Birthday party part II

Phew! Mission accomplished!

We've just thrown Lucas' first birthday party. Today came grandmas, grandpas, aunties, uncles and cousins. It was an exciting, exhausting, cheerful, festive, funny, chaotic, turbulent and lovely party. 

Our little birthday boy has experienced so many new things today that he went to bed voluntarily and fell asleep almost immediately. 

My self-imposed job was to make some fun birthday cakes and try some new recipes. On Martha Stewart I found this incredible looking cake called Moist Devil's Food Cake:

It looked fantastic and there was a picture of the cake layers, too. They were about 5cm thick and the whole recipe sounded easy to do. So I started converting ounces, cups, sticks, inches and fahrenheit into grams, mililitres, centimetres and celsius and began baking. But when I took the first pan out of the oven I was kind of disappointed. My layer was only about two centimetres thick and I didn't know why, so I decided to repeat the whole process twice to get three layers. This took much more time than I had planned, but I must say that the cake layers turned out to be very juicy so that it was worth the effort.

The moist devil cake cream scared me a little bit. I was afraid that it would be too much chocolate (if this is possible). And I wanted to make a funny looking cake and the chocolate frosting wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So I whipped some cream and added a little mousse au vanille mix. After arranging the cream and the layers I covered the whole cake with a marzipan coat. Because of its yellowish colour I covered the marzipan with a thin layer of white frosting. Then I dyed some marzipan with food colouring and cut out a few dots which I put on the cake. Finally I formed a bow to complete my present birthday cake. And tataaa! Here it is: 

I was really satisfied with the result and found it tasted good. Even though my sister-in-law found it a little too rich - well, she didn't know the original moist devil's food cake recipe with all the chocolate :-) 

It really was a "light" version of the original recipe! :-)

But the second cake I made was a dissapointment! 

I found this great idea on smittenkitchen.com and immediately wanted to give it a try:

But again I don't know what went wrong... instead of juicy brownies I got superdry crumbly cakes. :-( I had problems when I cut out the stars because the edges broke easily. My only explanation is that either my dough was too thin so that the cooking time was too long or there is another kind of flour in the United States - what would also explain the flat cake layers of the Martha Stewart cake. Well these are my "brownies" which were more a birthday table decoration then a tasty treat: 

But I didn't want to finish this baking report without giving you my favourite marble-cake.recipe. Do you know marble cake? It's really popular here in Germany and got its name from the nice effect you get by mixing a chocolate and a vanilla dough. 

I made this for Lucas birthday on tuesday and as always it was a success: 

Ingredients: 

250g unsalted butter, plus more for the pan

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla sugar or 1 tablespoon of pure vanilla extract

1 pinch salt

250g sugar

4 eggs

500g flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1/8l (125ml) milk

50g minced almonds

50g minced dark chocolate 

40g  dutch-process cocoa powder

2 tablespoons rum or a few drops of rum flavour

4 tablespoons milk (for the dark batter)

2 tablespoons confectioner's sugar (to decorate)

Preparation: 

• Heat oven to 180°C and butter the cake pan.

• In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter on low speed until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in sugar, vanilla sugar and salt until light and fluffy.
• Drizzle in eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition.
• In a large bowl, sift together flour and baking soda
• With mixer on low speed, alternately add flour and milk to the batter
• Put half of the batter into another bowl. 
• Add the almonds to one of the doughs and mix all.
• In another little bowl mix the chocolate, the cocoa and the rum. Add milk and stir.
• Add the chocolate mixture to the second batter and stir until everithing is mixed.
• Fill in half of the vanilla batter into the pan, then fill in the brown batter and finally fill in the rest of the vanilla batter. 
• With a fork or a little woodstick stir spirally through the batter in the pan to obtain the marble effect.
• Bake for 90 minutes. 
• Let cool the cake and decorate with confectioner's sugar.

And there was a little sewing, too, this week. I made a birthday garland. I thought it would be a nice little fast craft but again it turned out to be more work than I thought. At first I wanted to sew some letters on the triangles but I wouldn't have finished right on time for the party. And now I think that it's prettier without them because they would have covered the nice fabric. So here it is:

Although it took some time because of the many parts it was really easy to sew and it embellishes every party location. So give it a try!

Birthday Boy!

Yesterday my little baby boy turned 1! Unbelievable! But I don't wanna bore you saying things like "time rushes" or "they grow so fast" :-). But let me say that being a parent you become more aware of what that really means.

Anyway I wanted to show you a little goody I made for Lucas. It's a birthday crown that we will hopefully use the next birthdays, too. You can replace the medal at the front and actualize it each year as the kid grows older. This year he found the crown funny but sometimes annoying, I think. But I'm sure that in the future he will be the proudest little birthday boy with the crown on his head :-).

Saturday we will have the family birthday party and when I'm done with all the preparations I'll show some more goodies.

But for a start the crown:

front

side

back

 

 the medal

 the birthdayboy :-)

Merry Christmas!

Hoping that you're enjoying your Christmas holidays!

As I promised here is a picture of the last few ornaments.

And as a special treat I recommend to you (as last year) to read the recent chapter of the Wormworldsaga.

 

A peaceful, relaxing, joyful Christmas to all of you and a happy 2012!

Making the season bright!

Isn't it incredible? Only two days until Christmas Eve! Do you have everything ready?
Unfortunately this year I didn't have the time to make any handmade presents. But since this Christmas is the first one as little family I tried to sew some decorations for our home.
The idea was to make a Christmas ornament each day in december and show it to you... but I realised that there would be many ornaments of the same kind and it would be too boring. And to be honest, I didn't manage to make one a day... how could I've ever expected that to happen? :-) But, well, I made enough of them to decorate the tree and with some bought stuff it'll look nice, I hope.

We will have a red-white tree this year and I have some more ornaments in the pipeline... perhaps I can share them with you tomorrow.

And here's a quick tablerunner and some napkins which I sewed this afternoon. Our table is superlong and yesterday on a little Christmasshopping I saw this perfect fabric for it.

And typically this post post would end here but I really really have to share something with you.
As I told you I went shopping yesterday... I was looking for some ornaments (just in case I woudn't finish mine ;-) ) I was strolling through our little city when suddenly I couldn't believe my eyes!
Look what I saw yesterday - 21st december by the way!

Yeah! Right! Easter Decoration! Easter won't be before April 2012!!! It's crazy.
Christmas sale starts on august and Easter sale on december!?! And the best was that there weren't any Christmas articles left. Nothing but some sad little bows... But never mind. Next year I'll hang some rabbits and eggs on the tree and leave it in the livingroom until Easter. Less work. :-)

Appliqué Skirt

It´s been a while now since the last post, but I needed some time to finish my new skirt. And tataaa! Here it is:

It's the pattern of my first skirt. (You can find it here.) It's the Burda pattern 7531. But this time I used a thick wool fabric. I liked the colour and it turns out that you can simply cut the seems without sewing. That's practical :-)

The skirt consists of four parts: Front, back, and two inner borders (also front and back). The zipper is on the left hand. After sewing the skirt I ironed the applications on to the wool fabric Therefore I used "Vliesofix". But I don't know if it's called the same in english. Afterwards I fixed it with a zig-zag stich. The appliqué fabric was a printed and knitted cotton fabric.  I just cut out the elements that I liked.

This is the front:





And this is the back:




After the sewing and application work came the part that took me really long: the embroidery. Most of it was done by hand but for some edges and the decorative stiching in between the applications I used the machine.

Although I would like to embroider some more ornaments I'm happy with the result already.
Here are some detail-pictures for you. (click to enlarge) As you can see it's a real mingle-mangle of stiches but I wanted it to look a bit messy... And I have to say it was great fun and a bit liberating to sew wild! This wasn't the last time for sure!

There it is... Advent!

This year I was really looking forward to it. Christmas seems so magic when you have a kid around! Although Lucas is only 10 months old he enjoys the illuminated city with all its twinkling lights. Friday started the Christmasmarket in our town and you could see his amazement as we where visiting it.
Here are some impressions of the market for you. I hope you can apreciate the atmosphere although these are low quality mobile pics.

And today's not only the first sunday of Advent but also my nieces' 9th birthday. And she wished for an Adventcalendar. So I started crafting and made a wood deer on which I hang all 24 presents (well, better to say 25 because she has one extra birthday present on it ;-) ).

It measures aproximately 1,00 x 0,80m and is made out of chipboard.

I saw the idea 10 years ago in a magazine, cut out the foto and stored it since this year when I finally got the chance to realize it. Therefore I made a pattern and copied it onto the chipboard, then I cut it out with a compass saw, screwed it toghether and painted it. At last I drilled a hook into the back of the deer and hang the presents on it. 

And here it is. At first the front side: 

 And now the backside:

So... I hope my niece will enjoy it and to all of you I wish a delightful Advent! 

(And as my Adventdecorations are the same then last year, you can check them out here if you like :-) )

Wedding part 2

A few days ago I showed you the guestbook-masks I made for our friends' wedding. Now I wanna show you part 2 of the wedding present. I saw the idea on pinterest and thought that it would perfectly go with the modern style that bride and groom have at home. So I made a typographic design in black and white. It tells in very short terms the stages of their relationship.
For the realisation I used Adobe Photoshop but I had to compose the text word by word because photoshop doesn't support the "grouped style". It took me like three hours, I think.
At first I planned to paint the image by hand on canvas but as the surface was very uneven I decided to order it on a printshop and I was very satisfied with the result. I never would have achieved such a neat and sharp font with handpainting. So it was a good decision, I guess.