Bumble Bee Baby Shower

This past weekend I was buzzing around like a busy bee in my kitchen. My good friend Kelly who I have mentioned here on CIS before was hosting a baby shower, instead of being the guest of honor herself as you may remember here. The theme was bumble bees, adorable! I had never decorated anything with the bee theme before so immediately I started envisioning yellow & black, polka dots and of course little bees everywhere. Kelly requested cupcakes and cake balls/pops and then some sugar cookie onesies and baby bottles for the favors.

Drawing inspiration from polka dot ribbon and cupcake liners I added some dots to the yellow onesie cookies. My first instinct was to decorate the cookies with black stripes so they would more closely resemble a bee, but after trying this on one cookie it quickly reminded me too much of Charlie Brown...so I scratched that idea and proceeded with polka dots.

I hope you enjoy all the pictures of the bumble bee sweets...I got a little carried away BEE cause everything was so cute! I have some exciting news at the bottom of the post too that I can't wait to share with you!

The bee cupcake toppers were made from yellow fondant rolled into an oval with two slivered almonds poked into the sides. The stripes and eyes were piped on using black royal icing. I used a round tip 1A to pipe on 4 swirls of icing to resemble a bee hive.

Bumble bee cake pops inspired by Bakerella.

Now for the EXCITING NEWS!!!

I am going to be a monthly blog contributor to Half Baked. If you have never heard of Half Baked before and you are as big of a cake lover as me...well I don't know where you have been! Half Baked is seriously my go to blog for cake inspiration! It is filled with some of the most gorgeous and unique cakes I have ever seen. Carrie, the founder and editor of Half Baked is a cake designer herself and also features some of the most talented cake vendors in the industry. Whether a cake for a birthday, shower or wedding, no matter the occasion I am always blown away by the creative cakes and decorating techniques seen on Half Baked! This blog is truly one of my all time favorites, and one I have been following for almost two years now. I am so honored that Carrie has chosen me to be part of her blog. My new gig will involve creating monthly cupcake recipes and photos to share with all her readers, and I can't wait! I am looking forward to sharing my first cupcake flavor later this month, so stayed tuned!

Have a great week!

Early Arrival

What could be cuter than a batch of onesie, chick, bootie and bib sugar cookies...the newborn baby itself right? Well that is exactly what happened yesterday. The shower was held for my friend Andrea's sister, Allison in the early afternoon. Right afterward Allison was rushed to the hospital anticipating the early arrival of her little boy Preston. A few short hours later Preston had arrived almost 4 weeks early! Mom & baby are doing just fine though and I've already seen a picture and he is absolutely precious! Talk about a special delivery on the day of your baby shower!

Decorating baby shower cookies are always so much fun. Andrea sent me the link to the baby shower invite and I used the colors of pale blue, green and yellow for inspiration when coming up with the cookie designs. The invitation had a clothesline of onesies, bibs and booties and then a sweet little chick so I knew I wanted to translate each of those baby items into cookies.

I thought it would be a cute idea to include a few monogram "P" cookies as well using a scalloped cookie cutter.

I used my favorite sugar cookie recipe. The only change I made was substituting the vanilla and almond extracts with vanilla bean paste instead...YUM! I love those little black bits of vanilla bean that you can see in the cookie.

The little chicks were my favorite cookies to decorate. The invite had them with colored wings so I decided to mimic that in the cookie decorating, and I love how the blue and green add a pop of color to the yellow body.

Congratulations to the proud parents Allison and Bob to their newest addition little Preston!

Cute as a Button Pink & Gray Baby Shower

Can someone pinch me please! I am beyond excited to share with you that my Cute as a Button baby shower has been featured on the truly amazing Amy Atlas site today! Go check it out here! I have talked about Amy before here on my blog, and I cannot say it enough, her creativity, style and passion for all things sweet truly is an inspiration! She creates the most elegant, elaborate and fun dessert tables for all types of occasions!

So with my cousin Suzi being pregnant with her first baby, a little girl due on Christmas Eve, I knew I had to pull out all the stops and create an amazing shower for her! I had recently created some cute as a button cupcake skewers for my friend Kelly after she gave birth to her twin boys just a few months ago so I decided to take that idea and run with it.

First on the agenda was to come up with a color palette and create the invites. Since she was having a girl the obvious color choice was pink. I wanted the shower to feel a little more sophisticated so I decided gray would pair nicely with the pink. The whole idea behind the shower was to keep things clean, simple and homemade.

The invites were hand assembled with all materials being found at Michael's. The base of the invitation was a silver metallic stock that came with matching envelopes. A pink textured paper was placed on top of the silver and the main invite was printed on a white card stock. The invite was embellished with paper buttons using Martha Stewart's button punch.

My sister and cousin jumped on board to help me bake and decorate and we were able to pull of a super sweet dessert display! There were of course all sorts of yummies, from sugar cookies, pumpkin cupcake skewers and a yellow cake with a swiss meringue buttercream piped on as ruffles! I love love love the ruffle technique! This was my first time attempting the ruffles and I can certainly say it won't be my last! I first saw this technique from Melody Brandon of My Sweet & Saucy. She even has a video tutorial for how to use the ruffle tip. You should try this, its lots of fun, I promise!

Here's the entire dessert display!

Onesie sugar cookies with fondant pink buttons. Definitely "cute as a button"!

All party guests took home little pink boxes tied with silver ribbon packed with mini sugar cookie buttons. The boxes were a steal I just happened to stumble across at TJMaxx...love that store!

Guests also left with their own jar of sugar cookie mix. The glass jars were from HomeGoods. By wrapping them with a pink satin ribbon and pink button on top they make such a sweet gift!

A peak at the inside of the ruffle cake! YUM!

Here is one of my favorite features of the table...the ornament chandelier! This is a simple, super cute and inexpensive DIY project that will WOW your party guests! The clear ornaments and ribbon were bought from Michael's and filled with pink foam balls and silver beads. The silver matte and glitter ornaments were from the $1 bin at Target! I used 16 ornaments and tied the ribbon at varying lengths to create the chandelier! Since Suzi's baby is due on Christmas Eve what better way to tie in a Christmas element than with some ornaments!

The cupcake skewers were displayed using recycled can goods and wrapped with ribbon.

The pink trees were another great find at TJMaxx. Although they are intended to display jewelry they were cleverly re-purposed to showcase some dangling button sugar cookies to tie in with the shower theme.

Here's a picture of Me, Suzi (the mama to be), my cousin Betsy and my sister Emily!

It was a great day filled with family, sweets, and all things pink!

I am all about creating an amazing display without the huge price tag, and I think that was successfully accomplished with this event! I hope you enjoyed this shower and found some inspiration in the theme or design elements used!

If you're still getting your house all decked out for the holidays and have some extra ornaments laying around, why not make an ornament chandelier! You could dangle it from a doorway and use it as mistle toe, now there's an idea!

Sneak Peak

Happy December 1st! I'm so excited for the smell of peppermint, glittery ornaments, Christmas carols and oh so much holiday baking! Tonight Randolph and I started off December by going to pick out our Christmas tree from the same lot we have gone to the past three years. Oh how I love the smell of fresh evergreen trees! The tree is standing 8 feet tall in the corner of our living room, but will probably be bare for a few days until we can get down all the lights and decorations from the attic this weekend!

I'm planning to kick off my holiday baking tomorrow, so until then I wanted to share with you all a sneak peak photo from a recent baby shower I hosted. My cousin Suzi is having her first baby, a little girl due on Christmas Eve, I'm so excited for her! The picture you see above gives away a few clues about the shower...there was pink & gray and sugar cookies! I'm sorry, that is all I can share with you for now. You see there is a reason why this secret must be kept just a little while longer! I have submitted photos from the shower to the amazingly talented Amy Atlas the queen of dessert tables and she is going to feature this event on her blog! Amy truly is an inspiration to so many in the entertaining & dessert world, her work is one of a kind and her creativity is endless! Unfortunately I don't know when she will feature this shower, but to even be considered for recognition on her site is truly an honor. So I will sit back and wait patiently until the photos are posted for all to see! I really am happy with how all the details came together for Suzi's shower, and can't wait to share more photos and details with you all here!

If your curiosity is getting the best of you, feel free to leave me a comment with what you think the theme of the shower was or what other desserts were featured! I may or may not answer with a Yes or a No! But this could be a fun little game while we wait!

Brown & Blue

Brown, Blue & Polka Dots seem to be popping up all over the place these days! I absolutely love polka dots, so I was so excited when I found out this was going to be the design theme for a recent baby shower cake I made.

It was a 3-layer Oreo cake with chocolate buttercream. YUM!

The requirements were brown icing with light blue polka dots. Simple enough. I decided to stick with only one size for the polka dots to make a more uniform looking cake.

With a "T" on top for the baby's name "Tristan"...such a cute name.

The polka dots and "T" were made out of rolled fondant.

I used a Wilton #5 round piping tip to make a bead border around the bottom edge.

This cake would also be cute using brown & pink for a little girl, or even yellow for a gender neutral party.

On a side note, my cousin just found out today she is having a girl! This will be her first child and I'm already trying to think of cute desserts that would be perfect for her baby shower! The baby is due on Christmas Eve, how special is that! You can guarantee I'm going to start researching now for some adorable baby shower themes and dessert table ideas. I'll be sure to keep you updated on all the details and show pictures of whatever sweet treats I make for her special day!

Cupcake a Week: Mother Goose Themed

This weeks cupcake a week feature are some recent cupcakes and cupcake toppers I made for my friend Stacie's baby shower! The theme was Mother Goose. A baby boy is on the way so I thought it would be fun to decorate in blue and yellow to match the theme of the invites. I actually scanned the Mother Goose image from the top of the invite that had been sent out and used that as the focal point for the cupcake toppers!

In addition to the cupcakes I made some red velvet cake lollipops dipped in yellow and blue melted chocolate and sprinkled with white nonpareils.

Since the theme of the shower was Mother Goose, there were 10 different nursery rhyme stations set up throughout the party. I thought it would be fun to incorporate the different nursery rhymes into the lollipops by typing them up on paper and then tying them with a ribbon.

Stacie's baby is due Sept 11th and the name is yet to be revealed, these parents are doing a great job at keeping it a secret!

Cowboys! They are on the way....

I can't believe it was back in April when I did the Twins' Reveal Cakes for my friend Kelly and her babies. I had so much fun making the cakes for Baby A and Baby B to celebrate the gender reveal. In just about a month her twin baby boys will be born but we are betting it is going to be sooner than that...Kelly's hoping for Fri Aug 13! So to celebrate their arrival we celebrated last weekend with a Cowboy themed baby shower to match her cowboy nursery! My job was to provide the cake!

A family friend of Kelly's hand painted a dresser for the nursery with each drawer being a different cowboy theme. The bottom drawer is cow print, the middle drawer a red bandanna and the top drawer denim.

So in keeping with the theme of the dresser & nursery, I thought it would be fun to make a cake to match. The top tier was denim with a little pocket and stitched border. This layer was a strawberry cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting.

The cow print was really easy to make, using black fondant and cutting out black spots to place on randomly. This tier was a yellow cake with vanilla buttercream.

The middle tier was bandanna with a piped on paisley pattern. This tier was a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream.

I found the cutest cowboy clothes at Gymboree for the little boys.

And the cake is assembled. This was my first 3-tier cake and I was praying it didn't collapse before the party started. Luckily it held strong until it was time to slice it and enjoy.

I found some wooden letters and thought it would be cute to add the babies' names to the cake.

Baby A is MACK

Baby B is MILES

How cute are those baby names!

Here is the adorable table scape that Kelly's mom put together for the party.

So now that you've seen the cake, I can't wait to show you the sweetest nursery I have ever seen! These babies are going to be in cowboy heaven. Every detail has been precisely thought out to decorate from wall to wall in brown, red and denim...the perfect color combo for any cowboy.

Here's the inspiration for the cake...how stinkin cute is this dresser? This is one unique piece of furniture that is the focal piece in the nursery and brings their room to life.

Twin wooden cribs...

with cow print sheets and Woody from Toy Story.

And you can't have a cowboy nursery without a rocking horse of course, bandanna and all.

Every cowboy needs a cowboy hat. I can just picture Mack and Miles wearing these for their 1 year old pictures...they are going to be the cutest cowboys in town!

And the most comfortable double rocking love seat I have ever seen, newly covered in denim fabric.

Cowboy boot bookends...precious!

The proud mama to be!

Kelly's getting some practice rocking the Woody dolls!

Belly + Twins = perfect plate holder!

Here's a pic of Katie, the shower coordinator, Kelly the proud mama and me the cake lady!

What a fantastic day to celebrate this exciting occasion with Kelly, Mack & Miles! I can't wait to do another post once the babies arrive and I get to make something sweet to celebrate their birth!