Holiday Monday = Family Fun Day

We enjoyed yesterday, Victoria Day, with a walk down to Jericho beach to look for bunnies and ducks, and then in the afternoon Z&M ventured out with just me and NO stroller for errands. We were successful in both sightings, we saw one tiny little brown bunny, and a lot of ducks. Zack & Maggie are getting really good at throwing bread to the ducks and even try to feed the red winged blackbirds now ;-) Z&M have gone on walks with me without the stroller, but we never venture too far away as I eventually end up having to carry them both. I can do it, but it is not fun. Anyway, yesterday they did really well. We did take a break at Jugo Juice, where they enjoyed their first commercial smoothie, and a break at Kidsbooks to play with the toys. By the time we made it to Young Brothers, our produce place, they were pretty much done with 'shopping' so we took a bus home and had an early dinner. It certainly was a special day!

Zack & Maggie's Second Birthday Party

Richard Scarry wrote a book in 1963 called "I am a bunny," with the main character being a cute little bunny named Nicholas. Zack & Maggie love this book, as do we, and we decided it should be the theme to their second birthday party. We hosted the party at The Barefit & Pregnant Studio, same venue as last year, where there would be a lot of space for kiddies to run around in a nice bright space. There were about 14 families there to help us celebrate the big day and I think everyone had a great time. We brought over a few toys, taped butcher paper to the floor and had crayons for colouring, and also brought some books. The drawing was a big hit and the remainder of the time was basically spent eating treats. We had cake, cupcakes, cake pops (a HUGE hit), cinnamon rolls, banana muffins, lemon loaf, veggies, fruit, cheese & crackers, and kiddie crackers & popcorn type treats. The party favours were sugar cookies with different Nicholas the bunny images on them. I wrapped them up with colour coordinated ribbon and added a "thank you for coming" tag, identical to the tags used for the cupcakes toppers. I had a lot of fun prepping for the party, and loved having "I am a bunny" to help coordinate everything. I would definitely do events like this for other people - give me a theme and let's see where it goes!

Train themed birthday party

On Thursday I finished an order for train cookies, train cupcake toppers, and a train birthday cake for a 4 year old's Birthday party. The mom of the 4 year old, Pamela, sampled some of my baking at a mutual friend's son's birthday party and was hooked :-) Pamela's son's birthday party was going to be hosted at a venue that had a train the kids could ride, so it just made sense to have all of the treats be train themed. Pamela drove all the way from PoCo to bring me the train cookie cutters (I did not have any) and we discussed the design and detail of the other treats as well. When she drove away I was confident and excited to get started. I had to lay out a calendar to work backwards from, to ensure enough time to bake/flood#1/flood#2/write for the cookies, bake/ice/decorate the cake and purchase the paper to then cut and paste the cupcake toppers together. The cake and the toppers were the easy part of the order, and a lot of fun. The cookies were fun too but a serious amount of work. Once the cookies were baked, they all needed to be outlined in black. The icing was thick and the amount of pressure needed to get it out of the bottle for 144 cookies took quite a toll on my little thumb.
I know, boo hoo for me....I learned though that the icing sugar should be sifted to eliminate any little 'chunks' of sugar that may clog the tip...this was the real problem as I think if I had sifted, then my thumb still might be a little sore, but not numb. After the cookies had time to dry, I flooded them with the red/yellow/blue, but leaving the windows empty.

These were flooded last so that the colours wouldn't bleed together. After these two rounds of flooding were finished and completely dry, I wrote on the cookies. Finally, the cookies were packaged in threes and tied with a cute little train track ribbon. The birthday was a shared event so blue ribbon was for the boy, yellow ribbon was for the girl and red ribbon was for friends of both.

I'm glad to report that the cake/cookies and toppers were a big hit! I created cupcake toppers for Zack & Maggie's birthday and will post about that soon - just waiting on photos.

Zack & Maggie's Garden

My babies, Zack & Maggie, turned 2 yesterday. We were trying to decide what to get them for their birthday and decided on letting them pick out their own plants for our balcony garden. This way they can watch it grow all summer long and be a part of the process. They LOVED the garden centre and had a ball picking out the plants. They were pretty enthusiastic during the planting process and yesterday thought it was pretty neat to water their plants :-)

Cake Pops

I have become a new FB fan of TomKat Studios and Kim, the woman who owns/runs this company, is very good at adding amazing posts to her page. I am inspired for Zack & Maggie's Birthday party, which is next Sunday (yikes!) and wanted to do a test run on a few of these ideas. I made a Paul Frank cake last weekend and had some leftover chocolate cake from carving it to shape. I saved this cake and the leftover buttercream icing to try out 'cake pops.' I finally had some time tonight to put them together. They are SUPER cute, a bit time consuming to make, and taste delicious. Really, how could cake and icing dipped in chocolate taste badly??
So, I started out with the cake, pulsed it to crumbs in the food processor and then added the buttercream to make a sort of pastey mixture (sorry, no photos of the mixture). Then I rolled them into balls of various sizes as I wasn't sure what size would be best. I rolled a bunch of tiny balls because I had the brilliant idea that these little cake balls could border a cake, but then realized at the chocolate dipping portion of the event that it was difficult to cover them in chocolate...too fussy for me.

Anyway, I froze the cake balls for about 20 minutes, then put the sticks into the pops.

I melted some milk chocolate and dipped the cake pops into it...needed a bit of help from the spatula, and then sprinkled them with colourful little sprinkles.


During the drying portion, some fell off their sticks and I hope this was because they were too large and not because this is a common theme of cake pops.

This first batch of cake pops are crude looking compared to those I've seen on the internet, but I am going to keep trying and stay positive.
Look for the blog about Zack & Maggie's Birthday sometime after the 16th to see how the 'real' ones turned out!

Grandma's baking

My Grandma Young is an amazing cook. I have many of her recipes and use a lot of the classics over and over again. Zack & Maggie have helped me make her scones, and actually asked to do so today but we didn't have time. Tonight after they fell asleep I was sitting on the couch watching tv and checking my email and I thought "why not" so I got up and whipped up a batch of Grandma's cinnamon rolls AND raisin scones. These are almost the same basic recipe and are tender and flaky and bring back strong memories of Seaforth and my grandparents...happy memories. I wish I could fly some of these treats home to my family in Ontario as I know they would all love a taste, especially my Grandma Young. She deserves to have someone else make the favourites for her, and I plan on doing so when we are home in the summer.

Dr.S Cookies

A woman I work out with at Barefit and Pregnant has twins as well that turned "1" this weekend. She asked if I could do cookies for the party, with the theme being "Dr.Seuss." I said yes right away and then set out to find a cookie cutter to help me make that well known cat and his friends turn into delicious cookies. I could not find a Dr.S character cookie cutter anywhere except online, and I was not willing to pay $10 US plus shipping for this. My backup idea was to use the edible ink printer Mike bought me for my birthday. I've been reading a lot of new websites and blogs lately and came across a step by step guide to creating amazing sugar cookies using this printer - http://www.sweetopia.net/2010/03/edible-ink-images-decorated-love-cookies/. The instructions were perfect and the cookies really turned out well. I am going to do something similar for Zack & Maggie's Birthday, which is in 15 days, but first have to clean out the printer head as the images were a bit striated.


First - a flooded sugar cookie in a colour almost the same as the edible ink image


A bowl full of clear corn syrup to act as the 'glue'


The almost finished product. We decided that they needed a border. The border was actually the time consuming portion of these cookies as I used a super small circle icing tip. Next time I will use a larger tip I think!