Cake Requests

Regretfully, I will be unable to continue doing cakes every weekend. For all new cake requests, I will only be able to book every other weekend. This is not something I really WANT to change, but this hobby has made my life extremely busy. When I first started doing this, I wasn't working and had plenty of time on my hands. Once I started working again, I thought limiting my decorating to one order per weekend would be enough to still keep up with everything else, but it's next to impossible.

Because I am such a perfectionist, I will stay up all hours of the night working until I end up with something I am truly proud of. I promised I would never overbook myself to the point where I felt I needed to rush. And with the amount of cake requests that have been coming in lately (4 emails today alone), I fear that this is where I will end up if I keep going like this. I spend all hours of the night during the week baking practice cakes for new recipes, sketching out ideas, and making fondant decorations for upcoming cakes. I guess you can say I’d prefer my cakes to be produced with quality, not quantity.

I really enjoy my hobby and definitely do not want to give it up, but with the lack of sleep from cake decorating, my job, our social events, and our baby, it is quickly catching up with me. So, for now, this is just how things will have to be. I will continue to book orders for only every other weekend.

Cupcake Tower

I now have a cupcake tower you can borrow to display your cupcakes! It can be adjusted to hold anywhere from 12 to 60 cupcakes and can be customized to match your event decor!

Ashton's Baseball Party

Two-tiered birthday cake is chocolate cake with homemade fondant icing and homemade fondant decorations.

Cupcakes are marble cake with swirl-iced homemade buttercream icing and fondant  baseballs.

Ashton's smash cake is apple spice cake with buttercream icing.

Half-Birthday Present

Tony and I have been wanting to buy one of these for Braysen for a long time. We just hadn't done it yet. Hitting that half birthday mark sounded like a good excuse to me! When you hold him, all he wants you to do is help him stand so he can bounce, so we decided to just buy it. He loves it! His legs are still a little too short, but we made it work.

And surprise, surprise, his favorite toy is the "book"! Thank you to everybody that brought a book to my baby shower. Braysen's library is very full and we read every day. As you can see, he's no stranger to concepts of print!

Birthday Dinner

Tonight Braysen and I went out to dinner with my parents and my brother for my birthday. Because it was on a week night, Tony was at work. Braysen used to love the car and had no issues with being in his car seat. But for about the last 2 months, he has decided that he wants nothing to do with the carseat. His new thing is to try to sit up in it, while he is strapped in, mind you. So in short, he becomes very frustrated by the situation, (frustrated seems to be the perfect way to describe his personality overall right now) and ends up crying, screaming, whatever he can do that he thinks will get me to take him out. Car rides are awful, especially coming home that last river trip, when the poor baby decided to cry the whole way home, and only paused briefly when I got him take a 20 minute-nap.

Back to the point! I plopped his little butt in the car seat, and then hurried around the house trying to finish getting everything I needed so we could run out the door. I noticed that he is wasn't crying, he was actually very quiet. I checked on him, and found him like this:

I have tried every, and I mean every, toy that this kid owns to try to settle him down while in this car seat, and nothing works. He finds entertainment in his shoelaces? Are you kidding me?!

He was extremely entertained, that is, until he found out he couldn't get the laces into his mouth.



I usually like to try to pretend that it's not my birthday (birthdays just aren't fun once you're old), but my mom never lets me get away with it. After dinner we went back to my parents' to open presents. You may think this is pretty lame, but I was thrilled that my parents bought me a stand mixer! When we registered for our wedding, I thought it was a waste to register for one. It was very large, would take up a lot of space, and just seemed unnecessary. Sure, I loved baking when I got married, but never had anything that a hand mixer couldn't handle. Once I started really getting into baking my cakes, I found myself wishing I had a better mixer. It would save me time (which is precious now) from standing and mixing for long periods of time. I can now set the timer on this baby, turn it on, and then do something else. You have no idea how excited I am! I can't wait to start mixing the buttercream I need for next week. This of course was not the only gift from my parents, because my mom always way over-does it in the gift department. :) I also got some other stuff that I really needed wanted, but felt the need to blog about my fabulous new mixer.

I usually convince Tony to not spend any money on me for a birthday gift, but I really wanted some cake decorating supplies. In order to not feel guilty about buying the cake-goodies I wanted (I usually won't spend money to buy things I want), I told him I would just buy them and we'd call it my birthday present. So I was happy because I got what I wanted for my cakes, and he was happy because he felt like he actually got the chance to buy me a present this year! It worked out great!

Cupcake Cake Pop - Disaster

These were the first cake pops I made. I made them earlier this week. They turned out so awful that I didn't even want to post the pictures, but I used them as a learning experience (after all, it was my first time making them), so I thought, "What they hay!" and decided to post them anyway. I'm really unhappy with the way they turned out, they ended up looking really messy and sloppy, so being the perfectionist I am, this was really not OK! But I learned so much about each step as I went, that next time I'll know what to do to avoid the problems I had! Who knew melted chocolate was so difficult to work with?!

I had just a little bit of supplies left to practice making a couple more. I figured out what I needed to do to make the chocolate less messy, but I am still not quite satisfied with the way the pops didn't hold their original shape.

So my first cake pops may not turned out as I planned, but they still taste HEAVENLY! I have to distribute some of these messy-looking bad-boys out to other people, or we're in trouble here!

Pumpkin Cake Pops

Red velvet cake pops

Pink & Purple Leopard Print Cupcakes

Red Velvet cupcakes with homemade buttercream icing.



6 Months Old!

Happy Half Birthday, Braysen!

Again, as you would suspect, Braysen was extremely uncooperative during photo time today. I think the older he gets the more uncooperative he becomes! He was rolling around, putting the backdrop in his mouth, trying to grab the camera, trying to crawl. He's figured out that if he lunges hard enough, he can move his body forward and can sometimes use his legs and arms together to move one "step" forward. He still hasn't completely figured out how to coordinate his arms and legs together. Thank goodness for that!

He got a really fun gift for his half birthday, but I'll blog about that some other time.

On another note, our sleeping situation as gotten MUCH better! Our night sleeping situation, that is. Daytime naps are still few and far between, and really short when they do occur. I've been hesitant to bring up his better sleeping habits, as not to jinx myself, but he sees the doctor this week and will be getting shots, so I'm assuming I'll be back at square one again after that anyway.

A Healthier Alternative!

Introducing the Apple Spice Cake!

I've been researching a healthy recipe for baby's 1st birthday smash cakes for some time now. Carolyn called me a while back and asked if I could do Ashton's birthday cake, but for his smash cake, she wanted something that wasn't too sweet. Since then I've had more requests for healthy smash cakes for baby. After much research, I think I've found a winner!


This is an Apple Spice Cake. It contains no eggs and no sugar for you mamas that want a healthier alternative for your baby's first cake. It doesn't look like much, but didn't ice this cake because it was just a tester. It was not too sweet, but still tasty!

While this cake looks dark, it is not chocolate, but I can  make a sugar-free, egg-free chocolate version of this cake!

Labor Day Weekend

We spent Labor Day Weekend at the river. Braysen was an absolute fish and loved every part of being in and around the water! Here are some of my faves:

Flowers and Butterfly Cake

Lightly Lemon cake with homemade buttercream filling. Cake is iced with marbled rolled homemade fondant and decorated with homemade fondant.

Purple and Green Birthday

Yellow cake filled with raspberry. Iced and decorated with homemade fondant.

Labor Day Cupcakes

Chocolate cupakes and mini-cupcakes with swirl-iced homemade buttercream icing. Fondant decorations.

Zebra Cake

Mocha cake with homemade buttercream filling. Cake is covered and decorated with coconut-flavored fondant.