It's My Birthday!

It was my 33rd birthday yesterday, so I baked myself a cake. Don't feel too sorry for me, I wanted to make my own cake. The hubby offered to make me a cake and I said "well, you could help me..."!

I wasn't exactly sure what the cake was going to be when I started out, but I wanted to create something that pulls from the fantastic colours and flavours of this most amazing season. I wanted to make something different, not just the regular chocolate or vanilla cake - but I didn't know what. So what do I do when I need inspiration? Google of course. I found a great pumpkin spice cake recipe with maple cream-cheese icing (original recipe here). Oh my gawd!!!!!! It was amazing. So freaking delicious.

To go with the fall deliciousness I decorated the cake in fall-coloured leaves. As a present to myself I had bought myself a neat cake decorating gadget, a mold to make the leaves and branches - it worked really well. I'm quite sure I could have come up with leaves on my own without the mold, but it would have taken a lot longer! Of course cake decorating around here never goes exactly as it is pictured in my head. I didn't love the colours of the fondant at first, I find it hard sometimes to colour the fondant just right. I wanted really deep colours, but adding too much food colouring makes the fondant sticky and impossible to work with. So I brushed a little bit of red food colour onto the red leaves after they were made to deepen the colour. I think it turned out quite nicely.

Starting to decorate. Notice I didn't do fondant over the whole cake, just for the detailed decorations. The icing was way too delicious to cover with fondant. And I wanted a slightly less polished look to this one.

More branches going on.

Leaves and branches finished. Now to add some final touches.

Finished product. I really like how it turned out. The husband tells me he "Loves it, with a capital L!"

...and a little note on the back.

Check out my cakes page I've recently put together to see other cakes I've attempted to make.

Back To School

Summer holidays are great and all, but I love back-to-school! I really like fall in general, the leaves turning, the cool mornings, pumpkin spice lattes, and of course my birthday (countdown is on, 13 more days). Oops, I digress. Back-to-school is what I'm actually writing about.

The kids were excited this year about getting back to school, Mikayla especially. She was begging to go to school for a week before it even started, and she was especially excited for buying and wearing new school clothes. A little fashion diva I'm raising, I don't know how, I'm very unfashionable at the best of times. Anyway, she loves the social aspect of school, she loves learning, she loves making things and being creative, she is at that age where everything about school is fun. I hope she never looses that enjoyment of school, a mother can dream can't she?

I was so happy that Gavin was anticipating the start of junior kindergarten with excitement rather than dread. He had an awful time adjusting to pre-school last year. He cried every time when we dropped him off, for months. I'm sure that comes from him having either Mommy or Daddy around all the time, never having been to daycare or the like. Well, this year he did AWESOME!!!!!! His first day was short and the parents stayed to ease kids into it, so no problem there. His second day I left without a single tear from him. Speaking of tears, not a single one from me either this year. I'm not the super-emotional-cries-at-the-drop-of-a-hat kind of girl, but I admit I've had wet eyes taking my kids to their first day of school in previous years.

Happy back-to-school!

Summer 2012: Photo Dump

Is it September already?!?! It would appear I had too much fun this summer to get many blog posts written. And we all know the insanity of early September. So in lieu of quantity, I give you quality (I hope).

Here are some of my favourite pictures from the summer.

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