J's Firetruck Birthday Party

It always makes me pleased when someone contacts me again to have something made for them.  J's mom has contacted me on several occasions and has even passed my name on to friends. She even has gotten to where she will send me photos after the party so I can update my blog.  :) Thanks for the photos because I usually either forget or my pictures never look that great.  Photography (and blogging) is not a skill I have.  Here's the pictures she sent me:

Winter Onederland

Today I delivered a fairly big amount of baked goods to a former coworker's house. She had contacted me and said she had seen my cakes on Facebook and wanted to know if I could make a smash cake, 24 cookies, and 24 cupcakes for her son's first birthday.  (It is neat to think about how easily Facebook has made a way for us to get in contact with someone we haven't spoken to in a while. :)) Of course I told her I would love to.  She had picked out the theme Winter Onederland and did a winter theme which was very cute.  Our friends from church actually did the same theme for their son's first birthday as well or I would have thought about doing it for our daughter's first birthday. :)

The smash cake was a yellow cake and iced in buttercream.  I used MMF around the edges and for the number 1 on top.  I had made royal icing snowflakes to put on top but my son bumped the container that I kept the dried snowflakes in and broke my remaining ones and I didn't have time to make more. :/ So I improvised and piped on the snowflakes which was probably better for a smash cake anyways. :)

For the cookies she asked for mittens and a number 1.  Out of all the Christmas cookie cutters I had I didn't have a mitten.  I was able to find a mitten on an after-Christmas clearance rack which was excellent.  I actually had to buy a set of about 15-20 cutters to get the one mitten.  But now I have all sorts of Christmas cookie cutters for next year.  (I will have to think about whether I should do Christmas cookies for the family next year or not.  You can check out the post about that here.)  I actually made the number 1 cookie cutter because I couldn't find one in the right size without having to order one online.

The cupcakes were white almond and cookies n cream.  The cupcakes shown were just the white almond. The decorations on top were made out of royal icing.  The big snowflakes are the ones that my son broke.  Luckily I had the last cupcake topper in my hand when he hit the container.  I lost all the extras I was going to put on the cake but it all worked out. 

Christmas Cookies for the Family

For my husband's family this year I decided I would make cookies for the whole family.  OH MY!  My husband is one of 45 grandchildren.  What was I thinking? 

I decided I would make a stocking for each person and put their names on it.  The stockings are on the far left and also on the far right.  You can tell by that that there are a lot of people in his family. I ended up doing 64 stockings.  I also did another big cookie for everyone and then 2 smaller cookies for everyone.  I did over 190 cookies.  When I first started I was very excited about doing cookies and getting to be creative in this way but after about 50 cookies I started to doubt this decision.  :) I will have to say that it was fun and I'm glad I did it but that was a lot of work!