Thanksgiving and Gone With The Wind

Hmmmm....well, all the kids are home for Thanksgiving Break.  This is my favorite time of year, I absolutely love this holiday yet it is one of the craziest times of the year for me!  I love having my kids at home but I also love when school resumes and we get back to normalcy.  When I was a kid, Christmastime was my favorite holiday but over the years I have graduated to loving Thanksgiving out of all of them!  I never understood as a kid, why my mom loved it so much but now I do,  and honestly there are too many words to describe WHY I love and enjoy Thanksgiving.
Holidays mean time off from work and school and kids who are always looking for something to do.  During this time many cable channels will play and re-play a movie over and over and over throughout the entire Thanksgiving or Christmas day, I happened to be flipping through and found Gone With The Wind playing so I left it on.  I have never seen the movie in it's entirety, mainly because it is VERY long and my kids rarely allow me to sit for more than 10 minutes at a time! But this time was different, they all became GLUED to the TV,  I was incredibly shocked that everyone with the exception of the 3yr old were totally enraptured by this classic!  My six year old boy loved the war action, horses, soldiers and of course, fire.  My girls loved the drama and Scarlett O'Hara's deceiving character regarding men and money.  I think it showed them that even over generations, girls haven't changed much...LOL!
Well, every year I want to make a turkey cake with it's colorful feathers but so far I haven't had the time but that's OK watching my kids enjoy a classic movie was well worth forgoing a turkey cake :)

The Cake That Started It All...

My little boy and his 5th birthday cake

Last August my son specifically asked for a dragon cake for his birthday.  I was thrilled, intrigued and mortified at the same time.  I just didn't want to do a picture of a dragon, I wanted to do the real thing (or as close as possible).   About a week before his birthday I started doing some research on dragon cakes and tried to form my own idea of what I wanted to do for his cake.  I saw many incredible cakes made with fondant and sugarpaste but that is just not my medium, I really like using buttercream icing, it in my opinion is edible and more pleasing to the palate.  I gathered the information in my head and the morning before his birthday I started the process.  I first baked 2 round cakes, divided one in half to make the body, then I used the other to cut feet.  I then baked a regular 9x13 cake that would soon become the head and tail.  I had to piece together the head to get it to the look that I wanted, the tail was also pieced together with left over cake.  I used white buttercream to stick the pieces together, it worked great.  Believe me, by this time in my cake process I was starting to doubt myself and how this would actually turn out but I kept going using my best judgement and pastry bag!  Once I got the cake to the "look" that I was attempting I started in with the green colored icing, I honestly cannot recall the tip I used for this lizard skin effect but I was pretty happy with the turn out.  His spikes were a chocolate covered graham cookie and his wings and tongue were fruit rolls.  Those wings were the most difficult part of the cake, but I give credit to my husband for taking the time to sit and work on them until we both thought it looked decent.  I have to say that this cake was probably one of my favorites that I have ever created.  My son loved it and it tasted pretty good too.  I'm a little worried about what he will ask for next year!

Icing is my Canvas

I guess I should first explain why I am writing a blog.  I have wanted to write one for quite some time now but really never knew what I would say. About a year ago I started baking and decorating cakes for my family, SLOW DOWN~~ now I have baked and decorated before but never like this.  My husband, as a gift to me for putting up with his four years of doctoral school while also raising 5 kids basically by myself ;) sent me off to fulfill one of my life long dreams, to take cake decorating classes.  Needless to say things went well and I started posting pictures of my cakes to a popular social networking site and the requests from friends started coming in, needless to say I was excited!!  I get such enjoyment out of  seeing other people happy, making cakes is one way I can do that for someone!
I have always considered myself creatively challenged that is unless you give me a cake and some icing, in school I was very limited in my art classes and craft projects always seemed to frustrate me, stick figures were my forte and I found drawing to be a bore, that is until I discovered I could do almost anything with icing.  My mom let me have free reign in the kitchen as a child and I would make all sorts of cakes, cookies and cupcakes and she would let me tinker around with her decorating kit, she didn't have a ton of items in which to work with but I did my best and that is when I think the bug hit.  I also recall as little girl watching my dad sit at our kitchen table making sugar roses by hand for a birthday cake for my mom, in some little way I can't help but think that my decorating skills just might be genetic :)   So back to the whole idea of how I am creatively challenged.  Well, that is until you give me a cake and some icing.  An iced cake is my canvas and those colorful pastry bags are my palette,  I finish one cake and honestly can't wait until the next order comes through my inbox!
So what's it like to raise 5 kids that range in age from pre-school to high school while trying to run a cake  business on the side?  Words can't even describe it!!!