Bad Piggies Birthday

Ugh. I'm like the worst blogger ever.

So my son had a birthday... nearly a month ago. And now y'all get to hear about it. Hopefully you're one of the lucky ones and saw this on Facebook... or not and you don't really care if you see my son's spectacular birthday cupcakes in a timely matter. Either way, you get what you get. But without any further ado...

Now I can't remember if I shared last year's birthday cake, but the theme last year was Angry Birds. Here is a look at last year's cake in case I didn't post it.

We have graduated this year to Bad Piggies. Something of an obsession, I guess. He really doesn't play that much of either, but he likes the characters enough, I suppose. Bad Piggies was an incredibly fun birthday theme. You get to build these wonderful vehicle contraptions to complete the brief obstacle course. And there are all these crazy piggies.

 

For the game, we picked up a bunch of red helium balloons and some dollar store paper treat boxes. We put a Bad Piggy (from our Angry Birds set) inside the box, tied a couple balloons to the box and swatted it around the main floor. When they got to the end, the kids got a yellow card-stock card filled with candy & a balloon. 

I was up very late the night before his party making the piggies, which were lots of fun to make. When my husband got home from being out (pretty late himself), he said, "You're still up???" to which I replied, "Don't tell me what time it is. I don't know and I feel fine and I still have more work to do." It was past 3 AM before I got to bed. Unfortunately I was a little on the grumpy side for the party, but thankfully the kids didn't require a lot of my attention. The whole thing made me want to re-think the way we do birthday parties, though.

But not the cake.

Occasions for Cupcakes

I know some of you are thinking, "I really want to try some of those cupcakes, but there are no birthdays coming up soon, so what kind of occasion is good for cupcakes?" You're not alone. People ask these things all the time. There was a study.

So, first, there's the obvious: birthdays.

Chocolate cupcake topped with vanilla buttercream and marshmallow fondant

And cupcakes aren't just for kid birthday parties, there are plenty of yummy grown up options, too: perfect for your spouse or your co-worker or your boss.

Salted caramel filled chocolate cupcake with whipped buttercream and caramel drizzle

Other obvious occasions are bridal showers and weddings.

Chocolate ganache-filled chocolate cupcakes with whipped buttercream and sugar pearls

Here's where it gets fun, though. There are many unconventional opportunities to celebrate with cupcakes:

Returning home from military service

Caramel-filled chocolate cupcakes with three-toned vanilla buttercream

Becoming Canadian! Canada Day! Valentine's Day!

Chocolate cupcakes with vanilla whipped buttercream & sugar sprinkles

"New job in the oil sands" or "Home from Fort Mac"!

Vanilla oreo cupcakes topped with stabilized whipped cream, oreo cookie & crumbs

Staff parties. Potlucks. Graduations.

Chocolate chip cookie dough-filled chocolate cupcakes topped with whipped buttercream

Christmas parties. Halloween parties.

Gingerbread cupcakes topped with whipped vanilla buttercream & gingerbread boy

Now that we've got the party started with unconventional cupcake occasions, what's your occasion?  Who needs a special occasion for this beauty?

Caramel filled chocolate cupcake topped with salted caramel Swiss meringue buttercream & Snickers

Beauty

The following cupcakes were inspired by Beauty & the Beast, made for a bridal shower a few weeks ago. They were chocolate ganache filled chocolate cupcakes topped with a vanilla whipped buttercream and sugar pearls.

In other sort of unrelated news, I can now accept credit card payments in person! I opened up this little beauty that came in the mail today.

It allows me to process credit card payments on my iPhone! So, that will be fun! I'm running a little promotion for the next 30 days... order cupcakes and pay with your MasterCard or Visa and I will fill your cupcakes for free! Free filling! (Bulk orders are excluded from this promotion). That's like $6.00 off for a dozen standard cupcakes. Take a look at my prices page for more detail. Contact me to order. 

Cupcakes!

So, I suppose I just let the last year and a half slip by without doing anything over here, huh? Sorry about that. Forgive me? I'd like to do a better job of working up my side business, so I should probably plug in on the old blog and figure out what happened to my Artfire link. I deleted the sidebar link today, but it hadn't been working for a while and I never took the time to look into what had gone wrong. I feel like I've squandered a bit of time and money with my ArtFire subscription, since I haven't been taking full advantage of it.

Why not put a cupcake picture in the middle of a post?

I've been thinking a fair bit about why I haven't gotten more stuff done in the last couple years,** since I feel pretty incredibly lazy knowing all the things I should get done and then I add my Pinterest obsession to the mix and there's a million more things that I want to do and be and, well, it can leave a person feeling kind of down about themselves. I'm not usually a down about myself kind of person, but I certainly feel like I've been lacking motivation and follow through and I want to get to the bottom of it so I can find the ladder and climb out of whatever pit of procrastination I've fallen into. I've traced it to a few things: two years ago we moved from a 3 bedroom, 1050 sq ft condo into a 5 bedroom, 1600 sq ft 80 year old house which needs a fair bit of work, with very little know-how and very little extra money. Two years ago, I gave birth to our third child: a wonderful lot of laughter and a bit of chaos. And it all seems to come down to one word: overwhelmed. And it's debilitating. And paralyzing.


** I know many of you think that I'm some kind of superwoman who gets loads of shit done and has it all together. And to be fair to myself, in the last two years we moved, had a new baby, raised that baby to be a happy and healthy two year old (on top of parenting the five year old and the seven year old), replaced our kitchen ceiling, painted all but a few rooms of the house, put in a raised vegetable garden. I also did P90X twice and lost 42 lbs, which means I'm down to pre-wedding weight. But there are also many afternoons and nights where I think I should be doing something... getting my basement organized, painting and organizing the craft room, decorating my house properly, organizing the rest of my house properly (I still feel like I haven't fully moved in on some days!) and I just sit there with no get up and go.


And sometimes I think that perhaps I'm afraid of failure so I don't push myself to succeed. I'm afraid that my results will never look like the cute pictures on Pinterest and I'll be disappointed in all the effort that I expended to get to the failed result. And when I face the reality of these fears, I'm saddened at myself because it's kind of new to me to be so afraid to fail, or at least to be aware of the fear and for it to paralyze me like this. But the overwhelmed feeling is contributing to the fear because I feel like there's so much to do that I can't possibly get it all done, so why even start?

So I need to do something. I'm not sure if this is the right place to start, but waiting for myself to get the motivation and energy to get the craft room to a beautiful and work-able place hasn't happened either, so maybe I have to work backwards. So I agreed to make some cupcakes for the dessert auction portion of the annual banquet at the university I work at: The King's University College. And I took it on as a little bit of a promotion challenge. I knew deep down that not many people would take my business cards and it probably wouldn't result in much new business. But my cupcakes went for $105! For one dozen Salted Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes (oh! they were sooooo delicious!). And one person liked my Facebook page. That was enough encouragement for me to get going on doing a better job of this business.

I decided to work on my business whenever my husband is out doing comedy (more on that later, perhaps), so that'll give me at least once or twice a week, which is more than I was doing before! Bit by bit.

Crafty Birthday

In March, we had a birthday. Two actually. Mine and my daughter's. Mine totally gets overshadowed by the child's. I am totally okay with this. I made cupcakes to send to school on her actual birthday. They were strawberry cupcakes made with this Martha Stewart recipe. Honestly, I've been a bit underwhelmed by Martha's cake recipes. I made a perfect white cake (or something like that) from her site, too. And it was kind of dry. I really like that the ingredients called for in both the cake and the icing were simple, real ingredients, so that's nice. No food coloring and no artificial flavours.

While I have a this great cupcake icing kit from Bake it Pretty, with a number of large, fancy tips, the recipe didn't make enough icing for me to frost them all cupcake-shop fancy. I still need to make some cupcakes with that kit. Personally, I prefer a lot less frosting on my cupcakes and I like the homemade look of just frosting them with a spatula and dipping them in sprinkles.

Last year, I made a 3 shirt for my son's birthday. My husband insisted I put the large 3 on the back of the shirt, since jerseys don't have the numbers on the front. Against my better judgment ("It's not a jersey..."), I complied and my son has insisted on wearing it backward from day one. Funny.

I made a six shirt for Zoe. Pink pink pink. She loves pink. That six is sparkly fabric paint. I used the freezer paper stencil technique to make the six. So easy peasy. I also recently discovered in a different t-shirt embellishment project that using freezer paper as a stabilizer for the jersey knit fabric is super helpful. I could draw on the paper side and then cut the paper and the fabric at the same time instead of fussing with slippery fabric.

So, I sent my birthday girl to her favorite place in the world (school) with 30 cupcakes to share with her classmates and teachers with strict instructions not to return with any leftover cupcakes (remember how I lost 25 lbs this year?). She wasn't feeling great. I knew she wasn't feeling great, but she hadn't vomited and she wanted to go to school. On her birthday. She gets a birthday crown. She hadn't talked about anything else since January. This kid rarely gets sick. And when she does, she can time it to Thursdays (no school) and weekends. She just got her days off (her birthday was on a Wednesday).
By 10 o'clock I'd received a phone call from the school saying she was laying in the infirmary, having thrown up. Of course. So, I picked her up and she spent the rest of the morning laying on the couch at our friend's place while I took her brother to the paediatrician.

She spent the rest of the day at home, napping a little, but mostly being okay and feeling a little sad. We made pizza for supper.

The teacher saved the cupcakes until Friday (3 day old cupcakes...mmmm) and she got to celebrate with her class then.

Then we had her home party on Sunday. It was her request. And it worked out rather well because she invited her grandparents and as it turned out, my mom could make it on Sunday. She requested a Barbie cake. I looked for a picture of barbie that was mostly face, so she could have nice big eyes so she wouldn't look scary and ugly in buttercream, but alas, there were no such pictures to be found in Internet land. When Zoe announced Barbie was beautiful, that's when I knew to stop fussing with her eyes and just let it go. My cake decorating mantra: "You are working in a medium that is meant to be eaten."

She is kind of ugly though.

Hamburger & Fries for cake

This is a re-post from my personal blog, Containers and Compartments. This was for my son, S's second birthday. Instead of making a cake, I made a bunch of hamburgers and french fries, since he's such a fast food loving kid (not really). I got the idea from this post from Bakerella.

Okay, so we didn't forgo cake altogether! It's a brownie cupcake hamburger and sugar cookie french fries! So fun and so tasty (though I found the hamburger to be a little too sweet for my taste).

Duncan Hines yellow cake cupcakes, made a little on the short side. I got 35 cupcakes out of one mix.


Orangey-yellow marshmallow fondant... perfect processed cheese colour!


Tomato red marshmallow fondant for ripe red tomatoes.


Vanilla pudding... mayonnaise.

Brownies.... for the hamburger patties. To stretch my batter a bit, I added 1/2 cup of homemade applesauce instead of increasing the butter, and increased the dry ingredients by 1/3 except the sugar (I figured 3 cups was quite enough). Instead of cracking and falling like they usually do, they were even and fluffy, a little more cake-y, but tasty and beautiful looking.

The "cheese" rolled out and cut for hamburgers. I used a ruler (to make them square) and a pizza cutter and did my best to cut in straight lines. But it didn't matter that much.

The "tomatoes" rolled and cut. I used a biscuit cutter for these and the brownie "hamburgers."

All the ingredients ready for assembly. The bowl is full of the brownies. I squished each one of them before assembling. They were too tall otherwise. The squishing made them a little less perfectly round, which added to the authentic look.

"Ketchup" "Mustard" and Coconut "Lettuce"

Hamburgers assembed.

D taste-testing.


Hamburgers and fries assembled for our friends at the Legislature Grounds.



Delicious! And totally fun!