Advent Activities: Days 3, 4 & 5

Continuing on with Advent today, our last three activities were fun for both the kids and me. It's a little work to put these things together, but the kids enjoy them so much and I love making opportunities for them to enjoy all the fun of the season instead of it all just being about gifts.

As I mentioned last time, Monday's activity was to make cinnamon dough ornaments. They turned out great, though I think I baked them too long so they aren't smelling as cinnamon-y as I'd hoped.

Cinnamon dough ornament making

Ornaments baked and ready to hang

Tuesday's activity was writing letters to Santa. I printed special stationery for the kids to compose their letters and we even got them in the mail yesterday morning on the way to school. You have no idea how much that makes me feel like a supermom. 

Last night's activity was making paper snowflakes, which I mostly let the older two children work on while I put Isaac to bed. When I finished that up, I joined them to make a couple myself. I bought double-sided tape at the dollar store the other day, which was the perfect adhesive for hanging our snowflakes on our patio doors.

This afternoon's activity is to decorate gingerbread houses, which made yesterday afternoon's activity for me making royal icing and assembling the gingerbread houses so they are all ready to go after lunch tomorrow. I bought these little houses at Bulk Barn. They were very basic: just the houses and cheap piping bags that had holes in them (well, the only one I tried to use had a hole in it and since I have plenty of my own piping bags, I abandoned the kit bags). I always think the kits come with too little decorating candy and too little icing, so I chose my own candy from the vast selection at Bulk Barn and I have a much better assortment than the kit houses! Fun fun fun!

I have also been playing with my camera a little more this week. I am proud to say after reading through a few helpful blog posts and watching a couple YouTube videos, my camera is currently in manual mode! Even with the tough evening indoor lighting, I am taking pictures without a flash and managing to balance exposure okay. Before I would shoot in auto - no flash mode with my fixed 50mm lens, which for the most part worked okay, but I think my pictures are looking just a bit better than they were a couple weeks ago! Yay. Took me long enough.

More Cakes

So there were some more birthdays and other cake-worthy events in the last 10 months, too. I guess I didn't make cakes for all of them, but I made some cakes. I may have said this before, but I make cakes for the kids of our good friends and co-church planters. This Star Wars Lego cake was requested for the January birthday. (Star Wars Lego cake? Nothin' like a simple cake, eh? Boys....)

The techniques used here: buttercream transfer (YouTube how to) and painting on buttercream and of course, basic piping. I printed out a coloring page that the birthday boy and my husband found on the internet. I filled in only the grey shape of the Imperial Walker for the buttercream transfer.  Then I painted on the buttercream transfer using a mixture of real vanilla & black icing paste for the detail.

For the sides, I just piped flat monochromatic lego-sized stripes and piped dots on the top of them for the Lego look. I saw this idea here. From what I can remember, it was a hit. I was in my first couple weeks of our diet & exercise program, so I passed on the cake and ate a protein bar instead. I was told it tasted good.

The sister of a friend of mine commissioned me to make this monkey cake for her son's first birthday. It turned out okay. She looked through my Facebook cakes album and found the picture of Zoe's 2nd birthday cake, which I didn't think was one of my better cakes, but oh well, that's what she picked.

I'm always so nervous doing commissioned cakes. People tell me my cakes look professional, but I'm not so sure. I can tell the difference when I look through professional cake albums vs. my own. I'm not down in the dumps about this or searching for compliments, I'm just telling it like it is. I make nice cakes. Some are better than others. Most are better than these and I never make spelling mistakes, though occasionally I make a blunder and end up with a cake that unintentionally looks like boobs.

(It's supposed to be a purse, but it is kinda pathetic, even if it didn't look like boobs.)

Then there was a wedding. I wasn't really supposed to make a cake for this wedding. I'd thought of offering in advance, but the wedding date was only a few weeks after my due date, so I wasn't sure I would be feeling up to making a cake. But then we were visiting with the couple and while I know they're not big cake people (she's celiac & he doesn't really really care for cake), one of the reasons they opted for no cake was because it was expensive for something they didn't really care for. But everyone's grandma wants them to have a cake, if only for the opportunity to take pictures of them cutting it.

So, this was my first attempt at a gluten-free cake. I used this recipe and the bride told me it was delicious. I'll have to try it sometime. I didn't have leftover cake for me to try, so I was really hoping it was yummy.

For the roses, I made them out of fondant using this technique found on YouTube. Seriously people, I don't know how to do anything. I just Google it and figure it out. The beauty of the Internet is that everyone wants to be an expert so there are free instructions out there for just about everything. LOVE! I was pretty happy with this cake, though the seams were kind of obvious, but not if you take pictures from the right side!

Now, the final cake I haven't shared yet. Simon turned three the day after I began my 10 month blog hiatus. This was his cake. He loves basketball.

I was pretty pleased with the basketball colour I achieved for the fondant. Not always easy to get exactly what you're looking for. I used a bowl to make the shape and then used a lot of icing to make it more ball shaped and less bowl shaped underneath the fondant. It's round enough.

If you had a birthday in the last 10 months, Happy Birthday. If you have one coming up in the next 10 months and need a cake, let me know and we'll work something out.

Halloween Cookies

Last week, Z and I bought some Halloween cookie cutters. A bat, a pumpkin and a ghost. Today we made sugar cookies and icing and decorated some cookies. I was really happy with this recipe that I found on All Recipes. I once read a critique of All Recipes, which stated that the recipes used a lot of processed foods. Perhaps it is also full of casseroles with mushroom soup in them, but I find a lot of great recipes there, and this one is no exception. As the reviews all state, it makes an icing that will dry nice and shiny like a bakery cookie. That's totally what I was looking for: a nice smooth icing. My bats up there don't look all that smooth, but they would have looked a lot different with a buttercream icing. I didn't fuss a lot with the icing. I put some of the black icing in a ziploc bag and cut a tiny hole in the corner for the details, but that is it. Nothing fancy.

I managed to be fairly relaxed while making these with Z. I let her make a lot of her "moons" (circles) and so she and S decorated those with their icing. S (he's 2) got the white icing to prevent him from colouring our carpet orange or black. Basically, Z slathered 2.5 cookies with pink icing (she insisted I make pink) and ate the rest of her icing right out of the container. S iced and ate all at once.

If you're looking for a good sugar cookie dough recipe, I think the next time I make sugar cookies, I'm going to give this recipe a try. The recipe I have is good, but today I used non-hydrogenated margarine in place of the butter (I was out of butter) and I don't know, maybe I measured wrong or something, but the dough was WAY too soft and I ended up adding probably another 1/2 cup or more flour to make it manageable.

Happy Halloween!