Dessie is one of my super duper best friends and her lovely daughter Gabbie (Lillie’s super duper best friend) celebrated her 6th birthday at the Des Moines’ zoo last weekend.

Part of the party package includes having the children learn and interact with two animals from the zoo, of course some of the friendly critters. They actually bring them to the room for the kids to see and touch. Gabbie choose to have a turtle and a hedgehog at her party and I decided to add another cute critter to the pack.

When Dessie asked me to take care of her treats this year, I absolutely agreed.

The hedgehog cupcakes are chocolate with buttercream icing.

Then we have some turtles on strawberry cupcakes (Gabbie’s favorite flavor). sitting on a combination of soft yellow and white buttercream icing.

And my addition to the critter set, a sweet fox. Maybe I should have made a red panda since they have one at the zoo. She looks cute (I think).

We also made sugar and brown sugar cookies for party edible favors.

After making these cookies I thought that maybe the fox should have been smelling some pretty flowers instead of a tree with barely any leaves left on the branches. Opps…

The hedgehog walking on grass…

And the turtle swimming in water, sort of… yes, no?

I think I made over 60 chocolate decorations and used them on both the cupcakes and the cookies as you could see.

Gabbie was very happy with her treats and I was delighted to hear to see her pretty happy birthday face.

We love you sweetheart… Happy Birthday!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a joyful New Year. Now it is back to the usual routine right? Well, Valentines Day is coming up soon.

I simply had NO time to write about the Christmas cookies we made this year (I blame the kids for it). Instead, and I hope it is only this one time, I’m showing them to you in a couple of collages. Better late than never uh?

First, lots of Christmas Houses (aka very time consuming cookies).

 And the rest of the cookies.

So here you go. Whooosh… I feel much better now.

I think overall we made over 150 cookies easily and it was a lot of fun.

You can always see more pictures (and bigger) on the cookie gallery (starting on page 9).

This post is about my son Noah who turned 3 years old back in December.

My son is just like his daddy in a scary way. He is absolutely in love and/or obsessed with Batman, Spiderman and Transformers (especially Bumblebee). His favorite animals are lions, tigers and Dinosaurs (by far). Believe me, he can be a combination of all of them at the same time. He is a true/real boy. He has been able to sit and watch the Jurasic Park movies since he was 2. But it’s all in phases.

A month ago it was ALL about Bumblebee from the Autobots. Trust me, I don’t know the lingo. The only reason I know that ‘big’ word Autobots is because of my husband, the sci-fi geek.

Anyway, since Noah was all about the Transformers I decided to make him cookies of his favorite characters.

Optimus Prime

And both of them.

I’ve never seen him more excited to see my cookies. The sleepless night was all worth it.

We made enough cookies to take to his music class. He looked so happy carrying a basket of cookies for his little friends at Kindermusik and his teacher Miss. Molley.

Happy Birthday darling!

I am way behind on posting and updating the blog. I have many Fall cookies to show you, but I haven’t gotten the chance to edit the pictures to write the post.

Christmas is right around the corner and it’s my favorite theme for decorating cookies. Christmas cookies can be so fun and colorful and because there is a huge amount of cutters out there, the possibilities are endless.

Here are some cookies I made for my daughter’s Godfather’s mom’s nieces and nephews. Did you follow that? I even got confused writing it (I hope it is correct).

These bears look like they had too much pumpkin pie during Thanksgiving!

One of these houses is ours. Trust me, we don’t have any more beautiful flowers in front of our window.

It’s weird to be posting Christmas cookies before my Fall cookies, but I guess I still have time since winter is not here yet (although it feels like it already here in Iowa).

Have a Sweet Treat today!

Everyone knows the birds… the angry birds that is, except me.

They seem to be very popular birds because I see their pictures everywhere, but I honestly don’t know what’s going on with them.

We do own the movie Rio and it is one of our favorites right now.  I think it is one of the cutest movies of all especially when we watch it in Spanish, it is so funny (I haven’t seen it in English to be honest). My sister Crystal tells me that the birds are from the movie and other people have told me that they are the birds of an online game.

Why do they call them Angry Birds anyway when they look so cute?

Just in case that there’s actually someone out there (besides me) who is not familiar with these popular characters, here they are.

My nephew Axel was obsessed with Mario Bro’s last year and this year he seems to be a huge fan of the popular birds. My sister asked me to make a few cookies featuring the angry birds for Axel. So here they are.

The cookies are sugar cookies and the images are made out of chocolate.

I was very happy with the way the chocolate images turned out, but to me the cookies looked a bit mmmh… naked (?). I thought they needed something else to fill the empty space, or maybe I made the cookie a little bit too big.

Anyway, my sister said that Axel was very excited when he saw the cookies and that makes me happy.

We again had the opportunity to make treats for one of my favorite family events, Kindermusik’s Fall Family Music Night. It was only appropriate to make spooky treats since the event was held on Saturday 29th, just before Halloween.

Here are some of the cookies we prepared for them this year.

I’m not a huge fan of candy corn (although I can eat a few of them without complaining), but I love how they turned out in cookies.

I love this cookie because it is so versatile and I can make for pretty much every occasion.

The next one was also one of my favorites. I don’t have the spider web cutter, but the circle cutter worked. I wish I would have made it in different colors. The spiders (on the webs) look more like mmh… ticks (yikes!). I’ll fix that next time.

My mom loved this particular cookie design. Eye catching uh? It made a few people wondered how we made that.

I love these friendly creatures. Adorable and cute ghosts.

What’s Halloween without some witches? Here we have the boots/leggings and the hats. Maybe I’ll work on the entire body next year.

And just to make it spooky enough for the little ones…

I was never happy with the “B”… I just couldn’t get it right.

The family night was a lot of fun. It was all about sharing a music night with the whole family and learning while doing it.  Let me share the experience with you if you have never been to one of them.

Parents and children gather in a spacious room with the very awesome and talented Jenn Horak leading everyone on a musical journey of fun and games. Jenn either plays music or sings to everyone to make kids become active while they jump, sing, dance and share musical instruments.  They may not know it, but children are learning and developing other skills (social, musical, and more).

Caregivers become active too! Grown ups get to participate along with the kids on this musical event as they also get to sing and dance with their little ones.

If you are interested or just curious about Kindermusik, visit their website. My children have benefited tremendously from this learning experience and I’m sure yours will too. My son Noah is almost 3 years old and he absolutely looks forward to Saturdays for his music classes.

We got very positive feedback from the cookies we made this year. I just feel bad that I ran out of them  in the end!

Check out last year’s event here.

Enjoy a sweet treat every day!

I should have done the following cookies about a month ago, but something always got in the way. No, I wasn’t being lazy….

My daughter Lillie just started Kindergarten this year (sniff) and she’s in the hands of a couple of wonderful teaches. I wanted to bake something special for them. Apples for teachers, appropriate right?

Granny Smith Apples

Red Delicious Apples

 I had so many ideas and plans but because I wasted so much time, I ended up with some very simple treats for them… apples!. I placed about 5 of them them in a very cute plate that I found at Target and wrapped them with clear plastic.

I know I could have done better (maybe some pencils, notebooks, erasers, etc.), but I’ll do better for them for the Holidays.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m planning on a couple of shows at the end of October so many sweet treats are coming.

Ask me about cartoon shows for kids 5 years and under and I will probably tell you all about them.  I really can’t believe I traded my grown up shows for cartoons… but’s that’s life uh?

Anyway, SUPER WHY is in that long list of cartoons that now I am so familiar with. What??? You don’t know them??? Well, here’s a picture of them. They are kinda cool, but I still don’t understand the pig among children super heroes.

My target this weekend was the green super hero, Whyatt Beanstalk.

A dear friend of mine, Yolanda (I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing her name here) asked me to make a chocolate piece of this little character for her son’s birthday party cake. She would be making the cake at home and I would provide the image for her.

Here’s the chocolate piece that was recreated for the cake.

Cute uh? I really liked it and people at the party did also.

Yolanda came over the house with her cake and we set the image on top of it. It looked really nice, but I don’t have a picture of her finished cake.  She promised to send me a picture of it though.

About two years ago, her son was very much into Sesame Street. If you are interested here’s a link to the Elmo cake I made for her back in 2009.

My friend is a very crafty person and she made super hero capes for every child at the party as her thank you favors. My kids had fun at the party and they are still playing with their capes.

Thank you Yolanda!

I will be unable to take orders at the moment.

Hopefully, I’ll be back in business and ready to bake again to take orders for events starting in November 2011.

I do have a show/an event that I plan to prepare for, on October 29th and 30th so keep that in mind. Lots of yummy treats to show and share with you.

*** I have a valid reason though…. More on that later ***

There are two more projects that I am trying to finish hopefully this week.

One of them is a chocolate image of a Super Why character for a dear friend. She is planning on setting it on top of  her home-made cake. The other one involves cookies that I should have done a looong time ago. For one reason or another I never got to work on them. This week I said “enough is enough”, so we (both of my kids and I) decorated them two days ago. Anyway, I hope I can manage to post them by the end of the month.

Thanks for visiting the site and I can’t wait to help you again with your party needs.

I miss baking tremendously (sniff…).

I received a request to create a construction cake for a birthday boy in love with construction vehicles, a yellow digger to be specific. Mom told me about his favorite book, Digger Man.

If you have never heard about this book (and I had not), here’s a picture of it.

Construction sites, mud, dirt, trees… how fun! I can make mud, dirt and trees from many different edible things. I tried to stay as close to the book image as possible. We start with some details of the cake.

First of all, the yellow digger. This is a chocolate made image that’s removing some piles of rock/dirt just like in the book (because a little boy is trying to clear the ground to make a playground for his little brother, if you really want to know).

Chocolate Yellow Digger

My client thought it would be fun to add some construction tape and cones around the cake. Caution tape, check! Construction cones, check!

Cake details

Here’s the tree. I added one or two pieces of pretzel sticks to ‘raise’ the trunk and make it seem more real. I thought the pretzel would be better than a pile of frosting (not that’s it wrong, because it’s still good). Some buttercream leaves and grass to decorate the scene.

And here the finished cake.

Digger Man in action

The cake was white butter cake with alternating sections of vanilla buttercream frosting and chocolate ganache (mmmmh, ganache).

I don’t really know how the story ends because my 2 year old boy is more into dinosaurs and animals than anything else. I’m sure it is a very cute book and will soon be going to the store to check it out.

Hope you liked it.