Tea Party.

Matt's sister just got married on the 6th of July, but back in June, I offered to throw a bridal shower for her at our house.  We decided to go fairly simple and just have it be a tea/coffee type deal, so I decided our theme would be a tea party.  I made 4 types of tea sandwiches to go with our coffee and tea, and then decided to also make a cake, of course!  I've been reading this blog lately: http://sweetapolita.com/.  She has tons of fabulous sounding cakes and excellent directions on cake assembly and mixing instructions.  She has a recipe on there for a whipped vanilla frosting, that even has mixing times and speeds for a kitchen aid mixer - which I love - it's essentially fool proof!

So anyways, on her blog she has a recipe for a Vanilla Blackberry Mascarpone cake.  It sounded AMAZING, and she also has a great video tutorial on how do to an 'ombre' type swirl frosting...which I thought sounded fun, so I went for it.

What you can't really see in the pic is that it was supposed to go purple, white, yellow - but the yellow kinda smeared into the white...no big deal.  I have to say this cake was DELICIOUS.  In fact, I normally just use boxed cakes for my cakes and they turn out fine...but this one was very good.  The frosting was so creamy and almost light, which made it very easy to work with.  It also seemed like it didn't crust as quickly as my normal butter cream recipe, which I also LOVED, since there was ample time to go back and fiddle however I needed to.  I think that's a definite MUST for Colorado, with it being SO dry here.  I will definitely be using this recipe again.  I wish I would have taken a pic of the insides, because the blackberry compote was so beautiful!  Yum.

The 4 year old.

It's amazing to me how time flies.  At the moment it seems to be going very slowly, but then all of a sudden it's been 3 months and I can't figure out what I've been doing the whole time!  My oldest had her 4th birthday in May.  I can not BELIEVE that she's four.  She continually blows my mind daily; whether it be something she learned at school, or something sweet and kind that she does for her baby sister.

Last year for her 3rd birthday, I was still in the "4th trimester" with the baby, and we had a hard time getting anything done for her birthday.  I did make her a cake, but it wasn't the greatest or the cutest.  It was a giant cupcake...which I didn't really like how it turned out.  This year we told her we could have a party somewhere and she chose Monkey Bizness.  It's a giant indoor play area for kids, and they have  couple of rooms that they can have parties in.  For mothers day Matt got me a book on cakepops, so we decided that for this birthday party that Miss Muffet could pick out a couple cake pops that we would take as the treat at the party.  Wouldn't you know it, she picked out aliens, butterflies, flowers.  She thought the aliens were super spooky so they were a must.

I have to say though, they were once again a PAIN to make.  The aliens weren't as bad as the butterflies and the flowers.  I was 'gluing' (with chocolate) cake confetti to the flowers and butterflies to decorate them, and was sorta hating every second of it.  I think it took me 7 hours from start to finish...bleh.  They were delicious though - I just used white cake and white frosting, and the kids gobbled them up.  So, I just need to pick something easier next time.

For her actual birthday, which was on a Wednesday, I let her pick out a cake from my cake book.  She has had her eye on the princess castle cake for nearly a year, so I decided we could make it.  The tricky part with this cake was that it is made out of swiss rolls, which was odd, because nowhere in the book was there a recipe for swiss rolls, so I assumed I could buy them somewhere.  WRONG.  After Matt and I both searched in multiple grocery stores, we found those little cake roll things (gross), but that's all we could find.  So for the smaller thinner towers I did use the small ones that we bought, but had to experiment with making a swiss roll from scratch.  It was harder than I thought it would be - and after burning 2, I just peeled off the burnt parts and rolled it up with some whipped cream, cut and froze them.  Come time to cover them in fondant, I thought they were going to be SUPER soggy and gross, so I was very very worried how everything was going to turn out.  When it came time to cut and eat, shockingly it was all pretty good.  I was surprised.

The other one annoying part about this cake was those marshmallows!  The picture in the book had these beautiful well formed perfect looking marshmallows - mine however were NOT so beautiful, so I think the marshmallows look a little crap-tastic, but the Munch didn't mind - she just gasped and said "it's beautiful, mama!"  That's all I needed.