A very special garden cake for a very special 90th Birthday!

 

My grandfather turned 90 this August, so my Mom brought the family together to celebrate this grand occasion. It's pretty remarkable to be 90 and in pretty good health, I'd imagine. So many birthdays gone past, so much life lived, so many generations you have as a legacy. This cake pictured above is for his life long love of gardening. So, in making this cake, I think I made up a version of my dream garden. I, as well as my Father and Grandfather have a love of gardening. While our yard may not have a big garden yet, my mind is filled with images of what that will some day look like. This cake garden is one of those images!

Happy Birthday Pop-Pop!

Birthday Cake Round up... of late

This is a roundup of different birthday cakes I've worked on these last couple of months!

1. My niece's 16th Birthday cake with random letters highlighted by her name in a contrasting color!

2. Spider-man cake for a 14 year old girl who is totally obsessed right now 

3. A bug themed cake for our neighbor's son! He really loved the worms in the dirt! Look closer and you'll see some ants in there too!

4. A golf themed cake

5. A Syracuse cake for a long time fan

Wedding Dress Bridal Shower Cake + Cupcakes

This is probably the most elaborate bridal shower cake I've ever done! I love how bold the cake sits up on the stand with the accent cupcakes around it. This was my first time making a 3d  wedding dress and I love how it turned out. The dress was made with two  4" cake pans plus I baked the top round layer in a small glass bowl so I wouldn't have to do a whole lot of carving! It held up really well and gave it the shape I was hoping for. I brushed the bottom of the dress in a fine layer of fine sanding sugar to give it a beaded look! Topped it off with a few rosettes and some white poppies!

Liam is 2

2 years

•  We celebrated this little one's 2nd birthday this July! Wow! Lots has happened since I posted here at his 1.5 year
• We spend a good deal of time taking "hikes" as liam likes to call our daily walks around the neighborhood, hanging out at the pool and playing with the hose or water table this summer. 
• Liam is my gardener! He couldn't be happier when he's outside with a shovel in one hand and a bucket in another. Other favorites include the wheelbarrow and dump truck. This weekend all he wanted to do at Nana's was pick green beans!
• Liam is starting to speak in small sentences, which has been really fun to converse with! He still gets a little confused and a says stuff like "eat the Momma" which is either a joke to him or he wants to eat with me. At least I hope he doesn't want to eat me ;)
• Liam has discovered his love for books! Our current favorites are pat the cat, the little engine that could, goodnight train, the little red hen and dragons love tacos.
• He sleeps with his "nunny" every night. It's his stuffed bunny! sometimes nunny comes along on adventures
• His favorite foods right now are bananas, eggs, cheese, bacon, smoothies, tacos and pizza! We're still working on finding his love for veggies again.
• Liam is really into trains, so we had a train filled birthday for him this year!
• He's a pretty easy going boy and even likes to clean up his toys if we sing his cleaning song!
• Liam loves to wear hats and more recently sunglasses because his eyes are extra sensitive to the sun
• He's already gotten his first kiss and friendship bracelet from girls. eek! He's a charmer. One day while at a local park he was playing with these two little girls. I look over and the little 2 year old girl grabs Liam's cheeks and plants a kiss right on his mouth! Liam didn't seem bothered by it. 
• He goes out of his way to say hi to everybody he meets, but in new situations still is quite shy! He really likes to observe older kids, but not necessarily participate.
• I love you more than I ever could have expected my big 2 year old! I can't wait to see how much you grow, learn, discover, master, adventure and create this next year!
  

A girl and her horse ( graduation cake)

 This is a graduation cake I did for a lovely high school graduate, Bailey! She LOVES riding and horses so we came up with this pasture themed horse cake for her special day! I also did grass topped cupcakes to go with!

This was my first time making a horse of any kind for a cake. This unicorn tutorial is what helped me out so much in getting all the little details of the horse, correct! I also did a caricature of Bailey in her western outfit!

progress

I just wanted to remember this photo, so that when the floor is all done and looking lovely, I remember all the hard work it took to get there! Jason ripped out the kitchen floor/ sub-floor ( pictured above ) and then put in a new sub-floor. In the next week or two we should have a new kitchen and laundry room floor!  We also removed the door between the two rooms and need to redo the door frame, but until we do I'm enjoying the exposed brick.

words on renovating

 I've been wanting to do an update on our renovations for some time now, but most of them are half or getting finished projects. And while that can get me down at times, I thought I'd suck up my pride and do a little house update, because who doesn't need a little comic relief from seeing my fridge wide open in my dinning room ( with three layers of peeling wallpaper that we wait to touch because we aren't at the dinning room phase of renovations yet) while my toddler colors and thinks we are crazy. Today we got everything out of the kitchen that touches the floor, so that Jason can rip it out and that we can finally get a new floor put in our kitchen/ laundry room (pictured below)

 kitchen floor that needs to get ripped up

 This is soon to be our powder room. We decided to keep the brick wall exposed to keep some of the rich charm of our old home.

 Dining room/ kitchen for the next couple of weeks?????

 These are some well written words that struck a cord with me as we are doing the same! A fantastic renovating blog that keeps me inspired! We are the "other" strategy all the way!

It seems to me that there are only a couple of general strategies to choose from when undertaking a major renovation. The first is to just bite the bullet and do it all at once, often before even moving in, usually with lots of assistance from trained professionals. Any walls that need to come down have the chance to come down, systems get upgraded in one comprehensive effort, and then everything gets put back together, painted, decorated, and BOOM…that’s it.
Then there’s the other strategy, whereby one chips away at things piecemeal for a matter of years, never with enough time or money, living endlessly in a state of chaos and destruction that hints only vaguely of progress. In an effort to avoid going completely insane, one might try to keep things contained to, say, a single room, only moving onto the next thing when that space feels more or less completed. -manhattan nest

Monster Inc. Cake + Cupcake

This was probably one of my favorite requests this year! Don't get me wrong, I love pretty much everything people throw my way as a cake decorator. I love a challenge, especially something I've never attempted before, but for some reason this cake just got me very excited to do what I do. This Monster's cake was a lot of firsts. I've never done a pixar character before, or baked a round cake (used to make Mike) so that was some good learning experiences. I've been working with a new fondant, one that tastes sooooooooo much better than the other I had used in the past. It tastes like marshmallows. While I love the new taste, it's a bit softer than I'm use to working with, so that brought about a whole new set of challenges. I've picked up a few tricks of the trade and things seem to be working out great! So here are a few more shots of Mike sitting on Sulley from Monsters!

  I also did a smash cupcake with a little Sulley.

From Scratch: Roasted Tomatoes ( Plus my favorite way to eat them)

From Scratch: A new series here on the blog! Ever since I got married and had my own kitchen to cook in, I've been interested in making things from scratch, that I would ordinarily buy. Don't get me wrong, I didn't grow up in an overly processed foods family, in fact, my Mom would refuse to buy certain things I begged for at the grocery store on Saturdays, saying oh I can make that for us. And she did! I've been trying to take that a step or two or three farther over the years and I now have an ever growing arsenal of my favorite recipes for things I would have normally bought before. So I'd like to share some of those here from time to time.

It's that time a year when cherry tomatoes are about to come in and take over our lives. I kid, well kinda. I actually made roasted tomatoes in the winter for the first time because cherry tomatoes are really the only edible looking/tasting tomatoes in the grocery store during the cooler months and this brought some cheer to my winter meals. But now that my tomato plant is full of little green cherry tomatoes it reminded me to share my favorite way to use them up!

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes ( spread over ricotta toast)

cherry tomatoes or other small varieties
oil
rosemary
salt + pepper

Toss these together on a rimmed cookie sheet or oven safe bake-ware. Roast at 425 for 20-30 minutes until they begin to pop and "deflate"! That's it! Now you can puree them into a lovely fresh tomato sauce, add them to a store bought tomato sauce for some added flavor, or spread them onto crusty bread with ricotta and a drizzle of good olive oil.

Ricotta Toast

Good crusty bread
whole milk ricotta ( it's the best, I'll never go back to part skim)
garlic
olive oil

Slice bread and arrange on a baking sheet. Slice a clove of garlic and rub on each toast. Bake until slightly crispy. Spread a generous spoonful of ricotta, topped with some slightly cooled roasted tomatoes and finish with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of sea salt. YUM!

Bumble Bee Baby Shower Cake + Cupcakes

 This has definitely been the year of the baby shower cake for Snacky French! That's just fine with me. I have certainly been able to play around with quite a few themes and ideas for each cake or cupcake order I've received! 

This hive and bumble bee cake was especially great to make! I love these bee invites! Their heart wings and honeycomb design ( on the back) were a great inspiration for my design. The cupcakes have a fondant hexagon on each cake to look like honeycomb. Topped with bees and their buzzing trail and a few flowers mixed in for variety! The hive came together nicely, especially with the addition of the "flying bees" hovering around the cake. It was my first time suspending anything above a cake, so I was delighted that it worked out, just how I was envisioned it.

 I also had the pleasure of being in attendance to this shower, since it was a relative, which made it that much sweeter!

                                                         ^^^  (a closer look at the bees) ^^^