ABC Baby Shower (neutral)

This baby shower was a collaboration with the mother and the sister of the "mom to be." It was so fun working with them to make it a special day. They chose a neutral theme of ABC's and we went with primary colors and green for our color scheme. The above and below pictures are of the individual cakes I made for the shower. I got the idea from Martha Stewart.

 The small plate was our vegan version of the cake.  The non vegan cake was a white buttery cake filled with a whipped cream, cream cheese, seedless raspberry jam mixture I found online. Because I have a dairy allergy using cool whip and Toffuti Better Than Cream Cheese works just as well. The vegan cake was triple chocolate. Both were covered with ganache.

To make individual block cakes like this you bake a 9x13 cake in a pan without rounded corners. Doing this will help you keep more cake from being removed when shaping. To add a filling layer divide the cake in half horizontally, fill and put the top back on. Freeze or refrigerate until stiff. I froze it for around 5 minutes. Then divide the cake into squares using a ruler as your guide. My cakes were about an inch and a half square. Freeze them again and take one or two out at a time and coat with ganache on a wire rack with a jelly roll pan under to catch the excess ganache to re-use. Use a knife to spread it on to the cake evenly. After all of them are coated put them in the fridge and make your decorative frosting. In order for all the cakes to look similar I made the decorative frosting all vegan. I used Earth Balance vegan butter sticks. Have fun decorating. Another product I love is ENER G Egg Replacer, a great substitute for egg.

 The following pictures are at the shower. We used wooden baby blocks to decorate the house.

 I designed an ABC subway art to be a gift and decoration for the baby and the shower.

 Sarah, sister of the "mom to be," found these cute blocks at the Container Store and filled them with baby pictures of the "mom and dad to be."

I borrowed this canvas with clips, from my friend Blue Eyed Carrots, to have guest put up their well wishes to the family. Guests wrote their well wishes on hand stamped ABC note cards in four different colors. For a fun craft the guests decorated baby blocks with non toxic paint for the baby to keep.

Sarah and I covered mason jars with ribbon and tags for guest to write their name on and keep for drinks. Mason jars and be purchased at any grocery store 12 for $9.99, a cheap and trendy choice for glasses if you don't have many yourself. Paper straws were provided.

Here is a close up of the subway art. To get your own free copy you can download it here.

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.