Dinosaur Train!

I can't believe my little girl is 5 years old. Where has the time gone? She is such a sweet little girl, full of surprises and this cake was no exception. When I asked her what kind of cake she wanted a month ago, I expected her to respond with something like princesses, or butterflies, or fairies, but nope, she said loud and clear in her perfect little voice, "Dinosaurs!"
I suppose I should have expected as much - when we went to the zoo earlier this year, I bought her a green stuffed animal pteranodon, and it is now one of her favorites. And she loves to watch the show Dinosaur Train. And her favorite color is green, which many dinosaurs are.
Cecilia helped me design the cake - her input involved the colors of the flowers, and the grass border on the bottom. She must know that the grass tip is my favorite. I bought two little figurines to put on top, made one of my pretzel palm trees, and I was all set!
The cake itself is one of her favorites - chocolate with raspberry filling. She initially wanted strawberry, but when I caught a bad cold just a few days before her birthday, she was happy to compromise since I had raspberry filling on hand and making strawberry would mean a boring trip to the grocery store.

 

I also made cake pops for her to take to school before her birthday, on the last day of school before winter break since her birthday was on December 29th. I made them with strawberry cake, green chocolate coating and green sugar that I made myself with plain coarse sugar dyed green with food coloring. 

Happy Birthday Cecilia!

 

Monkeys!

After making mostly birthday cakes for the past few months, I was happy when my nephew Tom's wife Tasheena asked me if I could make a cake for her baby shower. I had made the groom's cake for their wedding, so suffice to say they are long-standing fans of my cake creations. I talked to her mom, and after a while we agreed on a super-cute design for the cake, and for some cupcakes that would look awesome with it.

I had initially wanted to make everything with banana cake, but since the mom-to-be has a food aversion to bananas, I decided to make the cake chocolate and the cupcakes banana. The cake was decorated with buttercream with fondant accents and a cute ball border that went along very well with the picture of a juggling monkey that was on the front of the baby shower invitations. Then I made a palm tree out of a fondant-covered pretzel, just like the ones I made for the topsy-turvy cake back in October. And in front of the tree, a cute little fondant monkey. Honestly, I love making these little creatures - it's so much fun. As I mentioned in my topsy-turvy cake post, it's like playing with playdoh. And who doesn't like playing with play-doh?

For the cupcakes, I had some help. My son's first reconciliation was the night before the shower, and then the morning of the shower I had an extra choir practice at church. I knew that if I tried to decorate all of them by myself, I wouldn't have enough time, so I called over my sister-in-law (and grandmother-to-be) Monica who brought over one of her sons, Raymond (who happens to be a big fan of anything having to do with cake decorating), and Tasheena's sisters Mari and Angaline, to help me decorate them. We had a lot of fun and got it done in a fraction of the time it would have taken for me to do it all myself.

Everything turned out so cute - and I hope everyone at the shower enjoyed them!