cat cookies and onesie cookies for a baby shower

To go along with the purple cat cake for Leona's baby shower, my good friend Diana had also asked me to make cat and onesie cookies as favors for the guests.  Using the cat logo from the baby shower invitation (designed by Diana and her husband Gavin, owners and creators of Bumble Ink), I decided to make two versions of the cat cookies - the original cat logo, and also just the cat face.

 I asked my husband to make custom cookie cutters for me, and he created both of them in one night!  He's the best!

For the cookie dough, I used my favorite homemade sugar cookie recipe, but you could of course use store bought sugar cookie dough.  After rolling out the dough, cutting out my shapes, and then baking them until golden, I whipped up my royal icing while waiting for the cookies to cool.  Once they were ready, I piped outlines on the cat cookies using stiff purple royal icing, and then filled them in with runny purple royal icing.

Then I did the same for the oneside cookies, except with this onesie cookie cutter and with white royal icing.

Once all the cookies were outlined and filled in, I let them dry overnight before piping on the details. The onesies were outlined with sage green, and I finished them by piping a tiny heart in the middle.

For the cat cookies, I used white for the details on the face, and more purple to add a final outline.

I thought the sage green royal icing matched the invitations pretty well, although the shade of purple royal icing for the cats was a bit off.  But oh well, they still looked cute!

And finally, a few pictures from the english tea themed baby shower!

purple cat baby shower cake with petal sides

Back in December, my good friend Diana threw a baby shower for her sister Leona, and she had asked me to make the cake and cookie favors for the cat-themed event.  Diana and her husband, owners and creators of Bumble Ink, had designed the cat logo for the shower invitations, so we decided I would use the same cat logo for the cake!

The baby shower colors were to be purple and green, but after a few sketches Diana and I decided that the cake would look better with just purple and white.

Diana's sister had requested anything chocolate, so I decided to make a moist chocolate cake, filled with decadent chocolate mousse.  I split each cake layer in half horizontally, giving me four layers of cake, and three layers of mousse (with a cream cheese buttercream border so that the mousse wouldn't ooze out of the cake!).

Then I did a quick crumb coat with cream cheese buttercream, and let it set in the fridge before proceeding with the petal sides.

Once the crumb coat was set, I piped my petal sides, starting with the darkest purple on the bottom, the medium purple in the middle, and white on the top.  To see more of my petal cakes, see here, here, and here (you can also see the original tutorial over at Hungry Housewife).

After piping a congratulations message on the top, I piped the outline of the cat logo, and then filled it in with a Wilton star tip.

I finished it off with a Wilton tip #2 for the details on the cat's face, and then I was done!

At the baby shower, I loved that Diana's daughter spent some time just sitting and staring at the cake ...

... until finally she could finally have a bite!

Congratulations Leona!  We can't wait to meet your new little one!

pink owl birthday cake

My friend Diana has a daughter named Naomi who loves owls.  So when she asked me to make the cake for Naomi's 4th birthday party, I had to make an owl cake!  Luckily for me, her husband designed an owl logo specifically for the birthday party (he also designs all the cards at their own stationery business, bumble ink!), so I used his logo as inspiration for the cake!

A few weeks before the party, I started brainstorming and sketching.  I finally decided to just do a simple pink cake with the pink and white owl logo, a white shell border, and vertical piped pink sides (sides similar to the carnival birthday cake that I did a while back).

The birthday girl requested "a vanilla cake with strawberries", and so I set out to make a 12x17 vanilla cake, filled with strawberries and whipped cream.  I used my go-to vanilla cake recipe, which is moist and fluffy because it calls for whipped egg whites which are carefully folded into the batter.

Once the cakes were baked, I started on the filling.  I sliced up my strawberries, and then whipped up 3 batches of freshly whipped cream.

Then I piped a border of whipped cream on the perimeter of the bottom layer of cake, and then filled it and smoothed it with an offset spatula.  Next came a layer of the sliced strawberries, arranged in neat rows.

After topping it with more whipped cream and then the second layer of cake, I whipped up 3 batches of cream cheese buttercream, and set a bit of it aside (since I would be neededing white frosting).  To the rest of the frosting, I added a combination of Americolor "fuschia" and "soft pink" to get the perfect color of pink. Then I did a quick crumb coat over the entire cake, and then a second smooth coating on the top.  And for the sides, I piped the vertical stripe pattern with a large basketweave tip.

Then I piped a shell border on the top and the bottom, and finally, the owl!

I also added a birthday message by piping with melted chocolate, but as I was piping I started to question my decision to use melted chocolate, because my piping tip kept getting clogged!  And the piping kept coming out in uneven spurts!  I was also annoyed with my letter spacing.  I tried to fix and doctor the birthday message as best as I could, but after a while I realized I needed to stop messing with it and just let it be, otherwise I was going to mess it up even more (sigh).

But in the end, all that worrying went away because Naomi loved her cake!  I've never seen her so excited!

She even spent a portion of the party perched on a chair in front of her cake, staring at it as if she was guarding it!  She was so adorable!

Hope you had a happy birthday, Naomi!  We love you!!!

fourth of july - red white and blue blueberry macarons

For fourth of July we had made plans to hang out with our friends Diana and Gav and their daughter Naomi, and I (of course) wanted to make something for us to snack on.  Last year I made these red white and blue cupcakes, and this year I ended up making red white and blue macarons!

I decorated the macaron shells with red and blue star confetti sprinkles and white non-pareils before baking, and couldn't wait to see how they looked when they came out of the oven.

To my horror, half of them had horribly cracked, while half of them were fine.  I'm not quite sure what happened.  Maybe it was the addition of the sprinkles on the top?  I've also read that you need to hit your baking tray hard against the counter before baking, to get out all of the air bubbles.  I'll have to remember to do that next time.

I had originally wanted to fill a third of the macarons with raspberry cream cheese filling (for the red), a third with blueberry cream cheese filling (for the blue), and the last third with plain cream cheese filling (for the white), but ended up just doing the blueberry.

I chopped up my blueberries and then cooked them on the stove for a bit to soften them and reduce the amount of liquid I would be adding to the filling.  This gave me a jam-like consistency, which I cooled and then whipped with cream cheese, vanilla, salt, and confectioner's sugar.

Despite the cracked ones, the rest of the macarons turned out great!  I couldn't really taste the blueberry flavor though, so next time I'll have to add more.  Also, while I thought the star sprinkles were really cute, they ended up being rather hard when biting into the macaron.  So the next time I add sprinkles to my macarons, I'll attach them with the filling after their baked, like I did with my Hello Kitty Macarons, since I don't remember thinking the sprinkles being so hard (perhaps the filling softens them a bit?)

Happy Fourth of July!

more hello kitty cupcakes

My good friend's daughter Naomi loves Hello Kitty (just like me!), so I made her some fresh strawberry Hello Kitty cupcakes for her 3rd birthday this past week.

Ever since my original post on these cupcakes, I've made them so many times I can't remember!  They are probably my most requested cupcake.  The first time I made them, I paired them with my fresh strawberry buttercream.  But I thought the combination was too sweet, and a little too much strawberry.  So now I prefer topping them with my tangy cream cheese frosting instead.

The hardest part about making these cupcakes is dicing the strawberries for the batter.  You need to dice them extra extra tiny, or else you'll get huge chunks of wet strawberries in your cupcake (which scared me the first time I made these because at first I thought it was uncooked batter!)  One of these days I'm going to try pureeing the strawberries instead, but I have a feeling it just wouldn't be the same as a delicate white cake speckled with tiny pieces of strawberries.

Hope you had a happy, happy birthday little Naomi!  I can't believe you're three!