Cake Wars: Me vs. Me... In my kitchen!

I love Food Network Challenge where they have to make crazy cakes.  Every time I watch it I'm convinced I should probably be on it.  Mostly because I have close to zero cake decorating experience and have made all of two (now three) decorative cakes in my baking career.  Yet I still feel, that despite never having even seen a piece of fondant, that I could be a strong competitor.

While in Dresden, I made two fancy-schmancy cakes.  One was an alligator for our friend Casey's birthday, and another was "commissioned" after the cake was displayed at a party, for another friend's daughter's birthday.

Click here to see the first cake, an awesome alligator.  Here to see the second cake- a frog prince.

After the first cake a year ago, I was asked to create a dragon cake for a friend's birthday.  He's Welsh, and the Welsh flag looks like this:

Unfortunately, when I agreed upon making the cake, I didn't even know I'd have a baby yet!  Needless to say, making fancy-schmancy cakes is a time-consuming process.  With a small baby, I would have needed approximately 1 year, 4 weeks and 3 days to complete a dragon cake.  So, I had to call in the reinforcements.  Thanks Mom!!

Due to my incredible cake-decorating expertise, I only had to redo the entire carved part of the cake once, and the wings twice, but other than that, things went smoothly (though as always, took about 14 times longer than originally anticipated).

Here is the fancy-schmancy dragon cake.

I also made cutsy-wootsy dragon cake pops.

See, told you I should be on Food Network!  Also judging by the quality of photo #1, I should not enter photo contests... Though I am starting to work on the quality of photos (see photo #2)  but can only manage to bang out one good photo a session...

In Other News...

Stretchy is the cutest ever and is getting cuter by the minute.

A Very Christmassy Weekend

My Christmas decorations are finally up!

I have to say, it is very difficult to get anything done with a 7-week old, let alone hang anything delicate or which requires hooks, lighting, electricity, or live branches.

Thank God for my mom who is willing to drive 3.5 hours anytime to see her granddaughter or my Christmas decorations would consist only of the boxes of Christmas decorations scattered around our house.

I was asked, when complaining about how much work it was to put them up, why I would even bother- after all, I have a new baby, and who is coming to my house to see the decorations anyway??
BUT, I LOVE CHRISTMAS and NEED my decorations, so to me, it was worth it :)

Saturday was the last step in decorating our house: we needed a tree!

We told MiniM.E. we were going to get a tree and she was so excited that we managed to snap a few good photos of some excitable smiles (or maybe I was just making really stupid faces and talking in a ridiculously high-pitched, sing-song voice... you'll never know...).

 And then she was SO excited that she fell asleep.

Sleeping doesn't last very long anymore, so after a few minutes we were ready to head out.

We decided on Ellm's Farm for our Christmas tree this year because you got to choose and cut your own.  They had trolley rides out to the farm and hot cocoa and cider and donuts and most importantly, reindeer!!

It was everything it promised to be, with the exception of the reindeer.  Turns out they were no longer living.  SO SAD!!!  Especially because I wanted a picture of MiniM.E. riding on one.  But I guess they probably would have allowed that anyway... sounds like a law suit waiting to happen.

It was a very Christmassy great time.

We found our tree and Bob cut it down

We tied it to the car

And enjoyed some hot cocoa, all while MiniM.E. slept, even through the photo op at this um, awesome? train with a hole cut-out for faces...

Yesterday, MiniM.E. put the first two ornaments on the tree!

SO CUTE!!

Alright... fussy baby- must go!!

Christmas Pictures

Can I just state how obnoxious it is that babies can be so super cute in person, but as soon as you press the shutter button on the camera something happens and they stop looking cute.  (or maybe its just my baby)  Seriously, now that MiniM.E. is smiling, all I want to do is capture the adorable-ness.  However, I get this instead:

Not that that's a terrible picture... it's a cute picture of a smiling baby, but it doesn't look ANYTHING like MiniM.E.

So my camera is filled with a lot of bad pictures.  Which, I have to say, made taking a Christmas for Christmas cards very difficult.  

Here are some of the best photos from the first session...   I didn't choose one from this batch for the cards because I decided against the green-striped outfit.  

A good smiling picture!!

I've realized that the best photos are sleeping photos.  Sleeping babies are the best kind of babies for taking photos (and enjoying while being a stay at home mom) so for "Christmas-Card-Photo-Session-Two" we opted for a sleeping MiniM.E.