Ashley's Baby Shower: Part I

This weekend I helped host my friend Ashley's baby shower! The two other girls (Erika and Heather) who helped put the shower together, have design experience and I love putting together these kind of events, so we made a great team :) We have been planning for the past few months now and it all came together this past Sunday. The inspiration was drawn from the beautiful invitation our friend Erika designed:I love it! How cute is the bird family?! The theme for the shower was birds with the color palate of green, blue and orange with hints of brown and yellow here and there. Our friend Ashley does eco-friendly fashion so we wanted it to be very natural and "naturey" as well. In this first post, I will post all the food from the shower.

Our menu and the frame I painted to match the shower theme.

Close up of the menu. We had sweet and savory items.

Cucumber and radish open faced sandwiches made by Erika. I also made the plate stand. I will post how I did that later :)

Desserts included: lemon blueberry cupcakes, chocolate orange cupcakes, a small lemon blue berry cake, bird's nest treats, coconut macaroons and fruit salad served in sugar cones.


So many pics, so little space... click to see these larger :)


6 inch mini lemon blueberry cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream for the mommy to be. Notice the birds match the birds on the invite :)


Everyone loves these homemade coconut macaroons! They have become a staple any time I do an event for my friends lately. They're so easy to make too!

For favors we ordered swirl lollipops and personalized them with our own sticker to match the shower as well a simple bow.

So you can't eat it, but a shower is not complete these days without a diaper cake! I like to keep mine simple, so I made a basket to hold a majority of the contents. Products included all natural baby products from my friend's website Mom To Mom Health!

Gotta wash it all down with personalized water bottles! Label designed by our friend Heather.

Stay tuned for the next post for part II.

Baby Party Cupcakes

This weekend I attended a friend's baby party (not quite a shower!). It's like a party but with a baby theme and co-ed ;-) I promised to make some cupcakes for the event. How cute are the little baby topper on those cupcakes?! Kinda makes me LOL.

Ready for 'delivery'...

I made two flavors for the party. First, chocolate cupcakes with a caramel swiss meringue buttercream and salted caramel drizzle. I used my go do chocolate cupcake recipe (Martha Stewart's devils food cake) and made a swiss meringue buttercream. To that I added homemade caramel, which took me 2 1/2 tries by the way! No bueno! After I finally made the caramel, I reserved a few table spoons to add to the buttercream and the rest I added kosher salt to make the salted caramel. Yummmmy...The other flavor I made the pumpkin cupcakes with maple cinnamon cream cheese frosting again. Just seemed fitting for the season (around Thanksgiving and all).

A few of us who used to work with the mama-to-be made a special gift for her baby present, that just seemed so fitting... a diaper cake! It was the first diaper cake I've ever made and it was so easy and fun. How cute is out monkey theme?!

Congrats to Tonya who is due in January!