Baseball Birthday Party

My oldest has recently started to take an interest in softball. Every Monday we go to watch his Aunts play baseball and every time he hopes to play with them. So as it was getting closer to his birthday I decided to throw him a softball party.
Now that he is starting to get older I like to let him help me plan the party and decide what all he wants there. This is where my pinterest board becomes very helpful. I let him browse through all the cakes I had on my board and as soon as he saw the baseball glove he was hooked.  The cake Idea came from parenting.com

The day before his birthday I baked the cake. I had wanted to make this cake a bit more unique so I decided to make the inside of my cake look like a zebra stripe. I got my inspiration from Recipe by photo. She shows step by step how to make the zebra stripe cake. When I first saw her pictures I was very unsure of how that would work and I didn't want another pinterest flop, I decided to give it a try and if it didn't work I would just have the entire cake be chocolate. To make her you pour a fourth a cup of batter in the center of the pan and alternate between batters always pouring another fourth of cup. The batter magically spread out to the outer layers and worked just like she said it would.  Here is how it looked in the pan before I cooked it. After it was all cooked I froze it which make the cake a lot easier to work with when molding and frosting

The day of his birthday I got all the supplies ready to decorate his cake.  I colored the frosting brown, red, and black. I left some of it white for the baseball. My kids loved helping me stir up the flavors and trying to guess what it would be before it was all stirred in.

I like to work with my cake upside down. It gives me a flat surface that is easier to work with. Before I cut anything out I took a butter knife and made an outline of where to cut so that if I messed up I could easily fix it. I cut the fingers out and rounded them and then also cut the bottom to look more like a hand.

Then came the fun part..... Frosting the cake. I love seeing the cake come together and to have it start looking like the finished product. I like to make my cakes out of honey to make it more healthy so I also used a honey frosting. Many people have told me that it is impossible to decorate with honey frosting because it gets runny but I have found a few tricks to help with that. I like to put mine in the freezer for a couple of minutes so it will have the consistency I want. I also add a little flour to make it a little thicker.
I put a base coat of brown frosting on the cake. I like to do the bottom layer a little thick so that I will not have a problem with crumbs.

After that I did the black lines with a skinny tip. To make the ball on top I took a cupcake and molded the bottom of it to look like a ball. I then frosted the cupcake to look like a ball. Here is the finished product.

 

I also decided to put a five on one of the fingers which my son thought was a excellent addition to the cake.

Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe

 

Ingredients

1 1/2 packages of cream cheese

1/2 Cup Honey

1 tsp Vanilla

1/2 Stick of Butter 

2 TBL flour

Directions:

1. Cream butter, cream cheese, and honey until smooth 

2. Add vanilla and Mix for two minutes

3. Add the flour and refrigerate for and hour or freeze for five minutes to be able to use with decorating.

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Plan B, Find the Best Way to Clean Grout

All week I have been looking forward to a good long bike ride. I signed up for my first official ride, which is in two weeks. I will be riding 50 miles in the "Little Red" century in Lewiston, Utah. I checked the weather last night, three different sources. All signs pointed to clear weather in the morning!! I was up, dressed, helmet and all by 6:00 in the morning, and that hurts on a Saturday. I walked out into....rain. That's right beautiful Utah spring rain.

Time for plan B. 

I have desperately needed to clean the grout in my kitchen tile. 

Check out my disgusting grout lines :( 

So I googled the best way to clean grout and decided to try out the two methods that used basic, on hand supplies. I did one section using the peroxide and soda and a different section with hot water and Oxiclean to see which one worked best. Two of my sweet daughters agreed to assist me in the undertaking. Here is what we did:

Ingredients for method 1) 

Hydrogen Peroxide

 Baking Soda

 Supplies for method 2) 

Hot Water  

Oxiclean

Directions for  both methods are pretty similar. Start by putting a little bit of the liquid (Peroxide or Hot Water) on the grout lines and use your scrubbing brush to spread it along the grout line, then sprinkle the powder (Soda or Oxiclean) onto the grout line and scrub it in. **Not much scrubbing required :) Let the product sit on the grout lines until you finish the entire floor, then sweep up the loose powdery leftover product and mop as usual. I was surprised how easily the grimey guck came out. The whole process went pretty quickly, we finished the entire kitchen and entrance floors in about 30 minutes. When we finished, I couldn't tell the difference between the two sections. I think the peroxide and soda cleaned the grime faster, but they were pretty even in performance and results.
Welcome back pretty floor :)

Birthday Cakes

I love to create birthday cakes for my children. Here are a few that I have made over the years.  I didn't take pictures as I was making them, but if I get enough requests then I will create another post with directions and pictures showing the steps it takes to make them.
My cakes are all sugar free and made from scratch. My favorite sweetener to use is honey. It's natural, better for you and tastes just as good, if not better.
For Elden's third birthday I made him a "Bot" cake from Umizoomi, which is his favorite T.V. show :)
He loved the cake, and it was surprisingly easy to make.

This cake has a mishap from a younger sibling right before we took the picture :-(
At least most of it still survived.

My son's farm cake was one of my first cakes. I had made the fence out of pretzels and chocolate. As you can see from the picture, the chocolate had melted and the fence was drooping, however the rest of the cake still looked pretty presentable, and was worthy of a 2 year old's farm birthday party.

This dragon cake was made using two round cakes and was a big hit at the party.

Stephanie