It's been a while since my last post, but for good reason - we've been busy! Of all the life-altering events I've ever experienced, this past weekend ranks up there right at the top of the list:

1. Being born
2. Gettin' hitched
3/4 tie. Birth of children
5. THIS PAST WEEKEND

And what was so darn life-altering about this past weekend, you ask? Well, just this: 

Andrew and I bought a golf course and sold our house this past weekend.

Yes, you read that right. We bought a golf course. We bought an 18-hole, par 3 golf course called The Greens at Brock, we are re-branding it Brock Golf Course, and we are moving to the Niagara region of Ontario in March with our girls to prepare to open for business in the spring!

This may sound completely out of left field if you don't know us well, so perhaps a brief explanation is in order: Andrew's folks have run a golf course of their own for the past (almost) 40 years, which they built from a dairy farm. Andrew lived and worked there with his folks and his brother as a kid and after university. We made a big move to Toronto after getting married to spread our wings, and we both got down and dirty in the corporate world for a number of years. However, owning and running our own business was never far from our daily conversations. So when this course came up for sale in the fall, we both felt in our bones that this was the right fit for us and our girls, and after several months of due diligence, we closed the purchase on Friday.

We hope to launch our website (www.brockgolf.com) in the next few days, but here's a sneak peek at our logo:

(Thanks again to Dina at Honey & Fitz for the logo that still makes me swoon - and for the update to the new location!)

I think it would be fun to have a little bakery display case in our clubhouse's restaurant, showcasing a few small cakes, and maybe some cupcake 6-packs for guilty golfers to take home to the significant other who stayed home with the kids.

But until that time when I get my bakery outpost up and running, I'll be going on hiatus. I have loved the past three years of running my own little business - which, now that I think about, I guess I started while moonlighting at work - and I've really enjoyed this past year of sharing my baking and caking adventures with you here on this blog.

Before I go though, I wanted to leave you with one last cake. I got this request in January, for a friend of a friend's daughter's 9th birthday. I thought the horse stable idea was super cute, and I was able to pull it off in the nick of time - just a couple of days before I packed up all my baking supplies to help with decluttering and staging our house for sale.

The birthday girl is an avid horseback rider, and Tiki, P.C. and Oreo are her three favorite horses at the stable where she rides.

This is essentially a 2-tier cake, with a 9-inch round bottom tier and a carved 6-inch round top tier (chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling). The hay and grass are buttercream piped with Wilton's 233 grass tip, and I made our friends Tiki, P.C. and Oreo (along with their water trough) out of modeling chocolate.

I'm not going to say my modeling chocolate skills are the top of the line, but I think overall this cake came together nicely. It was a fun challenge for what is likely my last cake in what could be a long time.

Thanks for coming along for the ride this year, and I'm excited to embark on our family's next big adventure. For those of you in Ontario, I hope to see you out on our links this summer!

I'm loving the anticipation of Christmas in our household this year. The girls are 3 and 5, and as all parents know, at this age, their utter, uncompromising belief in Santa and in all the good in the world is palpable and infectious. So hauling out the holly and hanging up the brightest string of lights I've ever seen has seemed extra sweet this December.

A group of parent volunteers at Stacey's elementary school pulls off a fantastic Holiday Lunch every year, and this year's lunch was last Friday. It's quite a spectacle: a turkey dinner with the works, and the gym decked out with mom-crafted decorations. The kids look forward to it for weeks, and dozens of additional parents show up to help serve the lunch. It's heart-warming to watch the kids file into the gym with all these parents clapping and cheering and singing.

For the second year in a row, I volunteered to make the dessert treat: 20 dozen mini chocolate cupcakes with a vanilla buttercream swirl and tiny red and green sprinkles. For a commercial bakery, this may be just another standard job, but for a home baker like me, it's a decent sized undertaking.

But not one that I would miss for the world.

It's a pretty cool thing for your Kindergartner to know that her mom is the one who made dessert for the entire school. No doubt it'll embarrass her in a couple of years, but I'm embracing the love while it lasts.

The process took over our kitchen and dining room for two days: baking on Wednesday, frosting on Thursday, and delivering on Friday.

Still so proud of my logo designed by Honey & Fitz.

We happened to be in the midst of that mega snowstorm that dumped on everyone from here to New England, leaving this marshmallow world in our backyard.

Things will be pretty quiet around here this Christmas, which is just fine by me. I'm looking forward to everything 2015 has in store, and I hope you are too.

Merry Christmas to all!!