When you live in a small-ish house with a big-ish backyard and you have kids with summer birthdays, you tend to subconsciously pray for sunshine all spring so you can have outdoor parties.

But over the past week, I watched the weather forecast show big fat rainclouds and ugly yellow thunderbolts sitting smack on top of Wednesday, Stacey's 5th birthday party.  The party that eleven Kindergarten girls were coming to.  In the house that can't fit eleven kids.

Not surprisingly, I woke up yesterday morning and it was pouring rain.  So I sucked it up and started in on Plan B.  Rather than picnic tables outside, we would have a picnic party on the floor inside, and I would have to somehow convince Andrew to hold the piñata while the kids beat it with a baseball bat because there's nowhere inside to hang it.  My last big genius back-up plan was to just turn on the Disney Fairy movies The Secret of the Wings or The Pirate Fairy when kids started going nuts.  (It WAS a fairy party, after all, and watching movies is KIND OF like doing an activity, right?)

I hung the tissue paper pom-poms (great tutorial here!) inside rather than outside under the pear tree, moved the furniture out of the way, and shoved our dining room table into the corner to give the kids room to play.

The party hats rested on the radiator instead of out in the sun.

BUT... since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?  100 points if you can correctly identify the movie and the character who said that line.

Miracle of miracles, that awful rain trickled to a stop and that crazy, gorgeous sun started melting the clouds away about an hour before party time!  I mopped off the deck, hung the piñata in the pear tree, and set up the fairy scavenger hunt in the gardens.  Game was ON!!!

The girls spent the afternoon decorating fairy wands, scavenger hunting, playing in the playhouse, playing Pin the Wand on the Fairy, eating junk food, and generally just scrambling around, in and out of the house.

I knew I couldn't top Stacey's Rapunzel cake from last year, so I went a different route.  Each girl got their own little fairy cake, and I made a layer cake for the parents and brothers to enjoy.

I cleaned Toys R Us out of their fairy dolls last week, brought home 14 of them at 30% off, and wrapped each one in plastic wrap up to her waist.  

The dolls were about four inches tall, so since standard cupcakes would be too small, I baked extra-tall cupcakes in a popover pan.  The popover-sized cupcakes were still a bit short, so I cut a hole in each with my (rarely used) apple corer for the fairies' legs to fit into, and I torted and filled each cake with buttercream in order to provide a base tall enough to hold the fairies up.  I used my offset spatula to smooth on each buttercream skirt, and piped on a rosette detail with a small star tip to complement the layer cake.

There were a few conflicts over favorite colors, but in the end I think the girls were quite fond of their fairy cakes.

I had wanted to swirl the pink and green together on the layer cake a bit more this, but I didn't have quite enough time or patience, so it didn't turn out quite as planned.  But my girl got to blow out her five candles with butterfly wings on her back and a ring pop on her finger.

My awesome mom had spent the morning making tea sandwiches and slicing fruit and veggies for the kids, and all the parents pitched in to help serve and clean up and generally make the party a success.

Here is two-year-old Clara on the scavenger hunt with the big kids.  She can't wait for her birthday in August.

After a long afternoon of playing outside, the remaining kids eventually did get to watch The Secret of the Wings.  All's well that ends well, right?

Happy 5th birthday Stacey!

PS I do realize that by saying all those mean things about the weather, that I have totally jinxed myself and it will definitely rain next year.  100%.

I made a cake for my husband's BFF's wife's baby shower this weekend.  They're expecting their first baby, a girl, in July, and when I got the invitation in the mail, it took me all of half a second to know that I wanted - nay, NEEDED - to volunteer to make a cake for the shower.

Just look at this invitation by Tiny Prints.  Does this not just scream "turn us into fondant sculptures!!"??

Ok, maybe it doesn't scream that exactly, but come on, how cute!!

So I immediately got in touch with my husband's BFF's wife's BFF to volunteer my services, and lucky for me, she hadn't been planning on a cake and made space for me on the sweets table!

I don't have a vast amount of experience with fondant sculptures at this point, so I'm learning as I go.  One of the big things I'm learning is that Rice Krispies Treats are crucial to maintaining the structural integrity of sugar sculptures that would otherwise be too bulky or heavy to be made purely of fondant or gumpaste.  Sculptures made out of pure fondant also take an eternity to dry completely, whereas a sculpture made with a base of RK Treat and covered with a layer of fondant or gumpaste will harden up nicely over a couple of days.  

Note that pure fondant will not dry as sturdy as gumpaste, so if you want your sculptures to last a while, you might want to use gumpaste only.  I don't tend to buy or make actual gumpaste anymore because I frequently need only a very small amount, so instead I knead in a bit of tylose powder to small amount of fondant to get a similar effect.  This is the tylose powder I use, and here is a tidy little summary of the differences between fondant and gumpaste.

We got home from our trip to northern California late last Sunday (update on that still to come), and on Monday I put together my plan of attack for the cake for the Baby Party, as Clara called it.  It's hard to explain to a 2-year-old that there is a party for a baby that doesn't even exist yet, and that we call it a shower instead of a party.  So Baby Party it is.  

I sculpted the bases of the two bigger animals (the elephant and the monkey) on Wednesday night, and finished them all off on Thursday night, well ahead of the Sunday party so they had time to settle and dry.  All of my fondant work is done after bedtimes at night.  Since the girls are still small (2 and 4) and they love to help in the kitchen (which, as any parent knows, can result in chaos), I generally save all my cake decorating for bedtimes, when the kitchen is mine alone, the little people are sleeping like angels, and the other big person is watching bang-bang-shoot-em-up movies on TV.  I baked the cake layers on Friday morning before the girls got out of bed, knowing I would crumbcoat the cake on Saturday at naptime and finish the decorating that night.

I used prepackaged Rice Krispies Treats for these sculptures.  This turned out to be a nice change from making the homemade version, which results in more dishes and mess to deal with when you are already up to your elbows in fondant and powdered sugar.

Here is a picture of the elephant at the 2nd stage of coming together.  I have yet to get the hang of taking pictures at every step of the process for a tutorial, so my photos below are kind of random moments of the process when I remembered to shoot them.

In this picture, I had hand-pressed and molded two RK Treats into an oval shape of sorts for the body, and mashed a third RK Treat into little squares for the legs.  I then started adding strips of pink fondant to round out the body in the places where it was a bit wonky.   Definitely art, not so much science.

I then realized I was short on pink fondant, so I switched over to some leftover white to cover the entire shape as a base coat to even out the bumps.

After lots of molding and shaping, here is the base layer of white fondant on the elephant's body.  Note there are still bumps and lumps showing in this coat, which I evened out with the final layer of fondant.

I left that white body to dry overnight, and then on Thursday I molded on a second coat of pink fondant.  In retrospect, I should probably have added a bit of tylose powder to this layer of fondant, as it kept denting ever so slightly by the pressure of my hands whenever I picked it up.

Of course the shape of the legs varies from the invitation image, but for me that was kind of unavoidable since I didn't want the whole thing to collapse on itself.

Next came the monkey and the little bird.  I gave the monkey an RK Treat core for her body so her heavy gumpaste head didn't sink into her body (again with the structural integrity).  I made her head on Wednesday night, left it to dry overnight, and finished her off on Thursday.  

I free-hand cut out her yellow face shape with a sharp kitchen knife, and I just use a small (food-use-only) paintbrush with water as my "glue".  I don't bother with edible glue or gum glue or anything like that, but then again, my sugar art is pretty basic and maybe edible glue is important for more delicate work, I don't know.  Ron Ben-Israel I am not.

Here is the monkey's faceless, decapitated head before I drew her face on with a black Americolor food coloring marker. 

The little bird also had an RK Treat core, and I used white lollipop sticks for her legs, which I colored black with the same Americolor marker and stuck into this green fondant blob to dry.

After adding some final details, here are all of three animals in their final state, along with the party invitation image they were inspired by.

Once these little guys were done on Friday night, the rest was a piece of cake, pun only semi-intended.  I had baked the cakes on Friday, so on Saturday during Clara's nap, I crumb-coated the cake in the pink buttercream I had made that morning, and I laid the fondant on after bedtime that night.

I thought these little guys would look cute on a baby blanket, so I imprinted a bit of quilting on a square piece of fondant by pressing the dull edge of a bread knife in a diagonal pattern before placing it atop the cake.

A few more details with that über-useful Americolor marker, and there you have it!

The mommy-to-be's BFF was also short some mini cupcakes, so I was happy to whip together these little vanilla mini-cuppies topped with sweet strawberry-vanilla buttercream.  The pink-and-gray jungle theme at this shower was just adorable!

The ladies who put this baby shower together really knocked it out of the park.  The colors and theme were super cute, and the sweets table was to die for.  Perfect pink, gray and white sugar-sanded cake pops, homemade scones served with jam and cream, homemade swirly white-and-pink candy bark and candy-coated pretzels, and the biggest, sweetest white-chocolate-covered strawberries you have ever seen.  The Hershey's Kisses even had "It's A Girl" paper strips!

While Leslee and Darren have a few months of new-baby insanity coming their way, they are also surrounded by amazing people who will love and support them through both the chaos and the fun, and beyond.

An early congratulations to you both!  Get ready to hang on and enjoy the ride!