Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Baby Shower Dessert

One of my friends from my Girl Scout Troop is about to embark on the wonderful journey of motherhood.  She is the first one in our group to have a child (and she was the first to get married !)  I volunteered to make the dessert for her baby shower since my sister and I are very interested in baking.  She has been working on finding great recipes for quite awhile now and also perfecting her cupcake skills.  The cake pop idea is new to us so we thought the baby shower would be a great opportunity to try out our work on a bunch of people.  

I needed to come up with a way to display the cake pops.  Originally we were thinking of sticking them into cupcakes so each person would have the cake pop with their cupcake, but the pops were way too top heavy.  I scoured the internet for photo ideas, but really nothing stood out to me that would work for the vision in my head.  I decided instead to just head down to Michaels and search for something that would work.  

This is what I came up with:
Fake flowers pushed into styrofoam inside a white basket.  Perfect idea since I will be able to reuse the flowers, if needed and the styrofoam!  I gifted the basket to the mother-to-be.
The cake pops this time around were picked out by the mother throwing the party.  She wanted a baby head and a chocolate cake.  Previously we have only used box mixes and frosting for the trial runs, but this time we wanted to make it extra tasty and make it from scratch.  We went with this great chocolate cake that had hot coffee in it.   It turned out delicious!  For the frosting we tried a new frosting recipe that was a chocolate cream cheese.  Sooo good!

Once the cake and frosting were ready I followed the same procedure for making cake pops.  You can go here to read the basics for making the pops.

Here they are almost finished...just need eyes =)  Candy necklace piece for pacifier, candy melts made into nose and bow.
Blue eyes for the mom-to-be...thanks to my mom for improvising on the eyes.  It was suggested that I use an edible marker for the eyes but it didn't work on the surface.  Last minute scramble and my mom saved the day.  She happened to have a squeeze tube of icing and food dye!
This little guy was the best one...and later eaten by my best friend =)
We placed the little girl pops in the field of flowers, with the styrofoam keeping them secure.
Andrea goofing around before she ate the best pop

Here is a pic of the frosting being made.  It really was sooo good.  I hope we find an excuse to make it again soon=)

Besides the cake pops, we decided to also make cupcakes, even though we weren't asked to.  I baked them and made the frosting this time around and my sister and mom did most of the work on the paper designs.  They did such a great job!
I really enjoyed making these, hopefully we can do this again soon!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Sneak Peak...

Here is a look into my weekend project for a friends baby shower:
Will post the finished product later!  Have a great weekend.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

The Royal Wedding

I am so excited for the upcoming wedding.  I don't know what it is, but I have always been so fascinated with British Royalty.  I love the history especially and will read anything I can get me hands on pertaining to it.

My latest obsession was the Showtime series "The Tudors." Pat knows this about me and bought me a very accurate book about the family line.  I read it after I finished the series and just let me say, the show did an amazing job of telling the story as historically accurate as possible.

Back to the actual point of the post.  I discovered today that the Royal Family has an officially sanctioned website all about the upcoming wedding!  I am so excited to peruse the site in my free time.

You can go here to check it out for yourself...

I think the biggest reason I am so excited is because of the opportunity to watch something that will be talked about for the rest of my life.  I wish I was old enough alive to watch Princess Di get married, but I will just have to settle with knowing my mom got to watch it.  Even though the wedding is starting at 11:00 am England time (3:00 am for us West Coasters!), I think I might just have to try to stay up and watch.  I will of course set me DVR, just in case.

Bring on the excitement!!!

She is so pretty...can't wait to watch her stylish ways continue!
Pics from official photo release