Charity's 18 Months

Charity just turned 18 months on the 4th. She is such a happy little girl and is constantly laughing and playing. She loves her mommy and daddy and loves her bampa (interchangeable for both Grandpa and Grandma as of yet) and she adores her "Zizzies".

Here are a few pictures of her we had done for her 18 months.

She has been a little sick as of late. It seems that just as she is getting better from one thing another one gets her. The day we had the pictures done she was sick and in the beginnings of an ear infection. Sadly the infection got so bad the poor kid had her ear drum rupture some time on Friday. She has been taking antibiotics and is doing really well now.

We love our little Charity and are having more and more fun with her each day.

The Haderlie Birthday Cake

Since there are several birthdays in Camille's family in March and April they are doing a big party today for all of them. Camille decided to put her cake making skills to the test yet again and created a really springy cake complete with daisies. This was our first attempt at some harder flowers.

All of the cake is covered in a white fondant to make the pastel decorations stand out. The bottom tier has colored squres with the center cut out in a flower and decorated with polka dots of the same color.

This close up shows the intricate lavendar piping that Camille did to create this band around the middle tier. Additionally there are pearls of buttercream setting off each of the tiers and the second tier band. This was a really cool feature that I was really happy she came up with. You can see it from a distance in the other pics and either close up or far off it looks amazing.

The sides of the thrid tier are decorated with differently cut colored stripes. On top of the third and top tier is a collection of white and lavendar two-part daisies with yellow buttercream piped in to make the core.

All I can say is that my wife continues to impress me with her creativity and talent at this whole thing. This cake is the same size as our first one which the first time took us 12-13 hours to complete. She did this one in about half the time. We found that making the bottome tier from rice crispy treats and covering it with fondant saves a lot of time and gives a very firm and stable base for the rest of the cake... plus we have not finished all of one of these cakes yet. All I can say is that Camille is amazing.

Mardi Gras in March

My fabulous wife is incredibly creative. I am still amazed by what she comes up with. This week she made cake #3 which is designed for our friend Mark for his birthday today. Mark had told his wife and Camille that he wanted a Mardi Gras theme for his party so Camille immediately began to design his cake... without further adu, here is Camille's 3rd cake:

The thing that I want to really point out is that the masks that are on the cake are all hand-made from fondant, black sparkles and gold buttercream all done by Camille herself. I was looking at this photo and realized that the masks may look store bought so I wanted to make sure she got credit for her creativity and skill in making those so realistic.

Also, it may be hard to see from the angle I took this shot but the lower cacke slants to down to the left and the upper cake slants back the other way. This is something we have been wanting to try for some time. Let me tell you that cutting filled cakes at an angle is REALLY hard.

Another amazing creating by Camille and her Igor-like assistant.... me.

Camille's First Cake

Camille told me that for her birthday she wanted supplies to make cakes. I spent nearly my entire birthday budget and bought her everything both local craft stores and brought it home. She got it all out last Sunday and played with it a bit making some buttercream frosting. After that she told me that she wanted to start out with a small cake... if you know me you know what my next response was "NONESENSE!" I told her that if she was going to do it she was going to do it all the way. We started last night around 6 thinking we could do a practice run and then make a real cake for dinner with my family tomorrow. We were up until 2 in the morning just trying to get the three tiers covered in fondant. We went to bed and got up around 10ish today to decorate. Another 4-5 hours latter we have, what we feel, is a pretty good first attempt. Take a look at Camille's first cake ever.

Needless to say we are glad it is all done. If it looks packed with stuff you are right. We decided that since we have all this groovy stuff for making cakes we might as well use it all. As a result this cake is covered from top to bottom. I kept pushing her to cram more stuff onto it and use different tools.

Whether it is edible or not is yet to be seen. It is a coconut cream cake with cream cheese filling and LOADS of standard fondant for decoration. We will unleash this confection on my unsuspecting family at our dinner tomorrow night in honor of the birthday girl and master chef, Camille.

News of sugar commas to follow...

Camille's Birthday Concert

HAPPY 26TH BIRTHDAY CAMILLE!!



We went to the concert that Camille has been waiting for since she was 12. We saw Alanis Morisette live from the third row last night. Thank you Mark and Michelle for awesome tickets. In addition to the incomperable Alanis Morisette we also saw one of my new favorite bands MuteMath and a classic favorite Match Box 20. Here are a few pictures.



Happy birthday to my sweet wife and I hope she had loads of fun at our 4 hour concert event!