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{ cupcake stand }

Just finished cleaning the laundry room, kitchen and bathroom so I'm allowing myself to blog now.

So if you read earlier you know that I made cupcakes for a baby shower. I knew I was going to need something to display them on and my recent cake stand find from Ross wasn't going to be enough and I wasn't going to spend another $15 (still a good bargain) on another cake stand that I really wouldn't need. So I decided I was going to do what I've seen everyone do and make my own stand. I ended up going to Goodwill and Salvation Army and finding everything, the whole stand was under $10. It could have been less had I gone to Salvation Army the day before on their 1/2 off day, but what do you do? The only mistake I made was the adhesive I used, I used the Gorilla glue that puffs up and dries white, also this morning I discovered the bottom piece came unglued so I'm going to scrape off the Gorilla glue and use glass glue. I had to use a box cutter to scrape the excess glue off and then used some ribbon to hide the glue that you can see through the glass. I was going to spray paint the glass white but I really liked the way it looked clear and I think the ribbon added something to it, especially for the shower. Also because you can see through the top plate and see glue I took some parchment paper and cut out a scallop with my Big Kick and stuck it to the top and it turned out great! This was super fun and now I'm using it to put fruit on.






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{baby shower gifts}

Today I wanted to share the gifts that I made for Annie's soon to arrive baby Michael. I wanted to make another tile like the last for his room. The room theme is space monkeys and his mommy drew a mural above his crib of a monkey in a space suit on the moon holding a flag with his initials, it's so cute. I wish I had a picture of it. So there is a scrapbook store here that is going out of business and they have everything 75% off so I went in to see what they had left. I found a space embellishment pack, some star paper and chip board letters that were perfect and mad was a deal. Because of all of the money put into the shower I needed something creative and inexpensive, so I was very pleased. Here is what I came up with for the tile and card.






I also wanted to give her more than just a tile so I saw this adorable idea at Little Birdie Secrets. There is a baby resale shop in the same shopping center as the scrapbook store, I know score on one stop shopping with a baby! So I found 3 really cute onesies and 1 nightgown. The receiving blankets weren't up to my standards so I found those at Ross. I don't pay full price for anything if I don't have to and ended up getting 20% extra off at the resale store. I was hoping that I got a good deal on the blankets at Ross so while at Target later that day I checked them out and I ended up saving $4 so I was happy. The only other thing I needed to get was the cupcake box. These were more than I expected but with 40% off coupon it wasn't that horrible and of course I already had ribbon and coffee filters on hand. It was great to use up some of my coffee filters too because we have a grind and brew now and just use the basket so my filters are just going to waste. Anyhoo, I think this turned out pretty cute.



I just realized I didn't get a picture of them in the cupcake box, oh well you get the idea. Then I just had a little gift bag with a couple of things I found while out shopping, nothing really. The magnet was a plain wood magnet that I colored with my Bic Mark-its.
So these were my gifts of course including the shower.

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{baby shower ~ part 2}

So yesterday I had to leave quickly to go take care of Hannah and might have to today too. But I left off talking about some of the games and things we did for the shower. One of my most favorite things that we did was an Alphabet Book for the baby. I saw this on facebook thanks to Prudent Baby. It was so cute I had to do it. We only had 18 people at the shower so Annie and I are going to finish up the rest of the alphabet hopefully this weekend. Here's pics of everyone drawing their pages. I was thinking keep it simple but some of the girls really got their creative juices flowing. More baby shower stuff to come later.


hey there's my pom poms under the table.


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{Annie's baby shower ~ part 1}

Well it's finally time to the big reveal of the baby shower. Well the morning of the baby shower didn't go quite as planned I ended up getting started later than I should have. I thought I was doing good but then everything ended up taking way longer than it should have and I didn't realize how long loading the car and setting up would take. I got to the location about 30 minutes later than I wanted to so I had to run around like a mad woman to get everything set up and get the cupcakes iced. Luckily my mother-in-law was there to help and then my sister-in-law showed up early and was able to help put some of the food out and make the punch, they were life savers. The father-to-be was there too and helped untangle the balloons and hang the banner. Everything that could go wrong that day did of course. The beam I was going to hang the pom poms from was way too tall to reach so they ended up getting put under the glass coffee table. I didn't have time to worry about it so I just had to let it go. I think I was being taught a lesson that day. Even though guests were showing up as I was running around finishing up we ended up only starting 6 minutes late and the guest of honor was able to see everything set up.
I was all flustered and not myself because during running around poor little Hannah was crying pretty much the whole time but she settled down once the shower started, thank God!
So the cupcakes were a success, everyone seemed to like them and the chocolate covered pretzel sticks that I made were a big hit. I will definitely do those again.
The cupcakes were banana which was requested by the mommy-to-be. I was told by one of the guests that I should make cupcakes professionally but I can't take the credit.  I didn't want them to be like banana bread so I scoured the internet to find a good banana cupcake recipe and I found one at schweetnsavory. The only thing I changed on the cupcakes was I didn't mash the banana I just cut them and then let the mixer chunk them up. I did a test batch a couple of weeks ago of 12 and they turned out great. I also change the frosting up a bit. The cream cheese frosting was a bit heavy for my taste so I made it to her instructions and then added cool whip to lighten it up and it worked, it also gave me extra. I wanted to have more icing on the cupcakes but I was in such a hurry and didn't want to run out that I skimped a little, but they looked ok. I had so much left over and my husband was mad that I had given the extras to Annie that I made chocolate cupcakes yesterday to use the rest of the icing, yummy.
The punch I made was also really good, the colors for the shower were blue, yellow, green, white and some teal so I wanted a green punch. It consisted of 1 can frozen limeade, 1 can frozen lemonade, 2 liter ginger ale, 1/2 can pineapple juice and lime sherbet on top. It had a tart kick to it and I liked that.
The goodies I had were chocolate covered pretzels, chocolate covered marshmallow pops (the milk chocolate ones were way better than the white chocolate, it made them too sweet), veggies and dip, apples and caramel dip and spinach dip and crackers. I should have known how things were going to go when I went to the store a couple of days before to get the bread for the bread bowl I was going to have for the spinach dip and they were all out of the bread, so thank God for crackers.
The games we played were baby bingo, baby babble (word scramble) and then guess how many dinner mints are in the bottle.
I'm going to have to write more later. This is getting long and Hannah is getting annoyed with me, lol.





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