julie's and mikaia's birthday and more yummy cake!

A second birthday and a 40th, fairies and beach day ...

= lots of more cake !

These were fun to make.

Daddy's day

Have you been to the writer's almanac with Garrison Keillor in the net?  WOW.  Great site.  We LOOOVEEE  The prairie home companion with garrison Keillor too...  
lovely sunday mornings with NPR.  
Today's poem made us think of daddy.....
The sun grows in your smile by Linda Rodriguez
When you smile, the air grows warm and soft,
the earth is watered with gentle mists,
seeds sprout and spread leaves above the dark, damp soil,
earthworms pierce the crust and frolic across the surface
to the delight of fat, happily hunting robins,
lilies of the valley unfurl beside purple, grape-scented irises,
fat pink and maroon peonies, and gay California poppies,
damask roses hurl their rich fragrance to the wind,
the crazy-with-sheer-joy song of the Northern mockingbird
echoes above other chirps and sweet winged notes,
gardeners join the worms in the warm, rich dirt,
children gallop across yards and grab handfuls of dandelions
to present to mothers who will set them in glasses of water
in kitchen windows or on dining room tables, weeds
glorious after the dark of winter with the color of the sun
that grows and warms and heals in your smile. 

( from Hearts Migration. © Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Daddy is the center of our world.

Strength, love, support... strong arms and hands to hold.

For daddy's day this year Honeypie made daddy a special t-shirt she decorated with fabric paints....just her and daddy holding hands. xo

Cake balls... huh?

yes...we ventured into cake ball land too...

Bakerella (who has a blog i love and am inspired by) has this recipe for her famous cake pops , which we decided to try today.

Sooooo decadent... we did not make it even half way into the process.

(we did not dip them in the melted chocolate and decorate them)...

mainly because they were so rich... i imagined going into sugar convulsions after popping a finished masterpiece in my mouth.

Maybe another day...

for now... here is as far as we got...and yes... we ate them!

Honeypie mixed in the fun!!

shaping the cake balls...

All in all... fun!

check out bakerella's site (here) for tons of inspiring cake ideas!

~birdycake

happy father's day

butterflies and cupcakes...

Here's a book we just bought!!!   

We LOOOOVEEE  all the ideas!

In anticipation of the butterflies that come into our butterfly bushes every june/july... 

here are some butterfly (viceroy or monarch? ... to be determined this year) , we baked some butterfly mini cupcakes using the basic vanilla cupcake recipe from the book.  

Delicious!

I must say the melted chocolate butterflies were more difficult than i expected.  Working with hot melted chocolate in ziplock bags (as they recommend)  made for hot hands and not a very steady stream of chocolate (thus look at how messy they are).  Also the butterflies are meant to be bigger, for bigger cupcakes.  To work in such a small scale and at that speed,  trying to make sure the chocolate does not harden was challenging.  Next time i will work big, buy more chocolate, and work one butterfly at a time ... not assembly line style, as i thought I could do!

So to re-cap...

Not meant for mini cupcakes

Use pastry bag with tips

Have a steady hand and use the template they provide!

They were fun to make though and  honeypie had fun swirling the chocolate on the wings.

Back to our butterfly bush...

It will soon be home to some  butterflies in this coming june/july .   We are eagerly awaiting since it fills up with tons and it is just beautiful!

We are  actually  confused as to what they might actually  be...  viceroy? monarch?  

This is a viceroy butterfly which looks alot like the monarch except it is smaller and has a black band across the center of the hind wing.

this is a monarch butterfly butterfly  

this is a  painted lady butterfly

We stumbled upon this book called "wings of flight"  illustrated by Bruce Hiscock and written by  Stephen r. Swinburne. The watercolor illustrations are beautiful and worth going to Bruce's website for some drawing ideas and just to hear him talk about his drawing/painting and love of nature, process.  It is a beautifully illustrated book full of great facts about monarch migrations. We also read another beautiful book about monarch migrations called "hurry and the monarch" by Antoine O. Flatharta.  It is the story of a texas tortoise named hurry as he watches the transformation of a monarch caterpillar to butterfly.  The monarch introduces hurry to life beyond his garden and in the process hurry learns all about her life and her migration.  Beautiful watercolor drawings. 

here are two more great books we love on butterflies ...

here's or adventures of when we hatched our own "painted ladies" butterflies.

caterpillars...

In their cocoons...

 Hatched!

Setting them free...  good luck!

the chia tree has started to bloom!!!

Looks like he is starting to sprout in all the wrong places but i am not surprised.  

He is beginning to have a goatee. 

A hipster chia tree.

lazy sunday...

Today finds us inside...   a nice lazy sunday

Honeypie is in her playroom, laying on her cot with mama's ipod, listening to charlotte's web.

Daddy has made a new nook for his turntables and is happily remixing music.

And mama?....  is in the kitchen figuring out the science of sugar!!

(OH why can it be more organic? all this math and numbers... )

My idea of the homemade lollipop making was harder than i thought and i had some interesting results but none which were actual edible lollipops.  

I am sure we will get rolling once i get a ...   "CANDY THERMOMETER"!!!  

(note to self: ***need a candy thermometer, pronto.  Seems that is the mystery secret.)

I started with a basic recipe i had in a booklet...

one cup sugar

1/2 cup water

1/3 cup corn syrup

and 1/4 tsp of cream of tartar

I put it all in a pan on high heat, stirring and waited for it to boil.

Once it boiled i waited for some signs of it kind of reaching a 300* f degrees... i stuck in a digital thermometer i had in a drawer and melted it (the thermometer) at 235*f ...

so then my result was... burnt sugar lollipops. (too much heat)

(here's the "dark" entry for "unplug your kids!")

mmmm.... those look NOTHING like the picture...

On my second try, i removed the pot from  the heat once the mixture was boiling heavily (hoping it had reached 300* f ) and that resulted in lollipops that never hardened (not enough heat) 

but the sugar was pliable enough to be molded, so i played around with that.

ahhhh live and learn.

I did try to insert some fondant figures inside the lollipops and found out that they did not dissolve, so that was a happy finding.

  

I will try again this week... this time with my brand new candy thermometer  that i am going to purchase!

and ps...here's a good lollipop recipe (here)!

Afterwards we did some artsy things for honeypie's "uniqua"...

Some body painting by daddy

Honeypie's first "kind-of" sewing project... a new dress for "uniqua".  We took a cloth bag we had gotten as a present and honeypie trimmed the bottom off and made holes on the sides for the arms...

Tadahhhhh... a dress!   I thought that was pretty creative on her part!

and also a drawing of "uniqua" for "uniqua"!

(... can you tell who we are in love with at the moment? ) 

:)

as night fell... 

a glass of red wine and roasted rosemary potatoes 

and we sat on the deck to enjoy the last of our lazy sunday!

Great day!