Noah is Five

To celebrate Noah's fifth birthday, I made him this cake. It was inspired by this one that I found on Pinterest. The main cake was chocolate cake made from scratch, and the cake pops were made with red velvet cupcake mix and dipped in white chocolate. Coating cake pops in chocolate is trickier business than you would think, but they do look much better when you coat them with sprinkles, and I did that with the rest of them, but never thought to take a photo of those!



Noah is adventurous and observant. He loves gadgets, accessories, and exploring new places and things. He likes batteries and screws and pulling things apart. He is funny and caring and a great hugger. I do think that one day (if we can keep him out of danger) he will be an amazing man.

Liam is Six

It's hard to believe, but Liam turned six last month. He is right into Skylanders at the moment, and loves collecting and playing with the characters that go with the game. For his birthday, I made him two Skylanders cakes. One for the night before, when we celebrated his birthday with a family dinner, and then again on his actual birthday when we were celebrating my 40th.


One of the things about Liam that I am loving at the moment, is that he is learning to read. I was a real bookworm as a child and constantly had my nose in a book, so I really enjoy seeing his progress. The school Liam attends uses Magic 100 Words to teach reading, and Liam also likes to play Reading Eggs Eggy Words to help practice his words. I am constantly amazed at all the jumps he is making with his reading, and Liam has been getting a new Skylanders character each time his teacher signs off a level at school.


Liam was thrilled with his cakes and the bonus Skylanders he got with them. He also got a tablet, so he can play his Eggy Words on there, instead of using my phone all the time.

The "F" Word

You might be thinking that the F word is some expletive that refers to my lack of blogging lately.... but actually, I recently turned F-F-F-FFForty......... ah, there, I said it. I am now in my naughty forties.

I had a lovely little party with a few friends. My cake was from the cheesecake shop as I don't think I should have to make my own birthday cake and I was too busy making one for Liam. Liam and I have birthdays really close together, so I stole his birthday to have my party on.



I received some lovely gifts, including vouchers for a local beauty therapist, nice hand cream, alcohol, candles, scarves etc. Of course, some clever people noticed that I could use a Spotlight voucher, and mum got me a sleeve board and a clapper. The best gift of all was from Maxx and the kids - a new camera! So, hopefully, there will be some improvement in my blog photos in the near future, once I figure out how to use it. It's a Sony NEX-5R.



The sleeve board has come in handy already, as I used it whilst putting together Amélie's Music Class Blouse and Skirt.

On a Roll

Liam attended a school friend's birthday party on the weekend. I made her a personalised pencil roll. Elise seemed really happy with it. I noticed that there were some colouring books amongst the gifts she was given, so the pencil roll and pencils should come in handy.


My pencil roll has twelve slots, for twelve pencils. I sent Maxx out to get the pencils at the last minute. He bought the packet, thinking that it had twelve in there, but it was a pack of ten. He even clarified before he left that it needed to be a pack of twelve. Apparently, he didn't realise that sometimes pencils come in packets of ten. He chose the ones he did because they had the triangle shape that is supposed to be good for pencil grip. I think for future projects, a pencil stash might be in order.


We had a bit of a discussion before he left about pencils vs textas. Maxx prefers pencils, whereas I love textas. I remember not being allowed to have textas when I was about six or seven, I wanted the saturated colour that you get with textas that you don't get with pencils. These days, you can get lovely textas that are easy to wipe off surfaces, such as the Crayola washables. Maxx says he always preferred to draw and colour with pencils. Which do you prefer?


For this project, I used about one fat quarter of fabric.
SYST13 Running totals: in = 172, out = 52, total = +120

Never Try, Never Fail.....

....never learn anything new! I have flicked past this cake, in this cookbook* so many times, searching for birthday cake inspiration. Each time I see it, I think to myself what a fantastic cake that would be, but it would never, ever, in a million years work. I have even made the cake itself, but decorated it differently, because I didn't want to risk making a big mess of my cake.



On the weekend, Maxx celebrated his birthday, and at the last minute, I decided I was going to have a go at making THAT cake. I must admit, I was a little afraid, ok, VERY afraid, when it came time to attach the chocolate collar around the cake, but it worked. The result wasn't perfect, there were wrinkles, some paper tearing and the white spots are a bit blurred, but I still felt like the cake was a spectacular success. I was after all, expecting a spectacular MESS!



I have learnt a few things when making this cake. I took a short-cut when making the dots. Since I already had "dots", I decided not to melt white chocolate to make spots for the cake and just placed them on the paper. This meant the dots were bigger, but I was ok with that. I now realise, that if I had melted the dots, probably they wouldn't have been blurred from the dark chocolate bleeding underneath. The other thing I learned was that it is ok to sometimes take a risk.



I felt that the kids probably wouldn't enjoy the cocoa dusted over the top, so opted for some pink sprinkles instead. I now have lots of ideas for different ways I can use the things I learnt making this cake. For some reason, when taking photos of cakes, there is almost always a hand appearing in at least one photo. Does this happen to you?

*affiliate link

Pink With Purple Polka-Dots (Amélie is two)

It seems like only a few months have gone by since Amélie was born. I guess it has been. Twenty four of them. To celebrate I made her a polka-dot cake with hundreds and thousands around the outside. As my nephews were staying with my parents, they came along for the birthday dinner and were quite impressed with the polka-dots hidden within the cake.



I've always wanted to do a cake with hundreds and thousands around the outside edge too, and now I can say that I can do that as well (tutorial here). I learned a neat trick about making an evenly risen cake as well, with a nice flat top, so there will be no chopping off of the big extra lump in the middle from now on.



The polka-dots were inspired by this polka-dot cake and one day, I would love to have a go at this lady-bug cake as well. My cake did not bake without incident however, there was a failure cake with large pustule-like protrusions instead of lovely polka-dots. Due to the birthday dinner being postponed due to a local bushfire, I had extra time to get it right, though you can see that it was not quite baked properly at the bottom in the middle. I do recommend if you are baking a polka-dot cake that you use the same recipe for the spots as the rest of the cake, and use the tip I linked to get that nice flat top and stop your spots from bursting from the top of the cake. (I am sorry I did not take photos of the pustule cake - we just ate it instead!)



Happy birthday, Amélie!

You Light Up My Life

When Noah asked for a "torch" birthday cake, I thought I might construct somthing using my nut-loaf tin.



But then he said he wanted a yellow torch, like daddy's.



A yellow, (Eveready) dolphin torch.



That lights up, just like a real torch!!! *faints!*



Thankyou, Amy Badskirt for the idea of using one of these.



That really, really helped!



And happy fourth birthday for yesterday, to my amazing Noah. There is nobody in the world quite like you.

One

I can't believe my little girl is one already. I couldn't resist this gorgeous little pram for her dollies, especially since it was on sale at just the right time.



I think Miranda* likes it, too.



We spent some time at the pool on the actual day. Although not as long as we planned, as Maxx was suddenly called away for an unexpected job interview.



The cake (although delicious) was a bit of a rush job, due to the changes in the afternoon's plans, so I didn't take any photos of it, and dinner was late...



... but he got the job, so it was worthwhile.



Yesterday, we had some friends and family over for a barbecue to celebrate, and there was a proper birthday cake.









*yes, the doll finally has a name. We've named her after Miranda Hart.

Four

Ok, so Liam's birthday was back in July - over three months ago! I was having issues with my camera - flat batteries mostly. I forgot that I had photos on my phone. They aren't very good, but still, better than no pictures at all... I made a chocolate cake, and decorated it with Kit-Kats and topped it with Smarties. Smarties are always popular around here.



We had a nice, quiet family birthday dinner at home with just the people who live here and Nanna & Grandad and Paige & Tess. Liam received his first two-wheeler bike which Grandad and I assembled. He also received a red car (the blurry part of the second picture).

Three!

Noah turned three last week. I made him a Devil's Food Cake for his birthday cake.



His favourite present was an orange torch that cost only $5, despite also receiving a skateboard, amongst other things.

He still really likes his super hero cape. He also enjoyed everyone at library story-time singing happy birthday to him.



Isn't it wonderful how easy it is to please a three year old? Now all I need is shares in Duracell to keep that torch going...

Don't forget to enter my giveaway.

Happy Birthday, Noah!

Noah turned two on Thursday. Noah's birthday cake was chocolate, and featured strawberries and cream. Given the option, Noah would happily live on strawberries (dorbees), bananas (nah-nahs) and Smarties (marties).

Cake = yummy!

Liam is three!

 Last Tuesday, Liam turned three. Nanna and Grandad came to help him celebrate with a special birthday dinner.

I made him a cake and he managed to blow out all three candles in two giant puffs, set to rival the big bad wolf.

The cake was inspired by another blogger, who was also inspired by The Idea Room.

(Hey, check out the action shot of me dropping icing everywhere!)
My cake started out looking like a bunch of very colourful pancakes, which I had to cool and store overnight in my locked pantry.

But a bit of icing fixed that. I haven't made my boys a birthday cake yet, that didn't have Smarties on it. This one had tiny marshmallows too.

Both Liam and Noah were pretty impressed with the cake. I missed Liam's excited expression when I cut the cake and he was able to see the colourful layers, although Maxx was able to catch it on video.

He was pretty excited about his new red tricycle too!