The Little Blue Truck

I have been wanting to blog about this birthday party for quite a while! My friend SuAnne has a little boy named Hudson who LOVES the book The Little Blue Truck. SuAnne based his whole 1st birthday party on the book and everything turned out super cute. I loved making the cake(s), cookies and cake topper because I often read Landon the book (Hudson gave it to Landon for his birthday).
Here are some pics from sweet Hudson's birthday bash!

 

The cake was Butter Golden with buttercream and covered in fondant. The topper was actually made out of polymer clay, so it wasn't edible, but Hudson was able to keep it.

I love how the cookies turned out! I wrote about making cookie cutter for the truck shape in a previous post .

 

Here is SuAnne's beautiful tablescape!! It turned out so adorable.

 And finally here is the awesome picture prop! I drew the truck on some cardboard for SuAnne and she and her hubby painted it....great teamwork! Happy 1st Birthday Hudson!

Sarah and Josh's Wedding Cupcakes

A little over a month ago I make cupcakes for Sarah and Josh's wedding. Sarah's parents are our Sunday School leaders. Chris, Sarah's dad, made the awesome tree stands! I think they got the tree stumps from their backyard. They went great with the wedding decor. The cupcakes were red velvet with cream cheese frosting and triple chocolate with buttercream.  I also make a little white almond cake for the bride and groom to cut into.

How to make a cookie cutter

Here lately, I have had a ton of orders for cookies. I think cookies are starting to replace the cupcake fad. Personally, I am more of a cake person and always associate cookies with Christmas. I always loved decorating Christmas cookies, but have only recently started using royal icing and "flooding" my cookies. It's REALLY time consuming, but the results are awesome!

Unfortunately, cookie cutters are not that easy to find around these parts. Your basic shapes are, but sometimes you even have to search for those. I looked into ordering some online, but the shipping for one cookie cutter was more than the cutter itself! Anyways, I had made a couple of fondant cutters a few years back and decided to google a way to make cookie cutters. I found a YouTube video of a girl who made them out of the disposable foil pans. I already had a few of them at home that I was supposed to use for a craft project so I didn't even need to leave the house to go get supplies :) Here is a little tutorial on how I made them:

Here are the foil cookie sheets. I'm not even sure what the real name is for them. You can cut them with craft scissors. They are heavier than foil, but not too heavy to cut.

I used a ruler to bend the foil over about an inch. I folded it twice so that my cutter had three layers of foil.

Here is the cutter formed into an circle and the ends are taped together with scotch tape ( I know, kinda ghetto). I think you can use a special glue, but I was in a hurry and knew that I probably wouldn't need these to last me a lifetime.

Here is the fun part. I did a very quick sketch of the truck shape that I wanted and then formed the circle of foil into the shape and taped it together. One thing to keep in mind is that these cookie cutters are flimsy. They are not as sturdy as the ones that you buy. If the shapes I needed were easy to find, I wasn't so short on time, and they didn't cost an arm and a leg to ship, I would choose to buy them. Bought ones are easier to use and they have a more clean cut.

Here are three shapes I made for recent orders. One benefit of making them is that you can make them big. I feel like if I am selling cookies I want them to be BIG and worth the cost.

 

As you can tell, the edges aren't all that smooth but you can't tell once they are decorated. Here they are all "prettified"...

 

A Rainy Day

I love how this order turned out! This customer threw a first birthday for her grandson who traveled all the way here from England, hence the wellies and raincloud theme. Here is the invitation she used (from etsy) and the inspiration I had for the smash cakes and cookies:

WHALEcome Baby

It's about time I get back into the blogging world. I have been up to my eyeballs in orders and have decided to put the blogging on backorder for a while. I am so sad because I lost a lot of pictures because my memory card broke so I won't be able to blog about all the recent orders. Here is a cake I did for a friend about a month ago and she has since had her little baby boy. My friend threw her this awesome shower and asked me to make a onesie cake with a whale on it. Here is the "tablescape" she did all by herself. Way to go!

The cake was white almond with buttercream icing and fondant details.