christmas cookies

i love making cookies at christmas! i especially love making (and eating) sugar cookies. here are some of my favorites from this past christmas...

i've also really like ginger bread cookies. they are just as fun to decorate too!...

becky and steve's wedding cake

recently i've been going to a lot of weddings! about 8 of my friends just got married or are about to get married! what i love more than making cakes is eating them, so i thought i would include pictures all of the cakes from all of the beautiful weddings! of course i am not the creator of these cakes, but i still love looking at them and eating them!!

the bride & groom cutting the cake! a simple yet elegant design!

all of us girls at the reception! we danced our butts of that night :)

our wedding cake

i think choosing our wedding cake was probably my favorite part of planning our wedding! i decided pretty quickly what i wanted. i found a picture of a cake in "the knot" bridal magazine that i really liked (with just a few modifications).

(photo from the knot magazine)

i sketched a rough design in microsoft paint (ha-ha) of what i wanted. the topper was the chinese double happiness symbol. each tier had swiss dots (3 small dots of icing in the shape of a triangle) and a skinny sage green ribbon tied around the tier with a bow in the front. and in between the bottom and the 2nd tier would be green hydrangeas (our main flower in our bouquets and center pieces). lastly, each tier would have a fondant band wrapped around the edge. reminder: this is a very rough sketch...

i was obviously not going to be able to make my own cake, but i did want to attempt making it myself! my co-workers were so nice to throw steve and i a shower a month or so before our wedding, so i offered to make the cake for the shower! i did a 1 tier version of our cake...

not bad, but nothing like the real thing! the cake was made by knodels bakery...

steve and i cutting our cake at our reception...

and feeding each other (we were clean)...the cake was very delicious!!...

wedding fortune cookies

for our wedding we wanted to incorporate steve's chinese culture into our reception. we decided that along with our color theme of sage green, we would add a touch of red and incorporate the double happiness symbol. i found a small stamp of the double happiness symbol...

i used this stamp on our invitation envelopes and also on our favor! speaking of our favor, we decided that we wanted to have chocolate covered fortune cookies! the chocolate covering itself wasn't going to happen until right before the wedding, but months in advance i was able to get started on the box for the cookies. i used a red and sage green stamp pad, a large paisley stamp, and our double happiness stamp...

i ordered like 300 chinese take out boxes online. then i stamped each one with the paisley and double happiness...

there were a lot of them...

now 2 days before the wedding, it was time to dip the fortune cookies in chocolate! steve's mom was able to hook us up with like 1,000 fortune cookies through the chinese restaurant she works at. my cousin ryan with a big bowl of fortune cookies...

then, my awesome cousin laurie, who just happens to sell dove chocolate, hooked us up with some yummy dove chocolate!!!

we ended up with 3 cookies per box--2 that were milk chocolate, and 1 that was dark chocolate!! here is my adorable cousin romy with some of the covered cookies...

thanks to everyone who helped!

it took all morning and into the afternoon to get them finished up!

the end product was just how i pictured it. each place setting had a chinese take-out box...

and everyone ate up the yummy cookies!...

memorial day/anniversary cake

after making brittany & josh's wedding cake, brittany's sister asked me if I could make a 2 tier memorial day/anniversary party cake! i of course was ecstatic to make another cake!

the design was similar to the wedding cake actually. it was chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, covered in white fondant and decorated with red, white and blue fondant stars, stripes, and ball border. i forgot to take pictures during the baking/decorating process, but i remembered to take some once i was finished...

this cake was really fun to make!!

brittany & josh’s wedding cake

a co-worker asked me if i could make her wedding cake! of course my first thought was wow, that will be a lot of work. but after thinking about it, i decided i could do it! her request seemed pretty easy...

she asked me if i could make a cake like this one she found online...

it was going to be a vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting in the layers and on the cake. then, covered in pink fondant and decorated with white fondant stripes, bow, and polka dots! i started out baking lots of cake! i was going to be making a 3 tier cake to serve about 11o guests. i think i times the recipe by about 9! next was stacking the layers with the cream cheese frosting in between. since the icing was cream cheese, i had to keep everything in the fridge when I wasn't using it...top 2 tiers...

next i covered all of the tiers with cream cheese frosting...bottom 2 tiers...

then i covered all of the tiers in fondant that I colored pink...all 3 tiers... next was the decorating!
steve even helped me out with the pink balls for the border...

next i added a polka-dots to the top tier, a solid white stripe around the middle tier and vertical stripes on the bottom tier. i also had pre-assembled a bow for the middle tier...

saturday morning we headed to greenville to deliver the cake! it took up my whole back seat...

once we arrived at the reception hall i finished assembling the cake, added the pink balls around the border, the bow on the middle tier, and the cake topper!...

the finished product...

me with the cake...

as long as this project took, i was really glad i decided to do it. it was a great learning experience and i really enjoyed every minute of it! although my feet and back were aching the next day from all of the standing, it was worth it. i was also able to make a beautiful cake for a friend's wedding!