Brain and blood clot cupcakes

Hey y'all! 

This weekend a friend of mine had her annual Halloween Party! Hubby and I left Little Man with the grandparents and had a great time! You will get to see what our costumes were on Wednesday. 

A few years ago, my friend started having a contest for the yummiest, most grotesque looking food. This is the first year I actually participated. I found this link on Pinterest and decided that this was going to be my entry. 

The cupcakes are a doctored up version of boxed French Vanilla cake mix. I promise I will do that post soon. It's really quite easy!

The cupcakes are then cored and filled with strawberry jelly. This is the blood clot part of the cupcakes. The tartness also helps break up all the sweetness of the cake and icing. 

The icing is my standard buttercream recipe from Wilton, with Almond extract as flavoring. I mixed together pink, yellow, blue and a tiny bit of black to make the fleshy grey color of the "brains." These we're lot easier to do than I thought they would be. All I had to do was do a big squiggle on each side of the cupcake, and a smaller squiggle on top of each big squiggle. The squiggles were made with Wilton Tip #3. 

And there you have it! They were big hit at the party, and although there weren't any prizes, I won the contest! We had a blast at the party, and are already planning what we will befor next year!! 

Happy Halloween Week! See y'all Wednesday! 

November Sub - Give Thanks

Hey Y'all! 

Hubby and I are getting ready for a friends Halloween Party this weekend, so basically, I am getting ready for the Party. I have gotten all of our pieces to our costumes, and am baking cupcakes today! It's going to be awesome and you can expect pictures next week! :) 

For now, you saw that title and were expecting to see a post about Thanksgiving, not Halloween! So let's get to it! 

The November Sub actually came to me about 3 weeks ago, but I thought I would post about it a little closer to it actually being November. 

Also, it's not my favorite sub. It's not strictly Thanksgiving, it's a VERY similar color palette to the October Sub, and there are a lot of stickers that I probably will just not get a lot of use out of. Let me quit yakking about it, and let you see what I'm talking about. 

I do like that she remembered to include the Purchase Sub reminder sticker this month. If you didn't get the sub last month, she sells a sampler sheet that has those reminders on them, here. I'm not thrilled about the card, because I already have my own thank you cards leftover from when my little man was born (ENDLESS BABY SHOWER THANK YOU CARDS!!) lol. I don't foresee myself using the label stickers much because they are so wide! They take up a big chunk of the EC boxes. 

I like the half boxes. Those turned out really neat! The quotes page looks awesome, but I don't really put quotes in my planner, especially not full box quotes because I want to fill it up with things I do. I like the idea behind the acts of kindness stickers because I think we should always strive to do kind things for others, but I never really plan out doing those kinds of things. They usually just happen. I don't know, maybe I'll use them. 

The Thanksgiving sticker set is adorable. That one will most likely get used with the leftovers I have from the October Set! 

Overall, I don't love this month's sub. I will still order a December one, so it hasn't deterred me at all because I have been ordering these each month since June, and this is the first one that I really just don't like. That is not bad at all. 

Don't worry Kayla! I still love your shop, girl! In fact, I just ordered a bunch of washi from her website, so expect a haul once that shows up! :) 

Have a great weekend, and I will see y'all Monday! 

Birthday Cake Fail, and Redemption!

Hey y'all! 

As promised, here is the story of my dad's birthday cake. His birthday was Sunday. As you all have probably figured out by now, I enjoy decorating cakes. I took all four Wilton Cake Decorating classes last year, and have done a few special occasion cakes since. 

Well, as my gift to everyone, I have been doing my family's birthday cakes. Except my husband......he never wants to make a big deal out of his birthday, and it's kind of hard to surprise him with a cake because we live in the same house. 

Anyway......
So I go to Pinterest and find this cake design. It looks simple enough, and goes with the fall designs we usually do on dad's birthday cakes, so I got to work making it. It turned out beautiful!

However.....

....this happened. I. Was. Devastated!! That cake was simple, but time consuming! I felt so bad. And my dad, being the awesome dad he is, ended up comforting me on his birthday!

Well, this year, I was determined to right this tragic wrong! I got my redemption in the form of the new cake....

It's not as pretty as the original one was, but it didn't fall on the ground so I call it a win! Just to be sure, we had it at my house so I didn't have to try to transport it anywhere! And sorry for the blurry photo, not sure what was up with my phone that day. BTW, don't you just love Timehop? It's great when it brings up past cute photos and videos of my little man, not so much when it brings up past failures!

I like this cake because it is chocolate with chocolate icing. I filled it with Marshmallow fluff, which actually ended up soaking into the cake and just made it extra moist and yummy! When the slices are cut, each slice looks like a candy corn!

Dad was very happy with his cake this year, and is grateful that he finally got one! lol. Here's to hoping this doesn't happen again with any of my cakes!
Hope y'all got a good laugh! Have a great week and I'll see ya Friday! 

Week of 10/12 - 10/18

Hey Y'all! 

Happy Columbus Day! 

This week continues the Halloween themes I've had going in my planner for the entire month of October! This week starts some pretty fun fall festivities, and I can't wait! 

It's Freaky Fountain week! :) I have been looking forward to using this Darice Book for awhile now! Halloween is such a fun time, anyway, but when you add in the cuteness of a soda shop theme, this is bound to be a great theme!

All of the wash tape used this week is from Michael's except the skinny washi separating the weekend. That one is from Hobby Lobby and was part of a set. 

As usual, the hydrate sticker is from Oh, Hello. The half box is from AWigsDesigns, and the rest are all by me! I am actually enjoying being able to slowly become independent in supplying my own stickers. It feels nice to be able to save money on everyday functional stickers, and it helps me justify purchasing some more elaborate stickers that I wouldn't be able to design for myself (at least not easily). 

Appointment stickers and churches are from Oh, Hello. I used some of the fall stickers from the October Sub (posted about here), and again, the half boxes are from AWigsDesigns. So are the baking stickers. Everything else is my own designs! 

As you can see, my dad's birthday is Sunday! I'll be baking his cake this weekend, and since his birthday is in October, he always gets a Halloween cake. I will be posting about how I made it next week! We will also be going to a Pumpkin Patch on Saturday so I will be posting about that experience as well! 

In the meantime, look forward to Thursday! I have my November Sub from Oh, Hello, and I will be posting about it then! 

I hope you are all having a wonderful Monday so far! 

Talk at ya later! 

Gender Reveal Cake

Babies, babies, and more babies! There are FOUR women pregnant in my Sunday School Class right now! Pregnancies are a good thing for me. In addition to the promise of a cute new baby coming soon to play with (squee!), it means that baby showers and gender reveal parties are coming soon. And these things mean one thing....CAKE! 

I bake cakes and cupcakes as a way to help pay for my hobbies (one of which is baking), and I have started to get pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. 

Last Saturday I had a gender reveal for a dear friend (and family member!).

I baked 2 dozen cupcakes and made one cake that would reveal the gender when cut into. 

The cupcakes were very simple: Lemon cake, box mix doctored up to be a little more rich (that's another post for another day :) ) with vanilla custard flavored buttercream. 

The buttercream is your standard Wilton Buttercream Recipe, with half the vanilla extract replaced with the Wilton Treatology Vanilla Custard Flavoring. Oh my word, these flavorings are DELICIOUS! This was the first time I had used one, and I can't wait to use more to experiment with flavor combinations! 

I piped the cupcakes using the Wilton 2D tip.

(My friends wanted purple for a girl instead of pink because that's their favorite color, and they can do what they want! lol.)

The cake is the same flavor combination as the cupcakes. After filling the cake with icing indicating the gender of the baby, I put a crumb coat of icing all over then set it in the fridge while I finished icing the cupcakes and rolling out the fondant. I use store-bought fondant, but if I ever have to do high volume of fondant cakes/cupcakes I will probably experiment with making my own. 

Once I covered the cake in fondant, I set about rolling the balls to make the border. In order to get a uniform size, I used a cookie cutter to make sure I was using the same amount of fondant in each ball. 

Then, I cut out the letters with cookie cutters, then the onesie by hand. Before attaching each element, I placed them in the correct places to make sure they fit, and looked right. To attach, I used gum glue (no, not chewed up gum. Bleh! Gum glue is a thing. Ask a baker!). I finished off the cake with some painted details using luster dust, and Voila! 

I am very proud of how this cake turned out. Hopefully, some of these ladies in my class will need cakes/cupcakes for gender reveal parties or baby showers! 

BTW: This post is not sponsored. I just really like the Wilton technique and products! They don't even know I exist! :)