Cinco de Mayo Cactus Cupcakes

Cinco de Mayo was last week, but Mike's work had their Cinco de Mayo potluck earlier this week. I made several things for him to take, including these Cactus Cupcakes. 

I thought they turned out really cute. The cupcakes were vanilla cake with green buttercream frosting. I used a Wilton Dessert Decorator Pro with a small star tip to apply the frosting. Just start in the middle and pipe little stars all around until the cupcake is completely covered. The pink sugar flowers (similar) were something I found at Hobby Lobby. If you don't want to use pre-made flowers, you could pipe pink buttercream in the center and that would be cute, too. I used orange and tan striped cupcake liners to look like terracotta pots. I thought that worked perfectly.

I thought these cactus cupcakes were perfect for a Cinco de Mayo celebration. Mike said everyone at his work really liked them. They had a lot of desserts and he ended up bringing 8 or 9 cakes back home.

I recently got a new cupcake and cake pop display and carrier, and this event was the first time I got to use it. It worked perfectly. It was easy to put the cupcakes into their spots and they didn't move around one I got them in place. I was concerned about how they would travel in the car so I asked Mike to send me a picture of the cupcakes in the carrier when he arrived at work. He indulged me in that and they looked perfect. 

Sadly, the leftovers did not arrive back home quite as neatly. I guess he was in a hurry to get home because a few of the cupcakes had fallen off their perches onto the tier below. I still think it's a great carrier though. Mike got a lot of questions and compliments on it from people at his work. I'll do a another post to show you all the neat features of the carrier I got.

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Baby Shower Candy Bar Game

One of the games we played at the baby shower was the candy bar game. I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to play this game before, but it was a lot of fun and sometimes pretty funny.

In the candy bar game, the host says a word or phrase related to pregnancy or parenting and the players have to guess the type of candy bar that best represents this word or phrase. Instead of printing a list of the possible choices, I decided to attach the candy bars to a poster board. I used a stiff poster board that I found at Hobby Lobby. I thought this method worked out really well because people could visually see their options and which choices are still remaining.

You can find many different lists of phrases and their matching candy bars for this game online, but I will share the list I used below. 

Baby Shower Candy Bar Game Matches:

Daddy at Conception	Big Hunk
The conception	Skor
Choosing a baby name	Whatchamacallit
Girl's Name	Baby Ruth
Boy Names	Mike and Ike
Anesthesiologist	Mr Goodbar
Epidural	Lifesavers
Delivery Doctor	Butterfinger
Labor and Delivery nurses	Sweet Tarts
Umbilical cord	Twizzlers
Hospital Bill	100 Grand
Preemie Baby	Runts
Chunky Baby	Rolo
Diapers, Formula, Medicine	Payday
Dirty Laundry	Mounds
Postpartum Belly	Jelly Belly
Breast Feeding	Milky Way
Dirty Diaper	Milk Duds
Time Alone	Zero
Mommy's Sleep Time	Fast Break
Lullabies	Symphony
New baby	Almond Joy
Triplets	Three Musketeers
Twins	Twix
Baby Laughs	Snickers
Cool Mom	Peppermint Patty
First year of Parenthood	Rocky Road

Some of the candy bars were hard for us to find. I actually put Emily and Mike in charge of finding all the obscure candy bars. They found a lot of them at CVS and Walgreens. You can go on the Walgreens website and look up which stores have certain candy bars. The Big Hunk is one of the candy bars that we had a hard time finding and we finally found on the Walgreens website at a store a few miles away from us. Mike and Noah went there to look for it and they found it right away.

Be sure to pin this so that you can find it later!

The Rocky Road bar was another one that we had trouble with. Mike and Emily eventually found it at a specialty candy store called Lohmann's Good Things in Norman.

This game was a big hit at the baby shower. I'd highly recommend it. Like I said, you can modify the list of candy bars to your liking. There are many choices out there for this game.

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The Best Cinnamon Rolls With Thick Ooey Gooey Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

A few months ago, I made a batch of cinnamon rolls for Mike's work. It was a lot of work! I started off using my hand mixer, but the dough was way too much for it. I ended up doing all the kneading by hand. They were good, but it was way too difficult.

After that, I told Mike that if he wanted more cinnamon rolls he was going to have to get me a Kitchenaid mixer. He told me to go get one. So I did. Since then, I've made several batches of cinnamon rolls for different occasions.

Want to see how I make them? I figured you'd want to know. The recipe is below along with some handy tips from me!

Yield: 12 large rolls or 24 medium sized rollsAuthor: Jennifer SmithPin it

The Best Cinnamon Rolls with Thick Ooey Gooey Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

These cinnamon rolls are so thick and fluffy with delicious cinnamon flavor. And the maple cream cheese frosting just takes these rolls over the top. Don't wait for a special occasion - make these today!

ingredients:

Rolls

• • 2 cups milk 
• • 1/2 cup butter
• • 1/2 cup sugar
• • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• • 1 package Active Dry yeast
• • 2 large eggs
• • 6 `1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Filling

• • 1/2 cup butter, softened
• • 1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
• • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Frosting

• • 8 ounces cream cheese
• • 1/4 cup butter
• • 1 teaspoon vanilla
• • 2 teaspoons maple extract
• • Pinch of salt
• • 1 pound powdered sugar
• • 1/4 cup milk or more for consistency

instructions

1. In a medium sauce pan, add milk, butter, salt and  sugar. Heat until just below the boiling point. When it starts steaming and bubbling around the edges, remove from heat and let cool until approximately 120 degrees F.
2. Transfer milk mixture to the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment and add yeast. Let sit for about 5 minutes until the yeast starts to foam.
3. Add eggs and mix until combined. Add flour a little at a time until the dough pulls away from the side of the pan. The dough should be soft and only slightly sticky.  Add more flour if needed. Knead for 3 minutes.
4. Transfer dough to a lightly greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled in size.
5. Divide the dough in half. Use a rolling pin to roll each half of dough into an 18-inch by 12-inch rectangle. Try to make it as square as possible on the sides. 
6. Spread one stick of softened butter over each rectangle. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Pat it lightly with the palm of your hands.
7. Starting with the long end, roll the dough into a tight log. Pinch the ends together and turn the log over so that the seam is facing down. 
8. Cut each log in half, then cut each portion in half again, forming four equal sections. Cut each of the four sections in thirds. You will end up with 12 cinnamon rolls from each log. 
9. Place cinnamon rolls into round four cake pan, two 9X13" pan, or one 11X17" pan or similar that have been sprayed with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap then a clean kitchen towel and let rise until double.
10. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake cinnamon rolls 18-22 minutes until slightly brown on top.
11. For the frosting, beat together the cream cheese and butter until well combined. Add vanilla, maple flavoring, and salt. Mix well. Add in powdered sugar a little at a time. Add milk until desired consistency. Frosting should be thick but pourable. 

notes

If I don't have a lot of time, I like to heat my oven to 200 degrees then turn off the heat and put my bowl of dough inside to help it rise faster. 
You can punch the dough down if it has risen to the top of the bowl, but you're not ready to roll it out yet. Just let it rise again and then go on to the next step.
If I'm planning to take the cinnamon rolls somewhere, I usually bake them in disposable round cake plans. You can find these at most grocery stores or you can buy them in bulk on Amazon. I usually fit 6-7 rolls to a pan.
If you have some rolls that start to come unrolled when you're slicing and putting them in the pan, it's okay to just tuck the loose end under your cinnamon roll. It will still come out perfect.
I like to make this dough in the evening and wait to bake the cinnamon rolls until the morning. I do steps 1-9 the evening before and then cover the pans with foil and put them in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, I take out the pans and let them warm up on the counter for maybe 30 minutes before I bake them (remove foil before baking.)  You can stack the round cake pans in the refrigerator, too. I think it helps ensure the cinnamon rolls will be even in height.
I also make the frosting the night before and just put it into a gallon sized zip top baggie. I put the bag of frosting in the refrigerator overnight and then just snip off the corner and pipe the frosting onto the cinnamon rolls after they bake.
These cinnamon rolls freeze well. After they have been frosted, let them cool and then put each cinnamon roll into a separate quart sized freezer bag. Or you can put several together in one bag. When you get ready to use them, just pull them out of the bag frozen and heat them in the microwave.
If you like bigger cinnamon rolls, you can skip the step where you half the dough and just make one 18-inch X 12-inch rectangle out of the dough. This would make 6 large cinnamon rolls. 
I've tried to double this recipe a couple times, but the dough is too much for my mixer to handle and it gets all stuck in the motor. If you want more dough, just mix up a second batch.

http://www.gracelikerainblog.com/2017/05/the-best-cinnamon-rolls-with-thick-ooey.html

I love making the big, thick fluffy rolls. They are so delicious, but it's way too much for most people to eat.

They look great and would be wonderful if you want to impress somebody. You can make them for bake sales or people with big appetites.

Or you can just eat them all up. Or freeze them. Or just eat them. 

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Emily's Salt Dough Map

A few weeks ago, Emily's class made 3D salt dough maps in class.  We had to make the salt dough at home and send it to school in a plastic baggie and provide the pizza box and supplies to decorate the map, but they did the rest of the project in class.

Salt Dough Recipe

4 cups flour

2 cups salt

2 Tbsp cream of tartar

1 1/2 to 2 cups water (add a little at a time until it's the consistency of Play-Doh)

Mix together the dry ingredients then add the water a little bit at a time until the dough is the consistency of Play-Doh. Don't be afraid to use your hands. Knead for a few minutes until smooth. 

I told Emily that we could whip up this dough really quick with the Kitchenaid mixer, but Emily said that her teacher said to mix it by hand. Okay fine. You can do it by hand, too. 

I thought Emily's map turned out GREAT! I was really impressed with it. She decorated it with acrylic paints and labeled it with a Sharpie marker. 

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Wordless Wednesday - Flower Shopping After Church

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How to Make an Edible Animal Cell Cake

Several weeks ago, Emily had the opportunity to make a cell cake for extra credit in her science class. It could be made of any food as long as it was all edible and large enough to feed half of her class.

She chose to make an animal cell cake, which is round. We did a lot of research on the internet to get some ideas for what to use for different parts of the cake.

Emily wanted to look like the cell was cut open so we baked one cake in a large round baking pan and another cake in a large glass bowl to make a dome for the top of the cell. We cut off some dome cake so that we can add in all of our cell parts. 

Here are the items we used for different parts of the animal cell:

Yellow frosting - Cytoplasm

Orange frosting - Cell membrane (add red food coloring to the yellow frosting to make things easy on yourself)

White candy melts - Ribosomes

Airhead Extreme candy belts - Golgi body

Large round lollipop - Nucleus

Sour gummy worms - Rough ER

Red Mike & Ike - Smooth ER

Orange frosting - Nuclear membrane (put some frosting in a plastic baggie and snip off the end to pipe the frosting around the nucleus)

Red gummy bears - Mitochondria

White jelly beans - Vacuole

If you try it, let me know how it goes for you.

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Spring Time, Flower Time

We finally got out and got our spring flowers this weekend. Want to see a quick tour?

Emily's new hibiscus in the barrel. I can't wait to show you the color of the flowers. (The blooms got knocked off during transit.) I'm loving the pretty colors of the coleus in the green pot. I need to get a closer picture of it. 

 

Going to try some begonias in the boot this year. It doesn't have drainage holes so it's hard to keep the moisture right. If this doesn't work, we might need to try some cactus or succulents. 

The green pot has the blueberry bush in it. I was reading up on blueberries last night and it said I needed more than one plant for cross-pollination if I want to have any blueberries so we'll see how it goes. I wasn't planning to have a whole blueberry farm in my backyard. 

We got a fancy hydrangea for the front flower bed. It's supposed to have evolving colors all through the blooming season. I've never had a hydrangea before so we'll see how it goes. I love how big and bold the flowers are though. 

For the pots in the front, I went with a red and white theme. I put a couple different types of trailing flowers in the urn by the front door. I'm hoping the mandevilla vine turns out to be really showy with a trail of red flowers down the side. 

I always like to have some spikes in my tall pots for height. I got some in a dark purple shade this year. 

I usually have really good luck with begonias in my big pots. I went with red flowers on the begonias to go with the red theme. I buy bigger pots of flowers for the front so that they'll fill in quicker.

I still have one more pot in the backyard to fill. Any ideas?

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Eating At Eischen's

For supper tonight, we took the kids to Eischen's Bar in Okarche, Oklahoma. It's very well-known around this area, but we'd never been there before. It's about an hour drive from our house so that's probably part of the reason we've never visited before now. 

Eischen's is a real experience. They don't have a lot to choose from on the menu, but what they do have is really good.  REALLY good.

We had a whole fried chicken, okra, cheese nachos, chili cheese nachos and a frito chili pie. That was WAY too much food. Obviously, we did not know how large the portions were going to be. We would have been fine with a chicken, okra, and one of the nachos.

Emily really liked the frito chili pie. Noah liked to eat his chicken on bread with ketchup.

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Cool Happy Smart

Noah's class made a word cloud at school. Noah wrote his name on it and then his classmates took turns signing it and putting kind things about Noah on it. I thought it turned out so cute!

Noah's classmates think he's cool, happy, smart, silly and "kute". I happen to agree!

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Teacher Appreciation - Bath Bombs

This week was teacher appreciation week at the kids' school. The school had different themes each day - Cards and Notes, Lovin' from the Oven, Meet the Need, Favorite Things. But the PTA also had different things going on for the teachers each day.

We did not participate in all the events, but we contributed several things I'm going to share on the blog.  

One of the things we did is send tins of fizzy bath bombs to the teachers. Super easy!

I found some bath bombs in tins on Amazon and just added a tag that I printed off the internet.

These are the tags I found online. So cute and so easy.

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Frontier City Field Trip

Today was field trip day for Emily's class! They went to Frontier City, which is a local theme park. I went along as a chaperone.

There were 7 girls in my group. We all had a good time. One of the hardest things was trying to keep up with everyone when some girls did not want to ride the same rides as the others. 

I took quite a few pictures, but I don't have permission to post pictures of the other kids online so I had to crop some of them out of the picture. 

One of the rides we found was The Tornado, which is the Tilt-A-Whirl!  I rode it twice. I think Emily rode it three times. I love that ride. It was a lot of fun. 

Some of the girls were wanting to ride the Silver Bullet, which is one of the big rollercoasters. We headed over there and when we got close we realized that the line for the ride was very short, in fact non-existent. It took me a second to figure out what was happening, but the ride had gotten stuck at the top and the fire crews were there rescuing people off the ride!

They were like 80 feet up in the air or something crazy like that! The news helicopters were circling overhead and broadcasting the rescue live on the TV and internet. It took them about 2 hours to get everyone off the ride.

Thankfully, none of the kids from our school were on the ride at the time and everyone made it off there safely.

Since we were not able to ride the Silver Bullet, we kept walking and eventually found the water rapids ride. We got sooooo wet! I guess that's the point of the ride, but it was cold out there today and we were very wet. But this amusement park has a full-body heated dryer that you can pay to use. We all get into it together and tried to warm up a little bit. When I got home a couple of hours later, my clothes and shoes were still very wet. 

It was a good field trip and a lot of fun. I hope it's something that the kids will remember for a very long time.

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Wordless Wednesday - Teacher Appreciation

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It's raining, it's pouring

In the last 24 hours, we've gotten about two inches of rainfall and our backyard really looks it. 

Noah wanted to go out and play in the water, but it was rainy and cold so we stayed inside.

Someone was out enjoying the weather though.  This big bunny girl was out checking out our yard. We were wondering if she was looking for a place to have babies. A couple years ago, a bunny made a baby nest under our swing set fort. We decided to give her a strawberry to eat. I was surprised how quickly she went over to check it out. I would not be surprised if the strawberry was completely gone by tomorrow morning. The internet says not to give bunnies too many sweet fruits. The internet is always right.

Several parts of our yard retain water when it rains so we have quite the pond going on by our fence right now. I think I need to make a dry creek bed over in there area or something so that it can handle the water a little better. Thoughts on this?

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Elephant Cake Pops - Let's Talk About the Elephant in the Room

Elephant Cake Pops - How to make Elephant Cake Pops

How to make Elephant Cake Pops

Edited: I edited this post to add information about how to make the grey color of the elephants.

One of the things Emily and I made for the baby shower was these cute elephant cake pops.

I definitely need to work on quality control if I ever do this project again, but everyone seemed to like them.

I followed these instructions that I found online. She had a very good tutorial on the process.

The ears are blue candy melts. The trunk is made from the same candy melt that has been trimmed down to a trunk shape.  The feet are dehydrated marshmallows. The heart on the nose is a heart-shaped sprinkle. 

The Feet

Let's talk about the feet for a minute. Back around Christmas, I'd seen some Jet Puffed Mallow Bits dehydrated mini marshmallows in a cute little container. But I could not find them anywhere in the store. And they were sold out or extremely expensive anywhere I found them online. So I found another dehydrated marshmallow product on Amazon that was cheaper. I ordered it ... and was very surprised when a 1 pound bag of dehydrated marshmallows showed up at my house. Anybody have suggestions on ways I can use about a million dehydrated mini marshmallows?

The other thing I wanted to say about the dehydrated mini marshmallow feet was that when I got them out of the bag and started working with, they rehydrated very quickly and began to stick to everything. So you might want to just get a few out at a time. You also have to make sure you adhere the marshmallow feet to the cake ball using melted candy before you dip the elephant into the melted candy. 

The Trunk 

I used a small metal decorating tip to cut the candy melts into the shape of a trunk. I was able to get about two trunks out of each candy disk. I used the exact same blue candy melt discs that I used for the ears. These are the blue candy melt discs that I used. I bought two packages and had one leftover. I only made about 24 cake pops though. Actually, I made probably twice that many balls, but only dipped 24 of them. Anyway, you will want to dip the trunk into candy melts and push it into the cake ball before you dip the entire elephant in the melted candy. 

The Heart

I think the red heart is one thing that wins these elephant cake pops. I used these red heart sprinkles. They were the perfect size. 

The Eyes

I ordered these edible markers online to use for the eyes. I had a very hard time getting them to write and so some of my elephant eyes were pretty messy and uneven. I still don't know what I did wrong there, unless the markers were not made to write on candy melts. 

The Grey Color

The grey color of the elephants was made by mixing 1 part black candy melts with 3 parts white 

Some of my elephants started to droop on the stick while they were drying. I think these were ones that did not get a good amount of candy melts between the stick and the cake ball. You should let the candy melts pool around the stick a little bit so that the cake ball doesn't move or come off the stick.

I am probably doing a terrible job explaining, but just look at the tutorials that are online and you will get the idea.

Also, be prepared to be in the kitchen for a while because it's definitely a process to get them all decorated up. But I think it was worth the effort!

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Cheater, Cheater?

This kid - what am I going to do with him? On Friday, he wanted to wear this shirt to school because it had one of his spelling words on it.

Yes, I let him wear it.

He would have spelled ROAR correctly anyway. He's a great speller. 

Smart boy.

And handsome.

And pretty silly, too.

Yep, that's my Noah.

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Baby Shower Sneak Peak

On Saturday, we went to Mandy's baby shower. Emily and I helped make some of the food. I want to share more about some of the things we made, but first I just wanted to post some pics of the sweets tables.

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Honor Choir

This spring, Emily tried out and was accepted into the Honor Choir at her school. They practiced after school one day per week.  A few weeks ago, they had their Honor Choir performance at the local high school. The performance included Honor Choirs from all the elementary schools that feed into our high school.

We were sitting up in the balcony during the performance and I couldn't get any good pictures. This was the best I could do. Can you find Emily? She's on the back row.

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