Friday, February 22, 2013

Cole's Wild Safari 3rd Birthday


Every year so far I have had the pleasure of making Cole's birthday cake! You may remember his 2nd birthday and his 1st birthday. It is so cool to watch my clients grow each year. This year Cole wanted an animal safari party and specifically requested an elephant cake.

For the cake we wanted to keep the elephant cute and more like a cartoon than realistic. I love the way he turned out and he was super fun to make. Cole's mom Amber told me that Cole absolutely loved his cake which makes all the hard work worth it.

Of course, with such a cute little elephant we had to make some really cute animal cupcake friends too.
We decided on zebras, lions, elephants, and tigers. I think the little lions are my favorite!
Amber always out does herself for Cole's parties with fun games and activities for the kids!



I hope you had a very Happy Birthday Cole and, I'm glad I got to be a part of it.

Lastly, congratulations to Amber and Allen who are expecting another little boy very soon. Best wishes to your growing family!

These boy party ideas were also featured on Spaceships and Laser Beams.

- See more at: http://spaceshipsandlaserbeams.com/blog/2013/03/party-central/boy-party-ideas-add-yours-03-12-13#sthash.bzuLseO1.dpuf

Friday, February 8, 2013

Secret Agent Party Tutorial

Hi guys so for those of you that don't know I will be guest blogging over on Spaceships and Laser beams and could not be more excited! Spaceships and Laser beams is a blog all about the boys, so they feature only boy related parties. They also sell items to create your own party which, is awesome. So I am going to be giving ideas about how to throw themed parties. My first party was a detective/ secret agent party and, I gave a ton of great ideas for games, food and decor so be sure to go over there and check it out. For each post I will be showing a tutorial on how to create one themed item for the party. So I wanted to share just the tutorial part here on my blog. Hope you enjoy!

So, I am going to be showing you how to make the crime scene cookies for the party. First off you will need to bake some round and oval sugar cookies. You will need more round cookies than oval so keep that in mind. I don’t like to outline my cookies so my royal icing is a little bit thinner. I use a “flood” consistency for all of my cookies. Getting the right consistency for your cookies can be a bit tricky however, once you play with it a little bit you should be able to get a good icing consistency. If you realize your icing is too thick then you can thin it a bit with water. If it is to thin then you can thicken it a bit with powdered sugar.
  

You will need to divide your royal icing up to add color. These cookies are great for beginners because they only require three different colors white, black, and yellow. You will need much more white and black than yellow. I used a Wilton tip 2 for all of the decorating tips however; you may want to use a Wilton tip 3 when you are flooding your cookies.   

Here is a little tip I like to put all of my decorating bags in a glass with a moisten paper towel at the bottom to hold all my decorating bags. This makes for easy access when decorating and also keeps the tips of my icing bags moist so that my royal icing doesn’t crust.
 

So after you have all of your icing colors made up you can start decorating the cookies. You will want to flood two round cookies with black icing, one round cookie with white icing, and one oval cookie with white icing. Then let the icing set-up and dry for at least 30 minutes before moving to the next step (time may vary depending on the humidity in the air). 

So first up we will complete the fingerprint cookie. I used a Wilton tip 2 with the black icing to complete this cookies however, if you find that the icing is too runny you might want to use a smaller tip like a Wilton tip 1. It is ok if some of the lines in the fingerprint touch but you don’t want them to all blend together. I suggest pulling up a picture of a fingerprint and then just start adding lines until the fingerprint is complete.      

Next up, add footprints to a round white flooded cookie. The only trick to this is to make sure one foot is a right foot and one is a left foot. You can also place one foot in front of the other to make them appear to be walking.

Next up is the body outline cookie. It is important to make sure your black icing is dry so that the black icing does not bleed into your freshly piped white icing. Again, this is a simple body outline so it does not have to be perfect.

The last cookie is a multi-step cookie but, is still super easy to execute. First, take your last round black iced cookie and add a yellow line across the cookie. Let this dry for at least 20 minutes before moving on to step 2.
Next add a second tapeline that intersects the first tapeline. You want to keep your lines as straight as possible. Let that dry for at least another 20 minutes before moving on.
The last step is to add the piped words across the yellow tapeline. I used a Wilton tip 1 to pipe the words on to the cookie. Don’t worry if you are not good at piping words you can use an edible marker to write the message on the cookie. If you are going to use the edible marker make sure you let the yellow icing dry almost completely beforehand.

So there you have it! Super cute crime scene cookies for your little ones party! Make sure you let all of the cookies dry overnight before handling them.
 
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and it helped to plan your future secret agent party! Be sure to go check out Spaceships and Laser beams to get all the details for the party! If you have any questions about how to make these or icing consistency feel free to ask!