What fun! What fun! E is one!

This year flew by.  I mean at Mach 3 speed.  I can't believe E's First Birthday has come and gone.  I'm a little ashamed to admit it but I started planning his party as early as December!  (I have issues, I know!)

The party was Dr. Seuss themed.  I ordered decorations from Birthday Express - they sell great Dr. Seuss party sets, with plates, cups, cutlery and table clothes.  They also sell adorable window decals and wall cut outs. 

E's Dr. Seuss collection is quite respectable and made for easy décor.  I placed several of his books around the living room.

I couldn't find a banner that I liked, so I used the basic Paint application on the computer and created a banner saying Happy Birthday, spelled out on Cat in the Hat hats, sewn together with bias tape.  I made a similar banner for E's highchair saying "I am 1".

Food-wise, I kept it simple.  I made:
fruit salad - called "Beezle Nut Fruit Salad";

• potato salad - lamely called "Tangy Pangy Potato Salad";
• green eggs;
• ham (and turkey) sandwiches;
• "cat"prese skewers;
• doughnuts - because "D is for doughnuts";
• cheese trees; and
• Birthday Cake with Jerry Jordan's Jelly!

For the cake, I tried to style it like the birthday cake from "Happy Birthday to You"!  The cake itself was a plain white cake, with raspberry jam filling and lemon frosting:

Lemon Frosting

1 box lemon pudding
1/4 cup icing sugar
1 cup milk
1/2 tub thawed cool whip

Mix pudding, icing sugar and milk with electric mixer for 2 minutes at medium or high speed.  Allow mixture to sit for 1 minute.  Fold in cool whip until frosting is consistently mixed. 

I also ordered custom "green egg" cookies from a local baker.  They were AMAZING!!!  Cake Expectations totally exceeded my expectations.

All-in-all, it was a good day!

Two posts in a month...what?!?!?

I might as well try to stick with the blogging again for a little while, especially since I have so much on the go right now.  With E's First Birthday approaching, I went through the mounds of onesies and sleepers he has grown out of over the course of a year.  It is mindboggling (a) how quickly he has grown and (b) just how much stuff a baby can have.

Both my husband and I are a little sentimental about some of the onesies.  Rather than donate them or hand them down, I selected between 50 and 60 of our favourites and made a quilt.  Admittedly, not my finest quilt job (there is definitely a reason I prefer the "rustic" nature of rag quilts to traditional quilts), but it means a lot to us and it is something that we can hang on to for years to come, without starting down the dangerous path towards hoarding.

Holy crap, its been a while

To say its been a while is probably the understatement of the year.  Between finishing maternity leave and returning to work after only five months, working full-time and coming home to an infant, I evidently let my blogging slip.  When I logged in, I didn't even remember preparing several draft posts that I should post in the coming days weeks.

The inspiration for this post, however, is a cake that I recently made for my BFF's daughter's First Birthday.  (Yes, I think First Birthdays are worthy of all caps!)  That and I have been crafting and baking up a storm recently in anticipation of E's First Birthday and a baby shower that I am co-hosting for two colleagues.  Hopefully I can make time to post about those events but it is probably wiser if I don't make any promises.

The theme for B's party this weekend was pink and black zebra.  Naturally, my BFF wanted the cake to match and zebra cakes are particularly trendy lately (one need only Google zebra cake and many posts explaining the technique are readily found, such as here and here).

We did a trial run and its actually much easier to make than I expected.  Just time consuming.  If I had to do it again, I likely would have used smaller amounts to create thinner stripes.  That said, I think it turned out amazing and it got rave reviews.

Due to my fondant aversion, I tried my hand at Wilton sugar sheets for the first time so that it could have a zebra exterior.  Talk about easy to use!  I applied some piping gel and they held up really well.

All in all, I was very pleased if I say so myself.