Aggies Do It Better

This year I went in a different direction and made different designs on each of the six cakes I made. They feature cut out hearts in an ombre theme. The inside is also ombre, but I went with a chocolate turning to vanilla instead of colors because I'm getting away from using food coloring. 

Here is a summary of the very small amount of cake-making I did last year. Balancing a newborn in the mix of everything else here did not allow for much! (See: No Blogging) But I did manage to eek out a few things.   First up is a small cake and cupcakes I made for a baby girl shower. The cupcakes were vanilla, chocolate chip cookie dough , and cinnamon latte.  The cake was carrot. These are little chocolate dipped marshmallows I made for Halloween. Franken-mallows!       This was the first  birthday cake I made for the baby. I've been wanting to make a cake covered in sprinkles for a while! Keeping in mind it was only 2 tiers of 4 and 6 inches, it didn't take me as long as I thought or as much sprinkles as I thought. I have lots left over!     The oldest turned 7 and request a Cowboys stadium. With the doors open, Mom. I didn't have much time to work on it and I would change a few things, but it turned out ok!     Another ...

Okay. Yall. This is gonna change your life :) Anyone addicted to Pumpkin Spice Latte's? (those of us who are refer to them as PSL's. we're hip like that.) Who's addicted to paying $4.50 for a small PSL? Not me! Often times if I get a little free time it is usually spent perusing the internets for recipes. I love me some Google! On a whim I googled "Pumpkin spice syrup recipes". I only came across a couple, and they seemed endlessly complicated. So many ingredients! Tiny bit of this, tiny bit of that. I thought, surely there's an easier way! Also, turns out, the PSL syrup uses pumpkin "flavoring", not actual pumpkin. And they don't sell it, so no chance for direct comparison. I figured, I could get pretty close to the real thing, no? Here we go: This only requires 4 ingredients: Water, sugar, canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix), and pumpkin pie spice . Well, maybe that's 3, some people don't really count water as an ingredient. ...

Hope everyone had a great Mardi Gras! Here is my first King cake I've ever made, it's from my Paula Deen Celebrates Book. It turned out huge, and took all day long to make-easily the most complicated bread recipe I've ever made. Next time I will make 2 cakes out of this. And, not forget to add the melted butter on the inside before adding the cinnamon sugar and rolling it up. doh! It still turned out ok, even though I don't have anything to compare it to. Here is the Shrimp Etouffee I made, also from the Paula Deen book. (the Mardi Gras chapter! I love it...it's all holiday menus.) I've never made anything like this before either, and I did have to alter the recipe at the beginning a little bit because the flour:butter ratio for the roux you start with left it a little runny so I had to add more flour. And I added a whole lot more Tabasco than it said...and I could have added more!

So here we go, 9 cakes in 4 days! First, the prep work. Assemble boxes, make royal icing roses and fondants, and the frosting. All this was done on the first day. One cake was due earlier (the 2nd day), so it's not in the picture here. Skip to Day 3, BAKING DAY! I had hoped to get all of them baked, torted and filled the first day, but here's as far as I got and the end of this day. Thank goodness we have an extra fridge in our garage!! My Husband was out of town all these days until the last day, which is partly why I was a bit behind schedule. The boys were going BONKERS and I didn't have as much uninterupted time to work as I hoped. It's much harder when they are running around the house! Also? We were practically snowed in the first part of this, which didn't help. Day4: (Daddy's home, YAY!!) Finish icing the cakes, cover them all with fondant, and decorate. There is lots of chilling-in-between-time here too, but since there was so many I always had one to ...

Happy almost Valentine's Day! Since I am about to take on this project again, I wanted to blog about last year's event. I didn't have this blog back then, but if I did, then this definitely would have been on it! I'm so glad I took a bunch of photos to document it. This was the first major baking project I took on, shortly after I got my grandaddy stand mixer last Christmas. I would have never attempted such a thing without it. My husband and I got the crazy idea that I would take orders and sell Valentine's cakes at his work. It was a way for me to hone my skills and earn a little bit of dough to get more of the "baking things" i.e. gadgets and pans and things, that make life as a cake maker easier. I got to work making a "demo" (but very real) cake to photograph for the flyer that was going to be handed out. I can't remember exactly, but I think I sent maybe half this cake to my hub's work and kept the other half here for us to eat. Th...

Hello, out there! I can't believe I haven't blogged anything since November 30. I just got so busy with "life" stuff, traveling for both the holidays and all that entails, plus Christmas here, plus as soon as we got back we all got snowed in for a week and got the flu for 2 weeks! Plus, I've been extremely frustrated with my computer, it's a laptop that's about 7 years old and on it's last leg. It makes me not want to be on it AT ALL. Hopefully we will be able to get a new one soon. I've also been reorganizing and declutterifying this house, top to bottom. We don't have much storage space, and not even everything is unpacked since we moved 8 months ago. I sort of just decided, if we don't have room for it, then we don't need it! Whew! It's a big job, but 4 weeks into it, I am breathing much easier with much less "stuff" around. Related: we will be having another garage sale. SOON. I have a huge list of things to share, wha...

So here are the side-by-sides I was talking about earlier. After this I'll leave Halloween be!! This is the pattern I used: McCall's MP373. I know the pic is tiny, but you can see that it is one pattern with different ears, tails, and other add-ons for a basic jumpsuit. This is the only Garfield costume I could find online. Basically I made the jumpsuit out of orange material, and got some black cut to make the stripes, etc. Then, by using this picture and pictures of the actual cartoon on line, as a guide, I made all the details. the face part I made separately, sewed a back on it and then stuffed it, then hand-sewed the corners to the hood. I hot-glued on all those stripes on the back. I cut out diamonds of the material, then cut those into strips. Here is the picture of the Odie costume. I did sew spots on the sides, evenly, unlike this "Odie", but you can't even see them in any of the pictures! Also, after some debate, I wound up sewing the "tongue...

This Thanksgiving, or before, who are we kidding?, Drink your Dessert! Ok yall. Seriously. Hang on to your hats. This recipe is a compliation of several I found online plus my own tweaks to make it easy to make with every day, inexpensive items. And, I wanted to make sure I brought you the best possible version. It took many tries. I was willing to do that for yall. You're Welcome :) Ok, here we go: Here's a pic of everything you need. It looks like a lot, but it's not really. Also, you will need some Pumpkin Pie Spice, I forgot to put that in the pic! This makes ONE drink. Martini shaker. If you don't have one, you could probably just put this in a large glass and stir it up really well. Also, you don't have to use a Martini glass, but it just looks cooler. 1-ounce measuring glass or shotglass. Or, if you're brave, you can eyeball it. Vanilla vodka (or regular vodka plus vanilla extract, which is what I used, because we are not fancy enough to have the f...