Kirby Cake

My sister's birthday party was the weekend before last and I wanted to share the cake I made for her with you guys. :) My sister loves the Kirby games on the Wii and I'm pretty sure Kirby is her favorite video game character in general. She has little Kirby trinkets in her room and a Kirby shirt so I thought why not make her a Kirby cake? I've made her a rainbow cake the past 2 years and I wanted to do something different this year.

Here's Kirby:

Picture from here.

And here is the cake:

We made tacos and veggie tacos with all sorts of toppings. I made queso dip and we had guacamole and of course, salsa. There were lots and lots of tortilla chips too. We also made black beans and rice.

Here's a picture of the table before we added the rest of the taco stuff.

It's not that exciting looking, haha. Honestly, my mom and I decided to make this years party more low-key. Usually I go crazy and try to make too much food/decor/whatever and burn myself (and my mom) out trying to get everything done at the last minute. So it was nice to just relax this year!

I thought it was sweet that one of my sister's friends bought her a Kirby figure since I had made her a Kirby cake.

As you can see someone bought McKenna the Trouble board game so I acted out the old commercial from when I was a kid where they all go "Gettin' into trouble!!" at the end and they had no clue what I was doing....

Here's McKenna with her cake! :)

I didn't actually get a picture of the 2 of us that day.... So here's one from the day we had a family dinner to celebrate her birthday.

I love my sister!

Strawberry Pie

A few months ago I decided that I wanted to make a strawberry pie (yeah, it was kinda random). After searching the interwebs, I settled on using this recipe to make the crust (from here):

Ingredients:

* 2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 2/3 cup butter or 2/3 cup shortening
* 5 -7 tablespoons cold water

Directions:

Put flour into a mixing bowl with the butter. Use a pastry cutter to cut the butter into the flour. Then add the salt and water. Mix together until a dough is formed. Roll out your dough on flat surface. Bake at 375 degrees until brown.

For the pie filling, I used the following recipe (found here):

Ingredients:

4 cups strawberries, washed, de-stemmed and quartered
1 teaspoon lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar
4 Tablespoons corn starch

Directions:

Mix all ingredients together.

How easy is that part, right? Haha.

After all that, I poured the filling in and did a lattice top with the extra dough.

Then I let it bake until it was brown, about 25 minutes.

Beautiful! And it was delicious to boot. I took it to work and shared with my co-workers to bribe them to like me more. :)

Homemade Brownies

I had never made homemade brownies before this past weekend. Wellll, never that I can remember. It's possible that I made them with my grandmother growing up, but I have no recollection of those events.

So anyway, I got an itch to bake and whipped up some brownies following this recipe from About.com. I altered it a bit.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups margarine
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup cocoa

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butter and then mix with cocoa. Stir in sugar and blend in the eggs one at a time. Add the vanilla. Stir in the flour and and mix for about 2 minutes. Bake in greased 9 x 13-inch pan for 25 minutes.

 Yay for brownies!

Tis the Season to ...Party?

Yep, we had another party. My BFF Kelly had her birthday last week so of course we had to have a party and celebrate. I wanted to bake a cake for her and I got an idea and ran with it. My friend Sharon came over to help me and totally went along with my cuckoo bananas idea. I remembered seeing an ombre cake on Pinterest a while back and that's where I got my idea from so run with it we did!

Kelly's favorite color is blue so we decided to do shades of blue. We took a cake mix and prepared it according to the directions and then divided it into four glasses which we then colored blue.

We baked two layers at a time in pans that we greased with butter and powdered sugar (yahoo answers tip there - actually worked pretty well!). We just made sure to check on them sooner than the package said since we made 4 layers instead of 2.

My lovely accomplice!

With the first 2 layers in the oven, we were free to dance!

Then back to work... I assembled the bottom 2 layers and frosted while Sharon got the top two layers into the oven.

Then Sharon assembled the next two layers once they were ready.

And the finished product. Check out this bad bay - with a 'K' for Kelly!

Of course I had to take a picture with it. =)

And the birthday girl with the birthday banner (a tradition for any friend who has a birthday).

And of course, the inside of the cake.

If you know me by now, I totally neglected to pick up birthday candles since Sharon's party a few weeks ago soooo Kelly also got the privilege of blowing out the soy candle. =)

Here's what we were left with by the end of the night.

I'm so glad the cake actually turned out properly and go Pinterest for another inspiring idea! =)

No Bake Reese's Bars

Growing up my mom would make Reese's bars for me and my sisters and we loved them. Since then I got the recipe from her and would make them from time to time for parties or just hanging with friends. They are easy to make and so yummy!

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups peanut butter
1 stick butter
1 (6 oz) pkg. semi-sweet chocolate chips
½ cup graham cracker crumbs crushed
1 box powdered sugar
1/3 block paraffin

Melt butter. Mix with rest of dry ingredients. Press into a long cake pan. Melt chocolate chips and paraffin. Pour over ingredients in pan. Let cool; cut into squares.

Those are the basic directions. Here are my directions -- with visuals!! (More fun that way, right? Get enough powdered sugar to kill a horse (1 box) and pour it into a big bowl.

 

Get 1 1/2 cups of peanut butter and dump that in on top. (make sure your counters are as messy as possible before doing this step)

 Melt a stick of butter and pour that in too. (Paula Dean would be so proud!)

Pour in 1/2 cup graham cracker crumbs and mix together.

Once your hands are covered with all your ingredients, wipe them on your pants and get your pants all messy too.

Melt 1/3 block of paraffin in the microwave (mine took me about 3 minutes). Then pour your chocolate chips into the bowl with the paraffin. Stir until mostly mixed.

Put the bowl back in the microwave for 30 second intervals until the chocolate is good and melted, stirring at the end of each 30 second interval.

Pour your peanut butter mixture into a pan and roll it out.

Then pour your chocolate on top.

You, my friend, have homemade Reese's bars!

And a messy kitchen too, but what-evs. You get to enjoy a tasty treat so it doesn't matter! =)

Party Party

So at the end of November was my BFF Sharon's birthday. It's always right around Thanksgiving so she was a turkey baby. =) Of course we had a party for her complete with pumpkin spice cupcakes.

I make these pumpkin spice cupcakes quite a bit in the fall/winter. I love them! I got the recipe from Pam over at Relatively Reagan. These cupcakes are so moist and tasty! I usually use cream cheese frosting from a can or I'll make my grandmother's cream cheese frosting and use that.

We re-used the banner we made for our friend's Matt's birthday back in March. I think it will be tradition now to put it up for everybody's birthday.

My ladies!

Sadly I was not very well prepared for this party and I did not have any candles for Sharon to blow out... This also happened last year on her birthday. But we always look on the bright side and just grabbed my big soy candle and lit that for her to blow out. We're so resourceful, right? ;-)

We also played board games. One was a game Sharon brought called Wise and Otherwise, which was new to me. Basically each card has an old saying on it with the latter part left out and you have to fill in what it might be and people vote on the best ones. It was pretty cool! I love making up stuff so that was fun for me.

In summary, I love parties. =)

Hopefully at some point I will get around to re-capping this past weekend was pretty much completely full for me. I need a few days to re-adjust my sleep schedule, haha.

Snickerdoodles!

This past weekend, for the first time I made homemade snickerdoodle cookies. I mean, who doesn't love snickerdoodles? I found the recipe on Betty Crocker's website and they did not disappoint.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  
Pre-heat oven to 400ºF. 

Mix 1 1/2 cups sugar, the butter, shortening and eggs in large bowl. Stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt. 

Now for the fun part! Shape dough into 1 1/4-inch balls. Mix 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon. Roll balls in cinnamon-sugar mixture. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet.

I thought the cookies looked so cute waiting to go in the oven. =)

Bake 8 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet to wire rack.

This recipe was so easy to follow and the cookies turned out to be really tasty. The recipe makes 4 dozen so there are plenty of cookies to go around. I brought some to work for my co-workers and I to snack on.

In other news I've been seeing a lot of this pretty face lately.

I love getting to spend time with my sweet little sister. I am feeling very blessed these days.

Grandma's Red Velvet Cake

I grew up in a very tight-knit family where we spent every holiday together and my sister and I spent almost every weekend at our grandparent's house. I became very close to my grandmother over the years and, of course, she was everything a grandmother should be: warm, loving, fun, a great baker, a great cook, selfless, hard-working, energetic and more. She passed away a few years ago, but I have only the most wonderful memories of her. She was an amazing woman and I admired her so much, especially her ability to bring the family together with her cooking. Every Sunday after church we had lunch at her house. It was more of a feast actually as in about an hour the table would be filled with all sorts of food, hot and ready to eat. And of course there were desserts on stand-by for afterward. Usually a pecan pie or homemade ice cream, but other times we would get a cake and if it was a red velvet cake, the crowd would go wild.

I have a cookbook from the school where my grandmother used to work and after looking it through it for recipe ideas, I discovered my grandmothers very own red velvet cake recipe! I had to make it ASAP and I did indeed. It wasn't as good as my grandma used to make, but I did what I could and it was still delicious. =) Besides, nobody can bake as good as grandma, right?

If you want the best red velvet cake recipe ever, read on:

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups self-rising flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp. cocoa
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cup oil
1 tsp. vinegar
2 eggs
1 oz. red food coloring
1 tsp. vanilla

Combine dry ingredients. Add other ingredients in order. Mix for 2 minutes. Bake in greased and floured pan at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool completely before icing.

Here's what my cakes looked like with I pulled them out of the oven. Nice and red! You could do this as a sheet cake, but I wanted a round cake to take to a family event.

After the cakes finished cooking, I started working on the icing. Once again I used my grandmother's recipe. What goes better with red velvet cake than cream cheese icing? That's right, nothing.

Ingredients:

8 oz. cream cheese
1 stick margarine
1 box confectionery sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Blend together cream cheese and margarine until smooth. Gradually add box of confectionery sugar and vanilla while blending.

I did a crumb coat first and then iced the cake. My grandmother usually garnished the cake with slivered almonds, but I was lazy. =) haha.

It was still a hit at the family gathering though so that's good. Yay for grandma and her recipes!