The Day of the Doctor/Nerdtastic Weekend!

Fish fingers and custard!!!! That could only mean one thing... Doctor Who 50th Anniversary viewing party!! It was a fantastic weekend which I'm going to say started Thursday evening when I went to see Catching Fire.

This was me at work Thursday, way too excited to see the movie. I didn't really have time to get a costume together since I was travelling like crazy this month. Nothing a Mockingjay pin can't fix though! The movie was everything I wanted. JLaw can do no wrong in my eyes. I liked it so much that I'm going to see it again tonight in IMAX. The audience was a little dissapointing, our theater was only half full - so not quite the opening night experience I was hoping for. But guess it didn't really matter in the end because the movie was FANTASTIC.

Saturday I woke up and immediately started baking. I bought some great Doctor Who cookie cutters from WarpZonePrints. I dyed the dough blue and grey since I didn't have time to ice the cookies.

I bought TARDIS, DW, Weeping Angel, Adipose, Cyberman, Dalek, and Doctors 8,9, & 10 cookie cutters. Though I didn't use the Doctors and realized after I finished that I also forgot to use the Dalek cutter. Oh well - They'll get some use for the Christmas Special.

I threw some disco dust on the cookies once they came out of the oven.

I love how they turned out!

I found a recipe online for cookies that look like fish fingers. (Because who really eats fish fingers with custard...) I bought a set of shot glasses at Comic-con this summer that display all 11 doctors and have a disappearing TARDIS on the back. (When the glass is warm the TARDIS turns white). They were perfect vessels for custard!

I bought a groupon a while back for personalized M&Ms. I've always wanted to make them. I chose 4 different phrases - "Allons-y", "Geronimo!", "Doctor Who?", and "Bow ties are cool" and had them printed on TARDIS blue M&Ms. mmmmmmm

I also set out some 3D glasses and bow ties for the event. Got to represent both my Doctors!

I got a silicone Doctor Who ice mold for the 50th Anniversary Reddit exchange so we could drink in style - melting Dalek's and TARDIS's alike. The movie was just... SO GOOD. Everything I could have wanted. The interactions between the 3 doctors was gold. So many great one-liners. 

I went and saw it again in the theater last night in 3D. It was so fun. Unlike Catching Fire, the theater was completely sold out and the crowd was awesome.

My favorite was the 6 year old behind us in line dressed as a Cyberman telling everyone they would be deleted. One day I hope to have a child as awesome as this.

I even brought my own special snack for the movie :) It was great to watch it with so many fellow Whovians who screamed every time David Tennant came on screen, gasped, cheered, clapped, and yelled in all the right places, and nearly lost their minds towards the end of the movie. (if you saw it, you probably know what part I'm talking about.)

Hope everyone else had as great of a viewing experience as I did!!

A Royal Baby Shower Tea

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I thought it appropriate on Prince George's Christening day to talk about the baby shower my friend Virginia and I threw in his honor.

Virginia made a delicious punch, chocolate mousse parfaits, and chicken curry balls. 

Chocolate mousse parfaits... mmmmm

I have silicone teacup shaped cupcake holders that I thought would be perfect for the occasion. 

I made red velvet cupcakes and iced them with cream cheese frosting. Luckily England and the USA have the same national colors so I could use the red, white, and blue non-pareils from the Fourth of July to decorate!

They didn't come out of the silicone molds too easily unfortunately. Next time I will definitely be putting some cake release in first! I also made butter cookies. Which are sooooo delicious and pretty easy to make, though a little crumbly. They didn't have the perfect oval shape I was hoping for. 

I made three different types of tea sandwiches: egg salad, the traditional cucumber, and then my favorite, ham, apple, and brie.

We encouraged our guests to bring baby gifts which we then donated to a DC charity - the Sasha Bruce Youthwork.

Me with my lovely co-host Virginia!

Everyone loves an excuse to wear a hat.

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I heart you Kate!! And happy Christening Georgie!

Mustaches For All

A friend of mine hosted a baby shower that was mustache-themed. HOW CUTE IS THAT? There are quite a few mustache cookie cutters out there, but I went with this one from Amazon.com due mostly to its primeness (2 day free shipping FTW). The cookies aren't too big, one batch of dough made about 55.

I set myself to decorating them whilst I watched the twitter-sensation Sharknado. (Only made it half way through before I finished the cookies. They were pretty quick and easy to ice.)

Outlined and ready to go!

Of course I doused them all with a heavy helping of disco dust. I'm a big fan of this cookie cutter. I will have to find another time to use it - maybe in Movember?

A Very Nerdy Weekend

The first weekend in May is delightfully nerdy. The scene above was at my local comic book store Saturday morning for Free Comic Book Day. It also happened to be International Star Wars Day! (May 4th). Last year I really lamented not having my act together and doing something for May the 4th. I planned then and there to host a Star Wars marathon in 2013.

Saturday was crazy as I pretty much didn't do anything for the Star Wars party until that morning. I also had to cram in a trip to my local comic book store. I wanted to buy Brian K. Vaughan's new series Saga but the line was nuts when I arrived so I just looked through all the free comics instead. (My brother ended up buying Saga at his comic book store so win!) I had never been to the comic store before but it is pretty awesome. They have a large gaming section with a ton of great board games and a room with lots of tables so you can play them. I am definitely going to have to go back there soon.

I think I mentioned last year that I had some awesome Star Wars cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma. I have both the Heroes & Villains set and the Vehicle set. I originally had these grand plans of icing them all but since I waited until Saturday morning, that did not happen.

I think they look great un-iced. You can see all the detail much better than if I had iced them. On a slightly related side-note, Friday night I went to see John Hodgman do stand-up and Paul and Storm opened for him. I had heard of them before but never actually heard any of their music. THEY ARE FANTASTIC. Their songs are hilarious and a lot of them are about nerd culture. Here is one they sang Friday night called Thanksgiving that is pretty appropriate for May the Fourth. (Note: contains some curse words so may want to listen with headphones if you're in a public place.)

I definitely bought all of their CDs after the concert! 

I knew I was short on time and I wanted to do some sort of cupcake. I decided making cupcake toppers was the easiest/least time consuming way to have fun themed cupcakes. (I also knew I'd be sitting around for a while waiting for the concert to start on Friday so I'd have time to cut out pictures.) I picked out 4 different iconic pictures (Han Solo, Darth Vader, R2D2, and the Millennium Falcon) and pasted them into a powerpoint slide. It took a little googling to figure out how to rotate the pictures 180 degrees for the backside of the toppers. If you'd like to make your own toppers, here is a pdf version of what I had or you can choose your own images!

Alternatively, Williams-Sonoma does have cupcake kits that provides toppers and adorable cupcake papers. I just didn't have time to make it out to the store.

Of course I also sprinkled them with some star dust! (aka, disco dust). The last thing I attempted to do was carve a watermelon to look like the death star. (they make it look so easy on the internet!)

I was doing this AS guests were arriving and also using whatever I could find in my kitchen to carve so it didn't come out the best, but still cute! (Plus watermelon! YUM) If I ever do this again, I think I'll dig out my pumpkin carving set.

I wore this great woot shirt (which GLOWS IN THE DARK) for the occasion and started off with my hair in the Princess Leia side buns. They started falling out and Leia changes her hairdo each movie anyways, so I ended up with the Heidi braids by the end.

Cute right?

 MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!

More Baby Shower Treats!

Not that these are much different from the boy baby shower cookies I posted 2 weeks ago, but here are the girl baby shower cookies/mini cupcakes I made for my friend Kim's shower. It was for her second child so it was pretty chill and also the first co-ed one I've planned. Our theme was everything mini so we had sliders, individual servings of mac n' cheese, pigs in a blanket, chicken nuggets, jello shots, and mini forks and spoons to eat everything with! The best part was baby colors = Easter colors so DOUBLE USE!

March Showers

I made these cookies for a baby shower I attended a few weeks ago. I really loved the green/blue/yellow scheme. Though some of the dots fell off the onesies. FAIL.

With all their dots!

I'm co-hosting a baby shower this weekend for a baby girl which I'm pretty pumped about! Time for Purple/Pink/Orange? Still trying to figure out the color scheme for that one. And maybe this time I wont dot the onesies. We shall see. The shower this weekend is technically co-ed "sprinkle" since it's for their second child. We're doing mini food for everything (sliders, pigs in a blanket, cupcakes, etc.) and including alcohol. (Still need to look up how to make fancy jello shots!) I'm pretty pumped. I have a full weekend of baking ahead of me!

Valentine's Sweets

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!! As I said yesterday, Megan came over on Monday night to bake. We only got half of what we wanted done.

The Pretzel treats are by far the EASIEST. So quick to make! You lay out square pretzels and place a chocolate on top. (A lot of people use Hershey's Kisses, we used Wilton's melting chocolate wafers.)

I found dark chocolate raspberry flavored wafers at Michaels so I mixed those in too. We were cooking brownies at the same time so just put the pretzel chocolates in the oven for about 60 seconds or until the chocolate looked melty then placed a Valentine's M&M on top of each one.

Next we melted Wilton colored chocolate wafers (white and pink) in zip lock bags, cut off a tip and piped it on top of the pretzels. So cute and only takes about 10 minutes to make!

The brownies were a little more difficult. Our first batch didn't want to come out of the pan. (Even though I sprayed it with cooking spray!)

We used the same heart shaped cookie cutters from the sugar cookies to cut out heart brownies. I quickly realized that we weren't going to get a ton of brownies from this mix - and then we got even less when the brownies stuck to the pan.

I got a little smarter with the second batch and used the ever-trusty Wilton Cake Release to grease the pan and the brownies slid out perfectly.

There is so much scrap brownie when you're cutting out hearts... Cook's Treat!!

The lastly there's the sugar cookies. My old stand-by! Megan and I ran out of time to frost them on Monday so I did it last night while catching up on Downton. Sidenote: if you are also watching Downton, you HAVE to read the Facebook Recap. It's written as if the whole episode took place on Facebook and is HILARIOUS. Back to the cookies - The two designs I did weren't very intricate but still look great. It didn't take too long to do which was nice. And of course I sprinkled Disco-dust all over them. What's Valentine's Day with out a little SPARKLE??