Holiday card handmade with love!

So I got my new slice last weekend and have been waiting for a good purpose to use it. We are doing a secret Santa gift exchange at work so I thought I'd make a handmade holiday card for the person I received to start things off with. I like to play it safe so I'm going for more of a winter theme than a Christmas theme. It's a great card for a person of any belief!

I used table scatter from my favorite spot, none other than The Dollar Tree. They are little pieces of foam that are already sparkly. They come in the shape of snowmen and stockings and trees too! I also got the ribbon at The Dollar Treevtoo! The rest was up to me and my slice! Can't wait to make my next card!

Have a Slice! Electronic Digital Designer,** Frugal Find**

I am currently,"all baked out." I hit the ground baking from end of august until now and I've been through most, if not all, of my main fall baking recipes a few times already. I needed a break! A change of artistic outlet. I remembered being in one of my favorite spots, the store Tuesday Morning. Last week I saw a Slice cordless digital designer. It appeared to be a smaller version of a Cricut. This Slice came with a cartridge of pictures, fonts, and words, a glass cutting mat, foam embossing mat, a few colors for its drawing feature and some card stock,stickers, project idea cards,and a few other supplies for use. I noticed it was on clearance for $59.99, which was pretty affordable for a craft cutter. So naturally I figured it would have horrible reviews and be worthless to try. Well yesterday, I was getting supplies for a cake at Hobby Lobby when out of the corner of my eye I saw a few of the cartridge cards in various themes on clearance from $49.99 down to $10.79. So I decided to do some research and see what these little Slice's were all about. Being that most reviews were favorable and I only would use mine moderately I decided to go back and see if Tuesday Morning had any left. Much to my surprise they had a few left and were marked down an additional 25% off! Woo-hoo! In total my Slice was $48.30 with tax and all! I figured if it wasn't that great I've wasted 50 bucks on worse things. 

So I got it home and tried it out.....

So far it seems like a cool investment. Being as I don't currently have a party planned I might use it to make a few holiday cards?? This version is from 2009, Slice now has a newer improved Fabrique cutter that is like this version and a more efficient fabric cutter all in one. Many reviews of the one I have note that it too is capable of cutting fabric, so I may try to do an applique and I'll let you all know how that goes! I am about to go to Hobby Lobby now and snatch up one or two of the cartridge cards before they are gone!

Buckeyes, the homemade peanut butter cup!

So this week was pretty busy! There was a Volunteer's Bake sale at the hospital. That's when the volunteers of the hospital ask people to either donate baked goods to sell, or to buy some to help them collect funds for the annual scholarship they offer locally. So I was eager to help, and I did a little of both (baking and buying). I decided to make Pumpkin Cupcakes ( recipe posted last month) and Buckeyes! Buckeyes are an annual Thanksgiving tradition in our family. We are from Ohio ( the buckeye state) and I'm pretty sure that's how they got their name. Now we aren't talking about the nuts here! It's a homemade peanut butter cup essentially. It's as easy as 1,2,3...... No really the recipe is as follows

Buckeyes

Ingredients

1 lb. of butter

2 lbs. of peanut butter

3 lbs. of powdered sugar

1-2 bags of semisweet chocolate chips

paraffin wax ( I use 1/4 of a bar, but litle by little)

Directions

1- Mix butter, peanut butter and powdered sugar by hand until the dough doesn't stick to your hands. Roll into little balls of dough ( size them as you like, I use mini cupcake holders to help determine the size of mine) This part is messy! You can always have someone else add the powdered sugar little by little!

2- In a double boiler melt chips and paraffin wax, mix well. For those like me who don't have one, just use a smaller pan inside of a larger pan with boiling water (only enough to fill the bottom 1/4-1/2 full). Ideally the smaller pan should have two handles so it doesn't splash down into the larger one and ruin your chocolate when you look away for a second..trust me it happens!I have done it with a one handled pan no problem, it just takes some more babysitting.

3- Dip dough balls in melted chocolate and paraffin wax mixture using a skewer, fondue pick, or toothpick (I've used a fork before too, it just bothers me aesthetically because buckeyes have one hole at the top not 4)

4- Place freshly dipped buckeyes on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or foil. When the pan is full place immediately in the refrigerator. 

5- After buckeyes have set ( approx. 20minutes) Place them in mini cupcake holders if you want, or just eat them!

6- Store in the refrigerator in a container for longer shelf life ( I like them cold much better than room temperature)

** One batch yields approx. 100 buckeyes

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The Bake sale went well! I did have a few leftover pumpkin muffins, probably because 4 others made pumpkin bread/muffins/cupcakes?? The Buckeyes, however, were gone in a flash! Try them and you'll see why!

Actual Buckeye Nuts...just for visual comparison!

Wild 50th Birthday Zebra Cake

Wild at 50!That's the theme of my friend's mom's 50th birthday bash she's throwing this weekend. All decorations are zebra print with hot pink accents. I, of course was in charge of the cake! Yay! This was a pretty fun project! I started by zebra striping the cake batter. I did pink and white for the top tier and classic black and white for the bottom. The cake was vanilla, not chocolate and vanilla like most of the websites I viewed for tutorial purposes. Here's how it went....

The tutorials showed a nice circle on top of circle on top of circle. Ummm my batter would not do anything except slump over...it wouldn't thin out so i had to give it a little shake every now and then. It appears to have worked but its just not center is all.

Next I gathered all of my decorating supplies....

I got the sugar sheets at Michael's, the cake boards and candles at Party City and the cute foil bows/cake toppers at The Dollar Tree! Here's how it looked when I finished...

I felt like it was cute but missing something. So I tried this....

It definitely took the cake from,simple and cute, to party ready!

Pyramids, Gold, and Whippin it all up!

I was approached Sunday afternoon by a customer at my husbands restaurant about a wedding cake order that fell through for her. She really wanted a pyramid cake in homage to her to-be husbands home country. I was up for the challenge! I had 3 days! Here's what I came up with.....

She wanted a chocolate cake with whipped icing, to feed 50. It was a task getting the top of the pyramid to work, so I borrowed from THE CAKE BOSS and used rice crispie treats to form the top. I used a 10 inch circle, 2-9x9 squares, and one 8x8 square. I iced them and stacked them, then using a serrated knife I carved down each side. I realized depending on how one would cut this cake, it may have only fed 30. So I threw in the two tier! I was going to do sheet cake or cupcakes, but it really isn't much of a difference in time or effort to stack two smaller (an 8 inch and 6 inch) cakes on top of one another and throw some whipped icing on top. I used the stabilized whipping cream icing recipe by Wilton, it was great! Something to note, the first time I made the whipped icing I only had sparkly gold piping gel in a tube so I used that thinking I was eventually going to spray the cake gold anyway, but the icing still came out white before food coloring was applied. To end it I used cake graffiti edible gold spray paint by Duff!