Arctic Animal Baby Shower

Over the past year I have been involved in helping with several different baby showers. Mostly concentrating my efforts on decorations and desserts. I has been a really fun and inspiring experience. Most of all I was happy to help the "mom to be" feel special. For the month of January I will be posting the two showers I hosted or co-hosted, along with one post about cakes. I will share a free subway art as well as recipes in the up-coming posts.

This first post is a baby shower of my very own creation. The "mother to be" was going for an Arctic and Antarctic animal theme, focusing on polar bears, whales and penguins. The colors we chose were chocolate chip, soft suede, so saffron, and baja breeze (these are Stampin Up colors).

These are chocolate cupcake with cinnamon frosting. The whales were stamped onto cardstock, cut out, and taped to toothpicks. My recipe for the frosting is:

• 3 cups pdr sugar
• 1 stick soften butter
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2-4 T of milk ( I use Silk orginal light, gives it a nutty flavor)

Just mix it all up until thick and smooth; perfect for piping onto the cupcake.

 My friend Blue Eyed Carrots lent me this cute clip sign holder, which I used to label the food. The cool thing about about the clip holder is the clear block base. You can slip in a 1" square paper to coordianate with your event. Rather than waste time gluing the white lables to the blue paper, I printed them on sticker paper, punched them out and stuck them on.

 This is a cake pop. If you haven't been freaking out about these for the past few years I would check out Bakerella's website. This is my take on a penguin cake pop. To make this, instead of using a ball shape make a long oval and push the bottom up in the palm of your had to get a pear shape. Then dip the whole thing in the chocolate candy melt and later lean the tummy section into the white chocolate candy melt. I used the tiny candy coated kisses for the eyes and beak, dipping the eyes in the dark chocolate for pupils. Lastly I used star sprinkles for feet.

 These are shortbread cookies in polar bear shape dipped in white chocolate.

Our favors were make-your-own candy bags, with whoppers, blue taffy, white chocolate gummy bears (polar bears!). I found the candy scoop at Cash and Carry and borrowed the candy jars from Blue Eye Carrots. She found the jars at garage sales, great tip as those jars can be expensive. The bags had a label that said "Thank you" with the poster details around the edge.

The cake was two layers of chocolate with one layer of mint chocolate chip ice cream in the middle. The frosting was whipping cream dyed blue. Whipping cream does not dye very well, I had to use a lot of blue to get this shade. The bunting on top was made by my friend Blue Eyed Carrots, out of fabric sewn together and tied to skewer sticks.

 In the top photo the larger banners were made with paper put through the sewing machine. The pom poms were made with the tutorial on Martha Stewarts page. These take some time to fluff and you have to do it carefully or they rip, but they are less expensive when you do it yourself.

Finally, here is a close up of the poster. I saw a square poster like this somewhere without the last name and was inspired to make my own. Because this was a post-birth baby shower we were able to have all the baby stats.