Emma's Birthday

Our baby is two!?!?! We are not exactly sure how or when it happened, but Emma is no longer a baby. :( She has grown up on us and turned into a little girly girl. She is super cute and has a fun little personality, although she has become a little more sassy since the birthday (funny how that happens).  

For her party we had all the girl cousins come over and play dress-ups.  They had so much fun and were so cute to watch.  Even the little ones and mom's had fun with it!

The girls had lots of fun trying on many different outfits, by the end of it all the floor was covered in clothes!

Later we had the boys join us for presents and cake and ice cream.  Megan made a cute jewelery box cake. She has a lot of fun making the kids birthday cakes. Emma LOVED it and really enjoyed licking the beaters from the frosting.

She was so cute sitting in a big chair and sharing her cake with her daddy.  She is such a sweet little girl!

Once everyone was gone, Payton decided to try on some of the jewelery that the girls had.  Silly cute boy!

The Making of Emma's Cakes

As we know, I really enjoy the challenge of making creative birthday cakes. Since the theme for Emma's party was ducks, I decided to make two 3-D duck cakes (one for Emma and one for everyone else). I baked two different flavors of cakes, yellow (from a box) and chocolate (from scratch), in different sizes and shapes of pans the day before. After refrigerating them overnight I was able to carve my creation the next day. I had a blast making them. Here is a little slide show of the process I went through.

Payton's Birthday - The Cake

Payton turned three this year! His latest obsession was Monster's Inc., so that is the theme we chose for the party.

For the cake we wanted to make a really cool one with Mike Wazowski on it (because he is Payton's favorite).
After watching the Ace of Cakes show, we figured it would be easiest if we used some sort of fondant to cover it.

So we baked the cakes and frosted them with cream cheese frosting (buttercream didn't sound too appealing to Megan).

Next Marcus made a white marshmallow fondant (with a recipe Megan found online) and we covered it with white, then he continued to make a green so we could make Mike.

We rolled it out and cut out the piece to make his body, arms and legs, then did a little details with just some black frosting.



Overall the cake looked pretty cool, but we learned that working with fondant for the first time is not the easiest thing.