Mixed birthday cupcakes for a man

When it comes to birthday treats for men, well, you need to know if they have a sweet tooth.  See many men prefer crisps to chocolate, and well, that's a whole new ballgame then.  

Luckily this chap was partial to chocolate, and vanilla.  So these mixed classic cupcakes were a doddle, and the blue, green and yellow designs - perfect!

Happy 60th birthday to a great guy...

Caramel, princesses and unicorns for an early birthday treat

Both our girls are quite gregarious, and have lots of friends in their class and outwith school.  But our kitchen table has only 6 chairs, so parties at home are limited in size.  I feel it makes for a more enjoyable occasion, as no-one tends to feel left out when there are only a small group of friends to entertain.  And the girls have certainly never complained, they enjoy the attention too.

In this case, Mini-2 had a group of friends who all lived very near one another and we'd arranged that L was going to come to our house one day after school to play.  But of course, as young kids do, they chatted about it and then G, E, A and K wanted to come too.  Uh, ok sure I said, then racked my brain as to the least stressful way to do that for her...

As her birthday was only a week or so after the planned playdate, we decided to call it an early birthday party and have cake and cupcakes and fun!

Mini-2 chose caramel as her cake flavour, and these super cute picks and cardboard wraps for the table decorations.

We ended up with a 6" cake and a dozen or more cupcakes, so the girls took them home as party favours.

The food boxes match the napkins and cupcake wraps - cute huh?  

Happy early birthday sweet girl.

A free Craftsy Class? I'm in!

I can't think how I first came across (oh through Jessicakes blog I think) this but a month or so ago I learnt that Craftsy offered some free classes.  They specifically do cake decorating classes, so it was quite fun to look through the myriad of classes they offered and see which one or ones I would like to investigate.  Then I spotted one of the free ones, Modern Buttercream.  

I joined up, and enrolled in the class...  And that was over a month ago.  Oops, what can I say?  Sometimes day-to-day life gets in the way of cake and hobbies and free time, ha ha.  But it's in my account, that was free to set up and apparently it will remain there for as long as I have the account, so I will get back to it one day.  It even has video instructions on how to make Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which is most definitely on my list of things to try.

And if it helps me produce a cake that looks as neat as this

by watching a presenter as focused on the work as this

Then that 'one day' might need to be soon.