600 hughes rd, houston. if you have a child, know a child, or have ever been a child, you should come check it out. there will be new and used items for babies and children, plus...FREE CAKE!! why would you miss it?!

happy easter

thanks to a few inspirations found on the internet, i created these bunny cupcakes!

dora #1 and #2

two weeks in a row i had dora cakes to make. for dora #1, i worked with the customer to make a design that she liked and i knew that i could make with no trouble. after a friend saw that design, she requested a cake for her daughter's birthday the following weekend. dora #1 was very similar to other cakes that i have made. while i was very pleased with the cake, i was somewhat frustrated that i didn't push myself to do something different!
i quickly started researching and thinking of something that would push my skills and make me a little uncomfortable. i found a spiral cake that a woman did for a bike race. that was it! it seems like dora is always trying to make her way to the top of tall mountain! i had to make that mountain. i called the customer for dora #2 and luckily she was open to my idea. i feel so lucky when customers trust me enough to be creative. and here is the results of that trust.

allow me to introduce you to my taste testers

the serious tasters - every sunday, my mother's family gets together for lunch. in my family, the women outnumber the men. however, the men can't complain b/c all of these women are bakers. this is a perfect place for me to get tips on specifics for my recipes. these ladies all know a lot about baking, and they are able to not only tell me what is good and bad, but what i can possibly do to make it better. this is the place where i get honest opinions about my cakes.

the confidence boosters - my husband's work may not be the best place to test new flavors. however, it sure does make me feel good when ryan tells me that 24 cupcakes were gone before he even had a chance to announce that they were there. ryan works at a oil refinery, so the majority of his co-workers are men. one of the guys has a sweet tooth like i have never seen. his favorite sweet - candy corn. that means that if i sent sugar in a bowl, this man would think it was gourmet. there really is no way to make this group unhappy.

my favorite - my 22 month old says, "cake" every time my mixer hits the kitchen island. there isn't anything he will not eat (except for provolone cheese.) while he was helping me make a stew, he was eating raw onions! as far as he is concerned, i really can't go wrong in the kitchen. not to mention, he is the cutest of my tasters!

purple patron party

a friend of mine has been decorating cakes for about as long as i have. we have totally different approaches to cake making. ava is fearless. she thinks that if a cake can be made, why can't she be the one to make it? where as i am very careful to push my skill level envelope. don't get me wrong. i'm not affraid of new things. i'm affraid of crazy new things.

after deciding to have a purple patron party, ava knew she wanted a big cake to be the centerpiece of the night. she asked me to work on it with her and i was super excited about trying some new techniques on a nice three layer cake (i thought that was big). well, let me just show you what she had in mind.
as you can see, i was going to be way out of my comfort zone. however, despite all my little pushes toward a more sensible cake, this girl was going...crazy big cake.

i am so glad that she did. we actually got to add a bunch of stuff to our cake arsenal. we found a great edible silver spray paint, i did my first real carving, and we learned how to stack a crooked cake. when i say "we learned," i mean, i asked how to do, got scared, kept trying to talk ava out of doing it, and then she did it when i wasn't there. :) here are some "during the process" pictures...

and the cake...

i have to say a little about this patron bottle. i have just started wanting to get into carving. this was my first real go at it. i'm really happy with the way it turned out. although, next time i will use edible paper for the labels - i hate when everything is not edible.

price change

on monday, cupcake prices will go up 25 cents each. place your orders before monday to get the old price.

margarita cupcakes

a friend of mine was having a purple patron party. i wanted to make cupcakes for the party and being that it was a tequila party, what would have been better than margarita cupcakes?

when i was throwing the idea around with my family, all i got was squished up faces and noses turned up. noone could imagine tequila in a cupcake.

i ended up making two different cupcakes. both cakes had liquor in them, but the "spiked" cake had liquor in the icing and the "virgin" cake just had margarita mix in the icing for flavor.

i wanted to decorate them to look like little margaritas. i did two different styles and ended up liking the more simple cake. i was pretty happy with the outcome, but these will definitly have to be a special order cupcake. they were much more expensive to make. however, they were delish!

look! people are taking pictures of my cupcakes!

here are some of their pictures

bananas foster cupcakes

last week i found myself starring at more overly ripe bananas. what is the deal? this is unprecedented in our house! i'm not sure where the idea for bananas foster cupcakes came from, but it wasn't long before i was researching. i only found 2 recipes, and both of them didn't look good. so, i modified them - alot.

now, i have only ever had bananas fosters once, and it was horrible. so, i was really kind of walking into this new flavor blindly. one afternoon i packed up my baking supplies and went to my mom's house. i knew i had to put some bananas on fire, and i wasn't doing that at my house!

i'm not sold on putting this flavor on my menu yet. it's quite involved and calls for expensive ingredients. however, i'll have to figure something out, because they are awesome!

oreo cupcakes

if you say that you don't like oreos, i'd have to say you're lying. everyone loves them. some of us are just more vocal about it. i have honestly not had oreos in my house as long as i can remember. simply b/c if i did, they would maybe last 2 hours - 1 hour, if ryan was home.

shortly after deciding to start the cupcake part of my business, i knew i had to have an oreo cupcake on the menu. again, i had to get it right. if you bit in and didn't think, "milk's favorite cookie," then what was the point? my oreo cupcakes have crushed up oreos in the chocolate batter. i also found a fake out version of the actual stuffing, so i modified it to be spreadable. they came out just as i wanted them to. the cake even tastes like the chocolate cookie! these are by far my favorite. they are also a favorite of my kid taste testers. of course, that was a no brainer. the only people willing to admit their love of this sandwich cookie are under 12 years old.

darla's strawberry cupcakes

i really want my cupcakes to be unique tasting desserts that you can't get anywhere else. i knew that i would be asked to make the traditional flavors like chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, and strawberry more often than anything else. my chocolate and vanilla are pretty good, but i needed to practice strawberry! plus, i had been wanting to try my aunt, darla's recipe for strawberry cake. it has fresh strawberries in it and is so, so good. again, although it does not have chocolate, it totally qualifies as dessert.

i actually had all the ingredients at the house - well, i had frozen - not fresh strawberries, and if you look closely, you can see that i used christmas mini cupcake liners. hey, it's all i had. in the first picture, i thought the green kind of made them look more strawberryer (my high school english teacher would love that word...). it also ended up being a nice accident, b/c i found out kids love them! they are just their size, plus they can get away with eating more. and so, my cupcake dots were born.

s'mores

one of my favorite desserts is a s'more. the only reason i go camping is b/c it's the one time that you can eat two or three of them and no one will judge you. it may seem hard to imagine, but i hate mosquitoes, sleeping on the ground, and dirt. i just put up with it b/c, really, what could be better than a toasty marshmallow smooched with melty chocolate between two graham crackers?

well, let me tell you, these s'more cupcakes come pretty darn close. i started doing some research on these little gems, but i couldn't find a good recipe where each flavor was given equal opportunity like in the original.

most s'more cupcakes are made with a chocolate cake (really? cake can't melt all over your hands!), little to no graham (hello! the cracker is the whole reason a s'more works!), and a marshmallow stuffed in the middle - undetected (b/c it melts away the second it hits the oven). it's embarrassing that people think this would be good enough for...the s'more. i decided - no, i needed to create a new version.

i knew i had to get a hershey bar in that cake, more graham cracker, and marshmallow that would get all over your fingers! luckily, i found an old recipe for a graham cracker cake. i was worried, b/c this recipe was not much more than your typical graham cracker pie crust. i crossed my fingers and started making the cake. before putting the cakes in the oven, i hid squares of hershey bar in the cups. again, i crossed my fingers hoping they wouldn't melt unrecognizable, slid them in the oven, and started on the marshmallow frosting!

i'm not one for bragging, but these cupcakes warrant it! i created a s'more cupcake deserving of the name.

orange banana - the first cupcakes

i have had quite a few requests for cupcakes, but i was never really interested in making them. a regular size cake is time consuming. i just kept imagining myself surrounded by little tiny cakes and spending hours on each one.

yesterday, we had some overly ripe bananas in the house. (this rarely happens, by the way. my 21 month old would eat 3 bananas in a sitting if allowed.) i usually make banana bread with these rarities, but this time i chose to make...cupcakes!

i wanted to do pretty cupcakes. the kind that you would imagine martha stewart making. i wanted them to have that cute little peek at the top and something delicately scattered on top. i decided to do a little experimenting...

i'm usually very adventurous when making dinner, but never in my baking. my mom always taught me that baking was a science. it made me a little intimidated to bake outside of the cake mix box. for some reason on this day i was feeling confident, and i'm glad, b/c these cupcakes turned out so good.


orange banana cupcakes with orange buttercream frosting! my husband, ryan thought they tasted like orange cinnamon rolls. i've always said, "it's not dessert unless it has chocolate." however, these definitely qualify as dessert.

i sent them to work with ryan and one of his co-workers said, "if you were to put one of those cupcakes on your head, your tongue would beat the sh*t out of your face trying to reach it!" i guess that means i'm in the cupcake business!