Sand Castle Cake

I meant to post this awhile ago but better late than never right…

I recently helped throw a shower for a friend that’s getting married at the end of this month. The shower was beach themed and I was in charge of the cake. I was almost ready to buy a cake when I found this site. Lots of cake ideas!

This is the one I decided to copy. I thought I would be really cute for a beach themed shower.

Here is my version…

  

I know theirs looks a lot better but I don’t think mine came out too bad. Especially for a last minute decision. I couldn’t find the graham sticks to go around the edges and I had to make it bigger to feed 50 people. Here’s what I did…

I cooked all the cake the night before (3 cake mixes of your choice)

The bottom layer is a regular 9x13 cake.

The next layer is two 8“ rounds one isn’t quite as thick (see below).

For the next two layers I cooked a 9x13 and put a bowl on top and cut around it to get a smaller circle and the top I cut around a wide mouthed glass.

The cone towers I used a little of the cake mix from one of 8” rounds to make cupcakes out of them. (They bake 20 min) frosted them and stuck the other cone on top.

I wrapped my cutting board with foil as the cake base and started the layering the next morning. Frost between each layer to stick them together then frost the outside with white frosting (3 cans total). I bought the graham crackers already crushed up..much easier that way and they were really fine it didn’t use quite 1 box of them. Then stick your cones where you want them.

I got lots of compliments (of course they didn’t see the original) and it tasted yummy too.

Crafty Wednesday

The little get together after my girl’s baptism turned into an even smaller get together so I changed my plans some.

I went with an easier and simpler centerpiece.

The buckets came from Target’s $1 spot and here’s a tutorial for the Dahlia flower. I just stuck a piece of floral foam in the bucket so the stick for the flower would stand up then covered the foam with some gift basket filler stuff.

I also made a quick and easy favor.

Seed packets were 10 cents from Dollar Tree. I cut a strip of scrapbook paper and wrapped it around. I used a baptism stamp, colored it in, and punched it out. I printed the poem and glued everything together.

Yummy

I just discovered there is a such thing as a candy buffet! My wedding would have been so much better if I knew half the things I do today. I’m going to share this idea with my friend that’s getting married in June. I may have to do it for my kid’s next birthday party. Here are lots of yummy pictures…

Head on over to Hooked on Houses to see what other people are hooked on…

Crafty Wednesday

My girls are getting Baptized on Sunday and we’re having a little get together after so I’m in the midst of making some centerpieces and stressing out over the preparations. I’ll post photos of them when I’m done but for now I’ll show you my inspiration photo.

Invitations

One of the things I love most about throwing a party is designing the invitations. Here are some of my recent creations...

This is one that I'm about to send out.

This was the cover of the invitation for my daughters 1st and 3rd birthday party. I used this digital photo edge kit.


This was the cover for my husband's welcome home party invitation. I used the same grunged photo edge kit.

This was the cover for my oldest's 1st birthday invite.

Hope this gave you some ideas for invitations of your own...

Crafty Wednesdays

Let's see how long I can keep this up...

My husband was deployed to Iraq this past year and we had a big Welcome Home party for him this summer. This is what I made for the centerpieces.

The star was an unfinished box from AC Moore. I painted it red and covered the front and back with scrapbook paper. I did the same thing to a small wooden star that I glued to the front of the box, then I tied a ribbon around the whole thing. I stamped "HOME" on a piece of white paper, put two eyelets in it, inked the edges and glued that on the front. I also inked the edges of the box. The picture sticks are just a dowel cut up into different sizes and I glued on an Aligator clip (I found them at Walmart in the electrical supplies) then spray painted them black. I stuck the sticks into a piece of floral foam then filled it in with shredded paper (the gift basket filler stuff).

These were the favors. I filled them with red, white and blue M & M's.

They're called Sour Cream Containers. Here is a better tutorial than I can do. I used a 4 x6 piece of paper instead. I saw one on another site that used a 4x6 photo to make them.

You could also use these ideas for a 4th of July party or a red, white, and blue themed birthday party.

Wedding Idea

I have a friend that's getting married in June. She's doing a beachy theme and I thought of a centerpiece that was a little different than a vase of flowers for each table. They sell giant wine, champagne, margarita or martini glasses at A.C. Moore, I thought it would be neat to put stones in her colors in the bottom, fill it with water and put a Betta fish in. You could scatter seashells on the table around the bottom of the glass.

Two Girls, One Party

I had a birthday party for my girls last Saturday. I didn't go with a theme this time, just lots of pink.

Favors: I wanted to do something different for party favors so I made these Kool Aid playdough kits. The Kool Aid playdough idea I got off the Split Coast Stampers website and the package idea came from this post on Stamp A Sweet Impression. http://stampasweetimpression.blogspot.com/2008/10/taylor-tuesday.html. The little girl stamp I used is by Amuse (my favorite brand).

Entertainment: My mom did face painting on the kids. My 3 year old wanted everyone to color, so I got little packages of crayons and I printed off some clip art for everyone to color. We also made homemade vanilla ice cream. We got this ice cream maker a couple years ago and haven't used it. I thought it would be fun for all the kids to pass it around to shake it up. It was super yummy too.

Cake: I made my 3 year old a barbie princess cake. My dad took all the pictures of the party and I haven't got them from him yet so I can't show you pics of my disaster of a cake. I was really excited with the barbie I found. It already had a painted on bathing suit type thing so I didn't have to worry about trying to decorate her with frosting, which was my biggest worry, or so I thought....

So I made the cake mix and poured it into my Pampered Chef batter bowl to cook it and it only filled half the bowl. I made hubby run to the grocery store to buy another cake mix to fill the rest of the bowl. When he came back and I finally put the cake in the oven, I started panicking because it takes an hour to cook and 3 hours to cool and I only had 2 hours before the guests arrived! After an hour of cooking I thought it should be done, I opened the oven and realized why the recipe said to use one cake mix. For some reason I completely forgot that cakes rise!!! So I had no idea how much longer the cake was going to take to cook. I kept checking every 20 min and at some point the knife inserted in the center came out clean! I let the cake cool while we did other party activities and came back to decorate it soon before it was time to blow out the candles. Decorating it was a disaster too. I couldn't find my food coloring. My plan was to tint the frosting the same color as barbie outfit and then use my new Pampered Chef decorating tool to make cute flowers and swirls on her dress. Well, I had to go with plan b instead. Frost it with plain white frosting and throw on some sprinkles. Everyone was still impressed and said it tasted really good.

My favorite cake is what I call strawberry jello cake. My family has been making it forever and no one knows where it came from. I made a cupcake version for my 1 year old. Now you all can make it too. My cousin found the recipe on the Jello website. Here's the link for "Gelatin Poke Cake" http://brands.kraftfoods.com/jello/recipe.aspx?s=recipe&m=recipe/knet_recipe_display&wf=9&recipe_id=53184 Enjoy!!