My Big Fat 5th Birthday

My baby is 5!!!! I can't believe it.  The night before she turned 5 she also lost her first tooth!  She is growing up waaayyyy too fast, where does this time go?!

Well we ended up drawing this birthday thing out for about a week. 

We had friends over the weekend of her actual birthday and cooked on the grill and let her open her gifts from us.  She received a LOT of Zhu Zhu pets!

Since I wasn't going to make the cake for her big birthday party, I made her a little cupcake cake to celebrate with that night!  I LOVE pull apart cupcakes!  No "weirdness" in the cutting!

We ended up going to Charlottesville, VA (one of my favorite places) for part of the weekend to visit friends on her actual birthday!  So we didn't have a real party that day, but she got to stay in a hotel and she thinks that is so much fun!   So I guess it's the little things.  If you've read my previous blogs you'll notice that I did NOT have the dress on her that I was intending to make for her birthday, but it became so very very time consuming and tedious and I had a LOT of other orders so we decided (my husband and I) that she will have that dress for her preschool graduation.  I think it's a nice compromise and gives me a bit more time to complete it. 

So, now to her big birthday party (are you keeping up).  We had a giant bowling party with a bunch of the kids from her preschool! It was a blast.  It was a Hello Kitty theme, so I made her a pattern from Childrens Corner, but I forgot that the neckline on this pattern was a bit large and didn't cut it down for her, so I ended up putting the buttons all the way to one side, it looked really silly, but she didn't seem to mind and since I'm the queen of procrastination when it comes to my child, I let it go.  

I thought it was particularly cute with the bowling shoes :)  While this is NOT my favorite outfit, I think it was one of hers because it was Hello Kitty.  

Well

Well hopefully she'll look back on this birthday fondly, I know I will.  While it's heartbreaking to think about how quickly she is growing up, it is such a blessing to get to watch her do it.  

Pop's

I had an idea of grandeur after getting on the Bakerella website.  I saw her way-too-awesome cake pops done as Easter eggs and thought "oh, I could totally do that for the Easter party at Sam's preschool!"....ugh! The good news is that I had the foresight to do a run through about 2 weeks before the party.  I received help with this project from Samantha and my awesome sister!

Well after we did the run through I had learned a few things.  The first of which was that in the case of cake pops and 4 year olds, many hands do NOT make light work.  I also learned that I can't "paint" with corn syrup very well, so I used frosting on the new batch instead.  The last thing I learned was that the foam you put the pop's into should probably be floral foam and NOT regular packaging kind...too tough.
For the preschool I made over 100.  A ridiculous amount, I do NOT recommend this.  It took me 3 days to get them all done and painted and packaged, but everyone seemed to enjoy them.  I made these with strawberry cake...VERY delicious!   Here are some pic's of the preschool pops.  I also made some with out the stick (since I ran out) for the teachers and parents. I put them in mini muffin cups.

More Cakes

Well I was suppose to have a "down month", ha, yeah right!  I ended up having one of the busiest months EVER!  Mike and I have been busy wrapping up the indoor triathlon series and outfitting, planning, and registering for some summer races, that in itself took days. But I also finished up my cake decorating class, did a whole lot of sewing (still on that one), and planned the Easter party for my daughter's preschool. 

So, I guess these next blogs I'll be playing catch up the stuff I didn't record.  I'll start with pictures from the cake decorating class.  Lots and lots of fun!  I'm embarrassed to say that I made the purple cake with white flowers.  As it would turn out, making the frosting the right consistency is about 90% of the process, and mine was clearly too stiff on this day.  The little sports cupcakes were made by the 11 year old who took the class...she was doing a GREAT job! 

For our "Final Exam" we had to make those cute, but very irritating to make, roses you always see on cakes.  I personally don't know if I would put them on too many cakes, but I'll never say never!  I did the pink flowers.  They are actually HOT pink flowers, I may have used a bit too much pink, but now I know what to use if I ever want to make a Hannah Montana cake!  The other 2 cakes are by a mother and daughter...I can't wait to take my little Samantha to do this sort of thing!