The Suphero Birthday Party

This is Isaac, my 6 year old superhero!

The table with all the goodies!  Everything on this table was gluten-free, peanut-free and homemade: chocolate and white cake/cupcakes, lemon buddies chex mix and muddy buddies chex mix with Nutella and a little cream instead of peanut butter, chocolate dipped GF cookies from Glutino.

My super CTR-Boy cake!

That's layers of chocolate and white cake with cherry Ganache filling! 

(I'm still recovering from the sugar high!)

And it was good!

 

Every year we have a Pinata--this year I got a pirate because it was the only "bad guy" character I could find--the boys loved it!

 

That's it--thanks for looking!

My First Fondant Cake

Tomorrow is my son Isaac's 6th birthday party--I've been planning for months what we would do and what kind of party it would be, ect.  We decided on a superhero party and so I set out to make the perfect cake: one with his superhero name on it--CTR-Boy!  A little bit of back story: I wrote him a few stories involving CTR-Boy who has the power to Choose The Right and be reverent and tell the truth, that kind of thing--he LOVES the stories and as CTR-Boys name is Isaac as well, he naturally assumed the stories are about him.  Not far off as they are for him--lol!

Anyway, back to the cake!  Everything at the the party is either dark or light--like white chocolate dipped vanilla cookies next to chocolate dipped cookies--so the cake is layers of gluten free chocolate and white cakes.

 The filling is cherry Ganache--a big thanks to Inspired-by-Michelle for posting  for posting this awesome tutorial!  Now before you go thinking I am awesome for trying a new sweet for frost my cake--I planned to use the Ganache to frost the entire thing, only the find out at the last minute that you have to let it sit over night before you can frost with it--oops!

 So I made Butter-Cream Frosting instead.  A big thanks to foodnetwork.com
for posting this recipe!  As it turns out, *that* frosting I have always loved but didn't know what it was so I couldn't make it is actually fresh butter-cream frosting.

Do you like my awesome cake turner?  I nearly toppled my cake a number of times--next time I'm going to make a Lazy Susan with a paint can or something.  

This was a very precarious way to frost!  lol!

The frosted product.

Fondant!  once again, I stole this from some awesome person on youtube--How to make Marshmellow fondant.  I loved this vid--it was super easy and quick to make.   

I printed out a big sized CTR sheild as a pattern and used an exacto knife to cut it out.

Last I added a few loving words in red Ganache.

Not bad huh?

UPDATE:

 

Upon request, this is the end product--now you can really see the layers!

What day is it, Mommy?

All last month I was plagued with questions from my home-school kindergartener: "What day is it?" "When will it be Christmas?" "How long till uncle Branden comes?"  "Is it my birthday yet?"

The reoccurring answer was "soon" accompanied by a field-trip to the calendar to discuss what day it actually was and how many days there would be between now and the event he was asking about.  For those of you who are wondering, his birthday is in February and he was not happy about that.

As a result I set out to make him his own calendar to help him learn the days, months and seasons of the year.  This is what I came up with.  If you want to make one yourself, all the materials were either on hand or purchased at Walmart.  Check it out and don't forget to comment!

 

 

I started with an old picture frame.

Spray-painted it green as green is my son's favorite color.

Painted a bunch of "craft sticks", they are thicker then regular Popsicle sticks.

Originally I chose blue for winter, green for spring, yellow for summer and red for fall; after painting one sick yellow I decided orange was better for the project.

Notice I painted extras in each color, I am a bit of a perfectionist and I didn't want to have to start over if I messed one up.

I used scrap-booking alphabet stickers to label the months.

The popcicle sticks have both the number and name of the months on there to make it easier to explain the order they go in.

This is everything laid out so I could see it.  

The fabric in the background is an old flannel sheet, I plan to change the fabric by the seasons.

I added velcro tabs to the popcicle sticks  and glued velcro to the glass.  The velcro enables him to swap out names of the month and makes it more fun.

After everything was all in place and the back secure, I used dry erase marker to write in the days of the month.  I love dry erase and this way I don't have to swap out for a new calendar every month. 

There you have it, the finished project!

 

What do you think?

UPDATE:  After working with him on writing date a few times, I decided to put the year on the bottom to make it easier.  This is the final product:

Don't look at the glue--I didn't a razor blade to scrape it off with.