Rainbow Butterfly Cake

Today's post is one we had a lot of fun doing! A really great friend ours is celebrating her birthday today, so we decided it was about time we made her a cake! She wanted white cake, which I thought would be the perfect time to finally try out the rainbow cakes I've seen floating around the internet! I've also been obsessing over these sugar butterflies, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone. 

I won't go into too many details about how we made the cake because it was pretty straight forward. The cake was white cake tinted with food coloring until it was the shade we wanted. The frosting was cream cheese frosting, which you can find the recipe for here. As for the butterflies, I think we'll make a tutorial sometime in the future. Now on to the cake because we're just so excited with how it turned out! 

The cakes cooling off. I thought they looked like play dough.

The uncovered cakes while I was stacking and trimming them.

We tried to go with a tree bark sort of texture. 

Ai was making the butterflies while I was baking! This is usually how we work, I'm the baker and she's awesome at decorating! 

The butterflies while they were drying. 

More butterflies!

Ai's piping skills are phenomenal! 

We arranged the butterflies so that they spiraled upward in the order of the rainbow. 

Since the cake was round, it was utterly impossible to get all the butterflies in the picture! >_<

Beautiful blue butterflies! 

Transporting the cake was difficult! The poor butterfly on top decided to lay down! lol It was our fault for not giving the butterflies enough time to dry. 

The inside of the cake! 

We were so happy that the cake cut beautifully! 

That's all for this week folks! October is coming, which means we'll be working on Halloween costumes!!!! Happy baking and crafting! ♥  

T-shirt Scarves and Pinterest Addiction

Sorry there hasn't been a new post in two weeks! I've been too busy with my new Pinterest addiction! I'm just kidding (but actually I'm not! hahahahaha). So I jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon only recently because I knew it would send me down a deep never-ending vortex of craft and recipe ideas and admittedly I was terrified of this! Ai has been on for a couple of months now and I finally caved last week and signed up. And I was right about how terrifyingly addictive it would be, but I have to admit that I am completely in love with it! 

With the blog, we had only begun to scratch the surface of how creative everyone was out there in the world. Since joining Pinterest, I've come to appreciate just how incredibly talented and brilliant people are! There are so many wonderfully amazing ideas out there and I love how Pinterest has broadened everyone's horizons! 

Anyway, I fell completely in love with all those t-shirt scarves that everyone was doing because they seemed easy and super cute! Long story short, I got carried away and rummaged through the whole house looking for everyone's old shirts. Out of all the tutorials, this is hands down the best one out there. Be sure to watch the video it really helps to understand how to do it properly. 

I told you guys I got carried away. I went nuts and tried to look for all sorts of colors.

I really love the way these drape and they actually do keep your neck warm! 

A few tips about making these:

• I've seen people asking about whether or not shirts with print on them would work. I tested this out and the answer is no, especially if the screen printing is really thick. The pieces just don't seem to curl right if there's a thick layer of writing on it.
• The bigger the shirt, the more ropes you'll have. 
• If you want a chunkier scarf combine a few shirts.

I really liked the braided scarves too. There's a few tutorials out there, but I decided to write one up because this I did mine in a completely no sew method. 

You should be able to click on the picture to see the instructions better.

That's all for this week folks! I'm so happy that fall is finally here, it's my favorite time of the year! Happy crafting!♥  

Crepes with Caramelized Bananas

Crepes are something I've always wanted to make and I was always hesitant because everyone always seemed to be making a big deal over how difficult they were to execute properly. So I went searching for an easy to follow recipe and found one but modified the ingredients based on a suggestion from a commenter.  If you follow the directions, you too can achieve this yumminess! 

Crepes

Ingredients

• 1 whole egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2/3 cup all purpose flour
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons melted butter

Directions

1. Sift the flour and salt together into a blender. Add the rest of the ingredients. Blend until smooth. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Heat a skillet over medium-hight heat and brush with oil. Pour 1/4 cup of batter into pan, tilting to completely coat the surface of the pan. Cook 2 to 5 minutes, turning once, until golden. Repeat with remaining batter. 

 Tips

• Instead of using oil to coat the pan, I used nonstick spray before each crepe. I'm not sure if you'd need to do this for each crepe if you had a super nice nonstick pan. So just use your judgment. I was so afraid of them sticking, I probably overdid it a little with the spray.
• If you have a stick blender you can make this in a bowl and mix it with your stick blender or you can go old school and whisk this until you get all the lumps out! 
• These cook really fast, so do not leave them! 
• The great thing about crepes is that they're so versatile! You can fill them with savory or sweet ingredients. I was going for dessert crepes so I filled these with caramelized bananas. To make the the bananas I heated 1/4 cup brown sugar with 1 tablespoon of butter over medium heat in a skillet and let it go until it just started to caramelize. Then I threw in a pinch of cinnamon and salt and the chopped bananas and only left in on the heat long enough to evenly coat the bananas. 

I just love how pillowly soft sifted flour looks!

I'm trying to be one of those fancy food bloggers today and documenting the steps! 

I used a stick blender so that's why the batter is in a bowl. 

 I really do love crepes! 

 Here's the crepe all put together with the bananas! Also desert crepes just have to have whipped cream! 

That's all for this week folks! I hope you all go out and make lots of yummy crepes now! Happy cooking and crafting! ♥  

Hello Kitty Cookies

Sorry for not posting last week guys! I got busy and totally forgot I didn't have a blog written up! Anyway, this week's post is just a quick one. A couple week's ago I made some cookies as set dressing for a costume photo shoot. (I was re-shooting all the costumes I've made so far to prepare for October! I'm gonna be re-blogging the costumes with the updated photos to countdown to this year's Halloween costumes!) 

These were made on the fly and are the same sugar cookies I made here. They were covered with marshmallow fondant, which is the same one we use for everything! I made a little template out of paper for Hello Kitty's head and then cut them out with an xacto blade. I just sculpted little pieces of red fondant into triangles and circles for her bows. Her face was drawn on with food markers, which you should really get if you don't already have some. I think they're the best thing ever and make it super easy to add faces and details to things! The colored backgrounds were cut with a round scalloped edge cookie cutter. They were really simple and easy to do and would make really cute treats for a little girl's tea party! 

I stuck with fun and bright colors for the backgrounds!

Closer shot of Hello Kitty's face! 

I really loved how this blue turned out! 

That's all for this week folks! Happy crafting and baking! So excited that the holidays are coming up soon, we can't wait to see what all of you have planned for this year! ♥  

Farm Animal Cake Balls 3: Cows

This week's post is the final part of our animal cake balls. If you want to know how to make these check out our first post in the series. To round out our barnyard animals we made cows out of white cake with vanilla frosting. 

White Cake 

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons softened butter, for pans
• 2 1/4 cups cake flour, plus more for pans
• 1 cup whole milk, at room temperature
• 6 large egg whites, at room temperature
• 1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 12 pieces, slightly cold

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour 2 (9 by 2-inch) round cake pans and line bottoms with parchment paper.
2. Whisk together the milk, egg whites, vanilla bean seeds and vanilla extract in a medium bowl.
3. In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. With mixer running at low speed, add the butter, one piece at a time and continue beating until mixture resembles moist crumbs. Add all but 1/2 cup of milk mixture to crumbs and beat at medium speed until the mixture is pale and fluffy, about 1 1/2 minutes. With mixer on low speed, add remaining 1/2 cup of the milk mixture, increase speed to medium and beat 30 seconds more. Scrape sides of bowl and mix for 20 seconds longer. Divide the batter evenly between the cakes pan and smooth the tops using a rubber spatula.
4. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few crumbs attached, 22 to 24 minutes. Cool in the pan on baking rack for 10 minutes. Run a small knife around the side of the pan and invert cakes onto the baking rack, removing parchment paper, and let cool completely, about 45 minutes.

Close up of a cow! They were my favorite because of all the details Ai did on them! 

Hanging out at the top of the barn! 

Closer shot of their cute little cow faces! 

That concludes our farm animal cake balls! You can look forward to more cute cake balls from us in the future! Happy baking and crafting folks! ♥