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!

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!

Pumpkin Patch

I'm not quite sure where November went. I feel like I blinked and it was over - though I guess technically we still have 5 days left. I just feel like it's December immediately after Thanksgiving. I did have grandiose ideas of making Christmas ornaments over Thanksgiving with my sister. However, when I opened the instructions for the ones I brought, those ideas went out the window.

I realized that if I started making these adorable Santa's, I'd have yet ANOTHER 1/2 finished project, so I decided to just keep-on-keepin'-on with my knitting. Anyways, coming off of Thanksgiving weekend, I thought I'd post about all the pumpkin themed desserts I made (for Halloween).

My friend Megan loves making iced sugar cookies. She brought over the candy corn and pumpkin cookie cutters for a baking day.

The royal icing was just thick enough that the ridges in the pumpkin stayed!

I also made a "pumpkin patch" courtesy of my Hello Cupcake! book. Unfortunately I didn't really get a good picture of the final product - but I think they turned out cute enough. The book says to use green licorice as stems, but I couldn't find any at Teeter, so improvised with tootsie rolls (which taste better anyways). Then used string gummy candy for the vines - though they didn't really twist prettily like they did in the book. The best part of these cupcakes? I used spice cake! mmmmm, I could go for one of those right now.

Also, this has nothing to do with pumpkins, but my Halloween Reddit gift-er gave me the BEST COOKIE CUTTER EVER:

AND I can use it again for non-skeletal gingerbread men this month! (Though maybe I'll have a few nightmare before Christmas ones heh)

Easy Halloween Cupcakes

I am a HUGE fan of the Wilton cupcake accessories. Seriously - some paper and cleverly designed toothpicks can really transform your cupcake. AND its ridiculously easy to make a simple cupcake look awesome.

While I definitely want to make some of the crazy complicated cupcakes from Hello, Cupcake!, these are just as festive and waaaay easier. I've also used the graveyard set - and there are SO MANY MORE. Then there's the Duff cupcake tattoos. I didn't think I would like them very much, but they don't taste bad and are really easy to use.

And lets not forget all the fun cupcake stands! One can never have too many. (I think I have about 5 different stands.) I could really go for a cupcake now....

Rule #32: Enjoy The Little Things

We had a Zombie movie night a few weeks ago and watched Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. I saw these cupcakes somewhere online about a year ago and have been waiting to for an excuse to make them ever since! Our Zombie-fest was pretty last minute so I went the expensive route and bought pre-made cupcakes at Harris Teeter.

I chucked the frosting they came with and then re-frosted them with store-bought butter cream I dyed green. The good thing about store-bought is you get vanilla AND chocolate! These are fun cupcakes to make because the work lies in the papers, not the actual cupcake. 

I found this template online and then decorated them with a sharpie to look like zombies. I cut out little arms and since I was short on time (I literally assembled them at the house of the person hosting the zombie night) just taped everything together. Given more time, I would have used a glue stick. I drew the shotgun on white paper and then cut it out for our little hero to defend himself.

He was still standing the next day - so looks like he made it out ok!

Stars and Stripes

I spent Independence day in Myrtle Beach. It's great being at the beach for the 4th because as far as the eye can see - up and down the beach - people are blowing up fireworks. And South Carolina has the GOOD stuff - none of this sparkler amateur hour. Their fireworks shoot high in the air, EXPLODE, and rain down in a glorious shower of color.

My mom asked me to make some desserts, so before I left for the wedding in California, I baked some star cookies. I waited to ice them until the actual 4th of July because I knew if they were iced beforehand my piggy family would eat them and there'd be none left for the actual festivities.

For the cookies I had 4 different designs: USA cookies, stars within stars, tie-dye, and just plain sprinkles (I let my brother decorate those.) To get the star-burst/tie-dye effect I flooded the cookies with white royal icing, then drew on red and blue lines. 

Taking a toothpick I drew lines from the middle out.

And wah-lah! Starburst!

I went on a patriotic decoration buying spree a few years ago so I have a bunch of fun cupcake toppers.

I still maintain that the red, white, and blue star sprinkles are one of the best purchases I've ever made. It'll be a very sad day when I run out of those.

I hope you all enjoyed your Fourth of July!! 

Memorial Day Treats Part 2: Patriotic Cake!

In this second installment of Memorial Day treats, I will show you the fun cupcakes/cake I made. First: THE CUPCAKES!

I found these fun patriotic cupcake papers in the recesses of my cupboard. I think I bought them at Walmart a few years ago for the 4th of July. WIN!

Next I divided the batter into 3 bowls and dyed one red and one blue. Then similar to the tie-dye cupcakes I made, I spooned each color into the papers - started with blue on the bottom, then white, then red.

I used a 1 tablespoon scoop to evenly add the batter. Though I did run into the problem of not having enough of each color. I need to learn how to divide the batter more evenly. Unlike the tie-dye cupcakes, I didn't mix the colors around once in the papers.

I used white frosting and topped with red, white, and blue star-shaped sprinkles.

Next I moved on to the Flag Cake. I saw this cake on a website a few years ago and have never had the chance to make it. I learned a lot making this cake.

Lesson #1: Evenly divide batter. I made white cake batter, poured what I thought was half into one 9in pan then dyed the other half red. Unfortunately I ended up with more of a 1/3 white, 2/3 red ratio.

Not sure if you can really tell from this picture, but the red cake is WAY taller than the white cake. I then repeated the process but left half white and dyed the other half blue. I did better with the second batch evening out the batter, but still not perfect.

Lesson #2: Use a cake leveler. I just used a knife to cut my cakes in half horizontally. They were all kinds of uneven. It looks like Betsy Ross may have been drinking a little when she made this flag.

You create the flag effect by placing half a white layer, then half a red. Next you take the whole blue cake and another half red/white combo and cut a circle out of the middle. You use the outer blue circle and the inner red/white circle when you're putting the cake together. BONUS: lots of scrap cake - Cook's Treat!

Here is a view from the top. I used copious amounts of white frosting to make up for how uneven the cake was. Then I decorated them the same way as I had the cupcakes.

Lesson #3: MORE ICING! I didn't ice between the top red and white layer and they didn't adhere as well as I would have liked.

Lesson #4: Add a crap ton of dye. Not only did Betsy Ross drink too much and sew this flag all crooked. She also passed out and left it in the sun. I hope she's proud of her pastel flag.

Mmmmmm. Tastes like freedom.