Merry Christmas!

Just before I left to go out of town I made the most adorable Christmas-themed cake pops.  I made them the evening before we left town and the pictures have been trapped on my laptop for a week, just waiting to be posted in cyberspace.  The order was simple, 30 cake pops, Christmas themed, arranged.  I found the most adorable little box at Hobby Lobby (aka, my new favorite place to spend my money!) on sale for 60 percent off, scoured the internet for some ideas and voila!  A Christmas basket was born.  Here are the pictures of the arrangement followed by the individual pops.  LOVE!

I'll be working on a New Year's basket tomorrow, so stay tuned for those pictures.  I will be trying something new with them-wish me luck!  Merry Christmas!

Cake Pops and Christmas

This has been a crazy couple of weeks; seems everyone is giving cake pops for Christmas this year.  This week alone I made 184 cake pops.  Nothing as spectacular as the penguins from last week, but still cute.  Here are the pictures.

A really "cool" party

This week I kept myself busy making things for a one-year old's birthday party.  The party had a penguin theme.  Here is the invitation:

Cute right?  My friend asked for cupcakes, cake pops, and a smash cake.  She wanted penguin cake pops, which provided a challenge since it is impossible to find black candy melts this time of year.  Apparently, they are only available around halloween.  I was able to get some guidance from a specialty baking shop and found some black candy coloring.  This was my first attempt at coloring chocolate, but it turned out great!  I was worried that the food coloring might change the flavor of the chocolate, and I think it did a little, but they still tasted great.

I made a couple extra pops, so I used one to top the smash cake, I just made him a little hat to match the invitation.  The tree is a fondant "cone" with buttercream foliage.

The cupcakes are just a basic buttercream, with these cute little snowflake sprinkles I found.  The large snowflake is royal icing.  I'm really proud of my piping, it is really improving!

I made a few different snowflake shapes and because I couldn't decide which were my favorites, I decided to use them all.  I think they turned out great!

Here's to Eva, I hope your party is really "cool!"

Vintage Rudolph Cookies

A friend of mine is obsessed with party planning.  She spends her evenings searching party blogs and planning her daughters' birthday parties.  I have to admit, the parties she puts together for her kids are nothing short of amazing; I wish I had her dedication and know-how.  


This year for her oldest daughter's party, she is doing a vintage rudolph theme.  She asked me to make her some rudolph cookies and some "rudolph nose" cake pops, which are just plain red cake pops.  The cake pops were nothing special, but the cookies were another story.  She ordered a printable collection from The TomKat Studio called the "Vintage Rudolph collection."  Are you familiar with this blog?  She has the most amazing graphics, definitely worth checking out!  I have been wanting to try to do some edible image cookies so I had her send me the graphics.  I had them printed and then I adhered them to the cookies.  They turned out better than I could have imagined.  Here is the picture.  

I hope they taste as good as they look!  Happy birthday Emma!

Chloe Kardashian vs. the Viola

This week was a C-R-A-Z-Y one for baking.  I made 84 cupcakes, 60 cake pops, 1 cake, and 24 cookies all for other people.  As you can probably imagine, by Thursday night, my kitchen looked like a bomb filled with flour and sugar had gone off.  I think just about every bowl I own was dirty!  I took some pictures of the cake pops and the cake to share with you all.  A friend of mine's son was having a birthday. He plays the viola and she asked if I could make a viola cake for him.  I don't know anything about Violas, but thankfully, the facebook community helped me out with a very amusing Kardashian reference, which put everything into perspective for me.  After that conversation, I did some actual research and I came up with this:

She also asked for some cake pops to go with the cake.  These turned out really cute!

Not much going on this week, an order of cake pops for the winner of my giveaway, and then a little holiday called, Thanksgiving!  We will be visiting family this year, so I don't think I will be doing any baking, but if anything changes, I will be sure to post some pictures!  All the best to you and yours for the holiday!

Hope and Cookie Stencils

A friend of mine is organizing an event to raise money for her relay for life team, Jim's Flyers.  Michele is so dedicated to raising money for Cancer research; she lost her father to Cancer a few years ago.  It is inspiring to watch Michele as she raises money throughout the year for her team.  When I did relay for life I sent an e-mail out to my family and hoped for donations.  Jim's Flyers does so many fundraising events; last year they raised over 3000 dollars at a yard sale, an impressive feat considering I made about 30 dollars on my last yard sale.  This year, Michele organized an event called the HOPE Bazaar.  She has about 20 vendors bringing their merchandise to the fire hall today and a portion of their sales goes to her relay team.  I am unable to attend the bazaar because of a JMU football game (priorities!) so I offered to donate some cookies to the cause.  


The emblem for the Bazaar was a butterfly so I searched the web and found these amazing cookies stencils!  Have you ever used cookie stencils before?  Me neither.  Basically it is a stencil that you lay over your cookie then you use royal icing to drag the design over the cookie.  There was definitely a learning curve with these.  You couldn't put too much pressure on the stencil or the cookie would break.  If you didn't put enough pressure on the stencil it would slide.  If you used too much icing it pressed under the stencil.  If you didn't use enough icing it wouldn't fill the stencil.  Eventually, I got the hang of it.  The cookie with the icing wasn't quite large enough to use the stencil with the spread wings, so I had to use the smaller stencil.  Not exactly what I wanted, but I think they turned out really cute.  (I should mention that I tried a couple of techniques on these cookies.  Before I tried the stencil with the royal icing, I tried a technique I saw on the internet to "air brush" the cookies without an airbrush.  I most definitely won't be doing that again.  It didn't work for me and the effect was NOT what I wanted.)


Here is the final result.

After I finished the purple cookies, I tried my stencil on a plain cookie.  Much easier to do, and I'm not sure which effect I like more.  I think I might like the plain cookie a little more.  They are so simple but there is something beautiful about them.  I'm going to have to play with the stencils a little more.  What do you guys think? 

Good luck today, Michele!  I hope you raise tons of money for your relay team and that people like the cookies!  By the way, if you are reading my blog, I would love to know what you think.  Leave me some love, folks!

Football and Halloween!

This was a busy week for cake pops.  One of my wonderful Physical Therapists asked me to do some footballs for her daughter's football party on Sunday.  Her daughter is an Eagle's fan, so my husband was against this from the start, but in the words of the great Joe Fox (You've Got Mail, anyone?) "It's not personal, it's business."  I hand formed the football shapes, dipped them in chocolate and then piped on the stitching with white chocolate.  Here is how they turned out:

This week was also my oldest's Halloween Party at school, and I wanted do something special for him.  He is a huge fan of cake pops and I saw these on the cover of a magazine and I figured I could do them for him.  They were a huge hit!

The mummies were my favorite!

The pumpkins were cute too, but a lot of work because my markers stopped working and I had to paint on the faces with chocolate and a paint brush!

The next couple of weeks are going to be busy too.  I've got 2 cake pop orders coming up and then our last home game at JMU the following weekend.  I'm thinking I might mix up my JMU cake pops and do some footballs with the purple and gold pops.  Stay tuned...