Busy, Busy, Busy Bees

Today I got together with Jess to make Erik a surprise birthday cake for his party on Saturday (and I'm hoping that he doesn't for some strange reason come take a peek at this blog before the weekend!). We wanted to pretend we were the master pastry chefs from "Ace of Cakes," so we decided to make a four-layer triple chocolate and red velvet cake in the design of a poker table top. We were ambitious to say the least and even though we ran into some troublesome obstacles along the way, I think the final result looks pretty good (for 6 hours in the kitchen!!!). Hopefully it holds up until Saturday!

The first layer of our home made marshmallow fondant is finally on the cake (after it took about an hour to knead it to the right consistency!)!

For some reason it didn't occur to us that there wouldn't be any way for the green fondant "table top" piece to hold it's shape once we cut it out. It kept ripping and stretching out - what a nightmare!

In the end we used just a little bit of the green fondant to make the edges of the table top and filled the rest in with green icing - soooo much easier!

Happy Birthday Erik!

I got to spend lots of time with Stella Bella today - yay!

She's getting SOOO big and SOOO exceptionally cute!

Stella is 5 months old today!

The boys have been having a bit of a trouble adjusting to the time change, mostly because they're used to playing outside in the evening before dinner, and now it's just too dark to play outside after 5:00. It seems to make them a little more stir crazy in the evening, so I've been trying to make sure that we head outside as soon as they wake up from their afternoon naps. They've both really been having a lot of fun playing (their own version of) soccer with each other, and Sawyer is getting really good at controlling where he wants the ball to go. I can't wait until they're both old enough to actually play on a team together!

"We doing good teamwork, Mom!"