Dessert Table & Sam - {Sneak Peak Party Week}

It's day 3 of Sneak Peak Party Week and I've decided to give you a teeny tiny glimpse of the dessert table. If you look closely behind the white chair's and "Sam is 1" blocks you can see the hints of aqua, lime and yellow serving pieces that will be used to display all the sweets! I know it's quite a tease, but you didn't think I was going to reveal the whole dessert table spread before the big party did you?

So instead I've included a few of my favorite photos from Sam's actual birthday on Monday. We started the day off right with a mini cupcake in bed at 7:00AM topped with a candle and the singing of Happy Birthday! Sam dove right in and loved every bite of his cupcake! Guess he'll be taking after me with his love of sweets and eating cupcakes for breakfast! I can't wait to see how he acts with his smash cake on Saturday!

For Sam's birthday we decided to give him a sandbox! He absolutely loves the beach. He has been to beaches in 3 different states so we decided to bring a piece of the beach to our backyard! I found the cutest Crab Sandbox at Amazon.com and just had to get this for Sam! Afterall, his nursery does have a touch of crab decor and his daddy loves to go crabbing in the Mobile Bay so it was a perfect fit for our little guy! As soon as we took the top off he was ready to play! I love all of his facial expressions in these pictures! Hope you enjoy!

Halloween Desserts

Halloween Desserts...need some ideas before Halloween on Wednesday, here's a peek at some cookies, cake pops, cupcakes and brownies I recently created for a party last weekend! I snapped a few behind the scenes shots as I was decorating the cookies and tombstones for the brownie graveyards! IHope you enjoy these Halloween treats!

I love how these brownie graveyards turned out! Thanks to my new Chicago Metallic Slice Solutions Brownie Pan, I was able to create uniform size brownies and didn't even have to cut them...the pan did all the work! Do you have one of these pans? If not I highly suggest getting one...add it to your Christmas list! Decorated with black fondant tombstones, a candy pumpkin and some green buttercream grass to complete the look.

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Strawberry Cupcakes with Strawberry Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

Before I took the desserts to the customer, I set up a mini display in my back yard on the new Farm table my husband built for me! I came across this amazingly beautiful DIY Farm Table on the blog Our Vintage Home Love and immediately fell in love and said I need one of these for my dining room! I showed my husband the blog post with the instructions, gathered the list of supplies we needed and off to Lowe's we went. Within a few hours he had made this table! Lucky for us we had an old desk in our shed that we were able to use as the base, it just had to be painted white. So we bought the pine boards, wood stain and sanding paper for the top and probably spent less than $50 on this entire project! If you have never checked out Our Vintage Home Love before, it is an amazing site with a great story behind it and some awesome DIY inspiration! I think I seriously sat and clinked on every tab and just kept browsing and browsing for a few hours once I discovered their site! So know that you know a little about our table, let's get back to the sweet stuff!

Here's a few more pictures of all the finished Halloween treats! Hope you all have a fabulous Halloween!

White Wedding Dessert Table

This past weekend two of my great friends Katie & Derek got married! I was honored when Katie asked me to create a dessert table for her special day. Her vision was to have a small cake, cupcakes and sugar cookies. She wanted to keep things clean and simple, with white being the focal color and a hint of green to accent. I love the Save the Date invites they sent out with the bicycle built for two! Katie and Derek first met a few years ago while training for a triathlon, so this announcement was so fitting for their special occasion.

Keeping with the white theme, I decorated sugar cookies using 3 types of white sprinkles: nonpareils, sugar crystals and pearls.

To add a touch of green I made some "mr. & mrs." cookies especially for the bride and groom.

Of course I had to create a few bicycle cookies to match their Save the Date!

Here are a few other special cookies I made only for the bride and groom so they could enjoy while honeymooning.

Katie's wanted to have a small cake for them to cut, inspired by i am baker's rose cake. I had so much fine trying this decorating technique using tip 1M.

The inside of the cake was yellow with chocolate icing in between the layers...the bride's favorite!

To match the cake, all the cupcakes were decorated with a rose on top. The cupcakes were all carrot cake.

Here's how everything came together on the dessert table. The bride's grandmother also made her signature almond pound cakes with a family recipe. And hiding under the dessert table are all the extra cupcakes and cookies to be refilled throughout the reception!

I just loved Katie's expression when she first saw the dessert table! I am thrilled that she was so happy with how everything turned out!

The look we were going for was similar to Amy Atlas' signature white dessert table.

Time to cut the cake...

Congratulations Katie & Derek! I wish you a lifetime of happiness! Thanks for asking me to be part of your special day!

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!