Happy Birthday Melanie

Today I made a card for my friend Melanie's Birthday!!!  Believe it or not Melanie has every birthday card I have ever made...she doesn't let me forget it either LOL.  Every year I make a special effort to make her a card in her favorite color which is Orange.  Her favorite team is the Mets.  Therefore, all her cards are orange, blue and white.  This year I realized, I had no card ready, so I got up at 5:30am and made Melanie a card.  Here is what I came up with.

 

I love these Stampin Up butterflies, they are so versatile and easy to use.  I realized today I need the small butterfly punch so I don't have to cut out the butterflies.  Thanks Melanie, you made me enable myself.  I hope you have a great day.  Happy Birthday Melanie!!!

 

Hugs Delia

Graduation Party!!

Logan graduated from George Washington Elementary School this past June and my friend Michelle asked if I wanted to do a pool party at her house for both Logan and her daughter Lauren.  As soon as the word "yes" came out of my mouth, we started planning.  Michelle is amazing, she really knows how to decorate and throw a party.  She ordered goodie bags, candy, decorations and paper products all in red and white.   She put up the tents in her yard and did all the decorations, the yard looked great!!  She ordered an inflatable slip and slide and water bucket drop.  The kids loved it all.  

While she was doing all the work, I was home decorating the cake and making little red velvet cupcakes which were iced with cream cheese frosting and a cherry.  They looked so cool, I just loved how they looked on the table. You can see them in the photos below.  We put them on long popsicle sticks and placed them in glass jars. 

Now for the cake, the Marty and Mike decided that a cake of the school would be cool and both Logan and Lauren decided they liked that idea.  Michelle and I protested since there isn't much character to the school but the kids insisted so a cake of the school it was.  I decided to add items to the top of the cake that were meaningful to both the kids in order to jazz it up a bit so I added: 

• two string instruments a Base (Logan) Viola (Lauren)
• Museum of Natural History, this was their 5th grade field trip
• Daren the Lion for the DARE program
• George Washington Mascot, George which was drawn by a kindergarten years ago
• Graduation cap and white tassel with 2013 drawn on
• Both kids took the 510 yellow bus to school and home so I made a school bus
• GW letters on stone that are in front of the school
• For good behavior and accomplishments, the teachers would give the kids paper cherries which could add up and they would get special things throughout the years. 
• GW motto about "Being George" on the side of the cake

So here is the cake making process.   

 

 

 I got too tired to take photos intermittently therefore, here is the end result.

 

The white cherry by the grad cap wasn't suppose to be there, someone put it there before I took the pictures.

 Look closely, with the heat and humidity, the cake started to bulge in the front.  Not the prettiest cake but the kids LOVED it.  I had trouble trying to get a photo because they were all jumping in front, some taking pictures others just yelling "look at this or that" they were so excited, I was so fearful that the cake was going to be toppled over LOL.  The thrill of making a cake this big is the reaction of the kids, they don't care that it's not perfect, they love it and that makes all those hours of work and lack of sleep worth it.   

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed the photos, now that this is over I can concentrate on making scrapbook pages and cards again. 

Have a great day!!

Delia  

Happy Birthday Logan

Logan turned 11 this St Patrick's Day and my husband really wanted to have a party for Logan.  He hired the video game guy on wheels and proceeded to help Logan invite his friends. This video truck allows 16 kids to play video games, the kids were besides themselves with happiness. My job was to do the rest, decorations, cake goodie bags, etc. Logan decided he wanted a video game themed party and Minecraft won out over the other video games by a hair.

 

So the planning started, my neighbor Michelle had tons of ideas to make the party special. She brought over her popcorn machine, helped label bottles, picked up the twizzlers....the woman was amazing! Thanks Michelle! Anyway, my focus was the cake. I had to make a TNT cake from Minecaft. I baked 9.5 inch square cake layers and piled them up. Here is the cake:

I thought the a bunch of sparklers would be cool on top of the cake, so it would appear like a lit fuse, but on the test run the night before I realized the the sparklers smoked too much and was really irritating. So as a compromise we lit only two.

All the kids thought the windows were so cool, we cut out white electric tape and the windows resembled Minecraft glass. For this I need to thank my niece Denise, my calf injury had me going at a snails pace and she took over and taped the window for me. Denise was also a huge help with the cake, she cut out out all the letters and the squares for the top. I had just about had it, when the white band around the cake came out uneven I didn't care, my leg was three times the size it should be and I was exhausted.

Happy Birthday Sofia



This past Tuesday was Sofia's Birthday and since she isn't have a party, I wanted to give her whatever cake she wanted.  So I asked her what she wanted for a birthday cake and she stated, a vanilla cake with Barbie.  A Barbie cake and it needed to come together overnight.  So Sofia went upstairs and got her favorite Barbie (thanks Virgina) and Sofia and I started baking a cake.  She had a blast pouring the ingredients into the bowl.  When we added the flour and milk some of the flour and milk in her words "poofed" back at us.  I turned to her and asked why did it "poof" and she said because we gave it too much love.  There you have it, the cake we were making had a lot of love and it was going to be delicious.  She had a blast, laughing and screaming every time any liquid or flour came out of the bowl. Daddy had to stop what he was doing to check out what was happening in the kitchen with all the laughter and screaming.  We winded up over mixing the batter but I didn't care, we had a great time together and she was so proud to have made "her birthday cake". 

Once the cake was baked I realized I needed another two layers but it was too late to get started.  I took the kids to bed, I got up at midnight to take all the ingredients out for a second cake and at 4AM I came down and made the last two layers.  By the time I had to go to work, the cake was cool enough for me to layer, shape and crumb coat it.  Here is where I started taking pictures. (Sorry Sofia, I should have taken photos of you baking with me).

Yes, I gave Barbie a plastic shower cap so her hair would not get frosting in it.  This is one of Sofia's favorite Barbie's you know  LOL.  When I came home from work, I rechecked with Sofia on the colors to make sure she hadn't changed her mind from the night before and she said she wanted a pink, white and yellow frosting. I made the frosting and Sofia watched over me as I frosted the cake.  Thanks to this great tutorial on decorating a Barbie cake, I made a cake that was nice to look at and  wasn't embarrassing to put in from of neighbors.  If you are interested you should really check out Liz's Barbie cake on you tube, it's beautiful. 

Since it was my first time decorating a cake this way, I was a little nervous but I knew my daughter would have loved it no matter what.  How do I know?  She thought the cake was done with the crumb coating above and told me I did a beautiful job.  She is too precious!  Well the cake came out better than I could have hoped.  One of these days I have to take a cake decorating class to get all the piping even but then again I might be a tad bit to impatient for it.

 

 

Here is a picture of the "happy" birthday girl!!  I forgot to mention earlier that Sofia was so excited for her birthday, she told me she was so happy and proceeded to screaming, jump up and down, clap her hands and laugh all at the same time because it was her birthday.  She was SOOO excited and had us all smiling and laughing with her.

 

 

 I am so happy our neighbors could come over and help celebrate Sofia's birthday on Tuesday night.  She was thrilled to have both Isabella and Lauren over and everyone had a great time. 

 

 

I love you Sofia, I hope one day you can read this post and remember what a great time we had celebrating your 4th birthday.  Happy Birthday baby!!  Love you with all my heart, Mom