*Bouncin' Baby Shower*

Dessert:Vanilla cupcakes with yellow and green vanilla buttercream frosting and sprinkles

Sandwiches: Turkey & cheese, PB&J (strawberry and grape) and tuna, cut with cookie cutters

Finger Jell-o: Peach, Orange, Lime and Lemon cut with baby-themed cookie cutters

Fruit & Veggies with ranch dip

All these cute goodies were for a friend's baby shower a couple of months ago. She and her husband didn't know if they were having a boy or girl so we went with a neutral color scheme of green, yellow and orange. Actually, it was part baby shower and part open house held at a park for friends, family and the kids and parents from her swim school. There was even a bounce house set up! 

Now the food items are pretty self-explanatory, but one thing that amused me was the novelty of Finger Jell-o. Apparently, it's something completely foreign to Southern Californians because when I made it for another event just last month, again it was met with amazement by the guests. In my family, my mom's Finger Jell-o popped up at every holiday and special event!  It's the simplest thing to make, it's just 2 steps more than making regular Jell-o. Green shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day, pink hearts for Valentine's Day, orange and green pumpkins for Halloween, and when they started making blue Jell-o, she would make the 5-layer version in stars of red, white and blue. 

I can't imagine a childhood (or adulthood for that matter) without Finger Jell-o, so I guess it's up to me to make sure the kids in SoCal will have the chance to discover how fantastic it is! 

*The Frog Princess*

Frog Princess Cake: 12" round, 4-layer vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream decorated with fondant and food coloring pen

Hoppy Birthday Cake: 8" round, 2 layer vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream decorated with fondant, food coloring pens and luster dust


The first cake was a special request by the birthday girl herself-a Frog Princess! The second was just for fun, due to the fact that I had left over batter and couldn't let it go to waist. I wanted the family to have another cake to take home for their own family party the next day so that they didn't have to take a half-eaten cake home from Chuck E. Cheese.

I had recently found the most delectable vanilla cake recipe out of a cupcake cookbook and thought I'd just up the amount to see how well it hold up as a cake. It was light and moist with a true vanilla taste to it, unlike white or yellow cake. As a self confessed "choco-holic", I have chocolate cake recipes to die for, but an amazing vanilla cake proved to be rather elusive so I was thrilled when this new recipe worked out so well!

The frosting both inside and out was a rich vanilla buttercream, making this a supreme vanilla cake. The only drawback is that because of it's airy texture, it doesn't carve well, so I had to keep most of this 4-layer cake intact. All the accents on the frog princess were from rolled fondant mixed with various food coloring gels, with a little food coloring pen for the eyes and diamond-shaped sugar decorations for the tiara.

The second cake was also a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting, but on a much smaller scale. It was just a lot of fun to put a bunch of hopping frogs and flowers (with my favorite decorating item- LUSTER DUST!) around the sides with whimsical yellow and green fondant decorations across the bottom. I couldn't resist putting "Hoppy Birthday" at the top!

*Cute Bunny Cakes*

Mini-Bunny Cakes: Yellow cake with food coloring, sugar glaze coating decorated with gum drops, hard candy decorations (found in baking aisle) and green YoGos Rollers

Hoppy Easter! Now that there were more little ones in our family, I thought it would be fun to dress up this year's Easter dessert and have some fun with it. Besides, the chocolate covered bunny from last Easter (see Post-April 2008) was going to be very hard to top, so when all else fails, go cute! And to up the cuteness, I made each batch of bunny cakes different colors, just like Easter eggs! This added more fun to dessert because you couldn't tell what color your bunny was until you took the first bite. My family was convinced that the colors were also different flavors and I spent most of the evening trying to get them to understand that the color was not flavor related. My family is a riot!

The eyes and noses were those little round sugar decorations that you can get at the store in the baking aisle, ears were made from flattened gum drops (boy was that ever a sticky mess) and the "bow ties" were a striped fruit roll-up type snack. To get each bunny's refinements to stick, I drizzled a sugar glaze over each one. Funny thing was, after they got their sweet coating, they looked just like glazed donuts! They were the cutest bunny donuts we ever had for Easter!

*Candy Cane Lane*

Crazy Candy Cane Cake: Yellow bundt cake with red center layer, white candy drizzle and candy canes

This was just a cake (well, actually I made 5 of them) I whipped up for my former students and colleagues for Christmas 2007. Bundt pans make such great shapes, and now more than ever with the variety of whimsical shapes coming from NordicWare these days. But I went "old school" using the traditional shape...with a twist-a peppermint twist!

After watching my mom over the past 25+ years make her cinnamon swirl cake for Christmas morning, I thought, why not mix up a yellow cake by adding food coloring? So I separated 1 cup of the prepared batter, added red food coloring, alternated layers in the pan, brushed the finished cake with a little peppermint extract and shoved about 3 dozen candy canes in the hole in the middle of the cake! Ta-Da...it's Crazy Candy Cane Cake!

*Happy Holidays...From the Kitchen*

Holiday Cookie Party:

Stained Glass Cookies-sugar cookies cut with a matching open "window" and filled with crushed Jolly Ranchers and peppermint candies

Oatmeal Kiss Surprise Cookie-Oatmeal cookie dough with "surprise" Hershey's Kiss/Hug tucked inside and rolled in decorative sugars

Gingerbread-Pre-baked gingerbread cookies for decorating with royal icing and a multitude of candy decorations and sprinkles to choose from!

Although there weren't any pictures I could post here for the Thanksgiving Feast project with a group of 5th Grade Girl Scouts, it's a day none of us will forget! In order for the girls to fulfill their requirements for their nutrition unit, I planned opportunities for them to make healthy fruit smoothies, grilled veggies, homemade dinner rolls from scratch, mini pumpkin muffins (shaped like little pumpkins!) and a frozen yogurt pie for dessert. We also went over all the "Rules of the Kitchen", including egg safety, cooking temperatures for various meets and safety tips for using knives, ovens and stovetops. After all the food was ready, we set the table, complete with a centerpiece using a runner with quotes for giving thanks written with fabric pens. I left the pens out so they could add their own Thankful Things to our centerpiece. We lit the candles, said "grace" and the girls feasted on all their hard work-and the baked chickens I bought from the store.

I had another opportunity to work with a younger group of Girl Scouts, the 2nd Grade Brownies, for a Christmas Cookie Extravaganza in December. The troop moms and I decided upon 3 hands-on cookie recipes that were fairly easy and really unique; Stained Glass Cookies, Oatmeal Kiss Surprise Cookies, and Gingerbread (because you can't have Christmas cookies without Gingerbread!) I pre-made each of the doughs, pre-cut the Stained Glass and pre-baked the Gingerbread and placed them on trays so they would be ready to go for each group as we cycled through the stations. In case anyone whipped through their station lighning fast, we had a cute Gingerbread Kid Christmas tree decoration craft station and another table set up for them to decorate their take home box with some foam Gingerbread House stickers.

The girls did an amazing job with the cookies, each tray was as unique as they are. But the best part was seeing their anticipation and then excitement once their masterpieces came out of the oven. And the smell......mmmmmmmm! The whole house was alive with Christmas Spirit! Not only did they go home with a box of homemade goodies to share with family and friends, they left with a lot of great memories, too!

*All-Star Cookie*

All-Star Cookie: 12-inch chocolate chip cookie with red, white, blue and green frosting

These enormous pizza-sized cookies were a blast to make! Thank goodness I paid attention in math class or designing the soccer pattern would have taken me all day-whew! But who doesn't love the idea of a humongous cookie as a birthday cake? The small star tip I used to pipe the red and blue frosting added an "All-Star" touch to this cookie cake. This is a unique alternative to a typical birthday cake, especially for those who don't want a cake dripping in frosting, but still want something super yummy!

Goooooooaaaaaaaalllllllll!!!!!!!!