Happy New Year!!!

I start a new year baking a popular cookie design in my Sports category, the Iowa Hawkeye cookie.

I have previously made this cookie (several times), but only in the distinctive yellow color. As I googled the logo once again to make sure that I have correct details and proportions, I noticed how there is also a black Hawkeye. How did I not pay attention to that before?

Well, that’s how the black Hawkeye cookie was born.

I was very happy with the look of the black Iowa Hawkeye. It was my husband’s favorite and my daughter really liked it too.

The cookies were offered as favors at a 50th birthday celebration. I received very nice and kind words from my customer as she mentioned how “beautiful” and “delicious” the cookies were.

Once again I had the pleasure of making birthday treats for a very special friend whom I love so much. Her name is Dessie and she has a couple of beautiful kids, Leo and Gabbie.

Today’s treats were designed for Leo’s 4th birthday. Leo loves animals and he decided to celebrate his birthday at the Des Moines Zoo. Suggested by his mom, a jungle/zoo animal theme was the perfect design.

First things first, finding cute and age appropriate jungle animal clipart. Here’s my inspiration and design base. Just google “jungle animal clipart” if you are ever looking for ideas.

Bakers Tip: Working with large and simple clipart to create cookie or cake decorations is easier than small and busy pictures. The details will drive you crazy when the pictures are small and very detailed.

Here are Leo’s Jungle Animal cupcakes! Cupcake flavors included Chocolate butter and Lemon with a Raspberry filling all of them topped with Buttercream icing.

Dessie’s husband, our dear friend Jon, loves my cookies so sugar cookies were part of my plan.

Now that I’m editing this post, I’m wondering why I didn’t make giraffe print cookies. Oh well….

I arranged a pretty birthday platter for Leo to make Leo’s birthday extra special. Sorry for the ugly pictures.

And the rest of the cookies were bagged in clear treat bags for gift giving. I think by far my favorite animal cookie this time was the tiger below.

The birthday party at the zoo was a lot of fun. They brought out three animals out so children would learn about them. The visitors were a domesticated bunny (aahhhh), a small alligator (scaaary), and the third one I can’t remember, but my boy tells me that it was a turtle so we’ll go with that. The kids and some of the grown ups got to touch them… NOT me. That alligator jumped out of the box when they were taking him out. Thankfully they caught him!!

Happy Birthday sweet Leo.  We loved making the treats for you and I hope you also loved them too. Love Ya!

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.

This bunch is a cute one because they were created to be the toppers for baby shower cupcakes.

I always ask customers to see if  they have any ideas, designs or patterns in mind so I can figure out what to do with their request. I received this blanket picture with the baby animals.

Here are the cupcakes with the baby animal toppers.

Giraffes, tigers, elephants, monkeys, parrots, oh my!

And of course my daughter Lillie asked me if I was going to make animals girls. So, I added eye lashes to some elephants.

What do you think? My husband liked them a lot and my boy Noah said “Wow” when he saw the first chocolate pieces.

As far as the cupcake flavors, we had chocolate butter cupcakes with chocolate ganache filling and strawberry cupcakes with fresh strawberries inside of them.

Here’s the wonderful comment from my customer.

“You did a wonderful job on the cupcakes!  They were SO cute!  And a big hit with everyone at the baby shower (even the men).  People raved about the edible decorations and the chocolate filling.  Thanks so much for all your hard work and talent!”

Big Thanks!!!

This post has been waiting patiently it’s turn to be posted, but the time arrived. Here’s a cake with snakes.

This cake was designed with lots of love because it was for my sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s son (followed that?), Lalo. This dear boy was celebrating another year on December 5th. His mom (wild mom, in a good way of course) had the idea of combining his love for snakes and the number 6 (for his sixth birthday).

So, Lalo loves snakes and his mom looooves cake. To please both of them, we made lots of cupcakes and chocolate snakes that looked like the number 6. The chocolate snakes were cupcake toppers.

Snake on a Cupcake CakeGiant cupcake and baby cupcakes

 Here are some of the pictures from the party.

 Starting on the top left side we have the new addition to the family, Mario and behind him Jose (dad). Axel, my sister’s boy and my little Noah whose birthday was the day before. In the middle we have the monkey from Monkey Joe’s. On the right side Alexis, Jose’s daughter. Lalo, the birthday boy below her and Laysha (my sister’s daughter).

The birthday boy

 The birthday boy gets to sit on a really cool inflatable chair like a king. Looks comfy uh?

Lalo and Alexis

My Noah!

Not his best picture, but a funny one.

If you are in the Des Moines area, Monkey Joe’s is a very fun place to have a party and spend a good time with kids and family. 

*** Happy Birthday Lalo ***

I dare you not to go “oooh” with the next cake. A previous customer (and lovely friend) asked me to make a cake for someone at work that love animals, especially dogs and cats. I was off to find the cutest pictures to make the topper of her cake.

Chocolate doggy

Chocolate Kitty

This cake was White Caramel cake with Dulce de Leche buttercream. Ana loved the cake, so did I.