Mario Land Was a Success!!

Tristan's birthday just passed, and his request was a Super Mario cake. His thoughts for what/who he wanted on there changed pretty much daily, so we just had to wing it and hope he wouldn't be disappointed. 

Our original plan was to have a 3 tiered cake, with the top tier being the castle.  Once the baking was done, it became clear that our plan wouldn't work. The cakes just had an odd shape to them, and to cut away enough of them to make it work wouldn't have left us with much to feed our guests. So it was on to plan B, I came up with another idea, which I sketched out, and we were good to go again! We actually ran into a whole bunch of other issues with this one, eventually it worked out.

By the time we started creating the Mario masterpiece, it was quite late (always is), and I was already running out of gas. A few hours in, I just couldn't keep my eyes open, so I had to tap out. I slept for a few hours while Nicole worked on the cake, then shortly after I got up, she headed off to sleep while I continued decorating.

I was hoping to have the cake done before Tristan woke up in the morning, but that didn't work out. He got up, opened presents, then I got back to the cake for a bit to wrap things up. I really didn't feel like it anymore, but what a boring cake it would have been without Mario and Bowser Junior on top.

In the end, it was a success, Tristan really liked it, and he especially enjoyed playing with the characters and the bridge while everyone else ate cake. Watching him have fun with that made the whole night worth it. 

Fun With Lights!

Once again I've become a bit of a blog slacker, no posting for days. I've taken thousands of pictures over the past few weeks (with maybe a few decent ones in there), but there's been too much going on for me to have time to get them on the computer or do any messing around with them. Anyway, I finally got around to doing some of that, so I guess I'll get the posts rollin' again.

To start things off, here's a little fun with lights. Derf Rellim recently bought a nice little light kit, and we thought we'd play around a bit with it last night. I don't need much of an excuse to want to snap a whole bunch of shots, but a new toy is definitely a good reason to whip the camera out. Here are the results...

They're All Gonna Laugh at You!

Some days, things just go so crappy that I need to spend a few seconds doing something goofy to try to get out of the funk. Today was one of those days.

I hurt my finger, banged my head a few times (once on a doorframe in the house...ya), dropped my keys in the mud, lost a pen on the snow, had strangers actually point and laugh at me (I'm not kidding at all), and had snow thrown at me from people on a ski lift while I tried to take pictures (again, not kidding one bit, seriously).

All this added up to the complete failure of the task I needed to accomplish, and I was feeling pretty defeated by it all. I usually have no problem bouncing back from challenges and setbacks, but today I just couldn't shake it.

Eventually, I was cleaning the kitchen and Lily helped me empty the dishwasher. She was pretty cute, and really helped with my mood. After that, all I needed was to do one little silly thing to get back to my normal goofy self. Here it is...

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I'm Back... With food of course!

Well it's been a few days since I posted anything. The days seem to have been going by a little too quickly for my liking. There has been a little bit of distraction over the past few days (I'll post something about that later), but my time has mostly been taken up by a lot of last minute rush jobs. Anyway, I did finally get a chance to go through the food shots I took at Churchill's a few days ago, so I figured I'd get my posts going again with a few of those pictures. Here's an assortment of crab cakes, calamari, lamb, steak and more...

What a Croc!

Well, I guess it's actually an alligator, if that matters.  When a few schools were merged to form Alliance Public School at the beginning of this year, I was asked if I'd be interested in designing a logo for the new alligators.  I thought it would be kind of cool, since my kids are students there, so I went ahead and put something together. Now, after we were asked to put together a cake for the 100th day of kindergarten, the obvious choice was to create another alligator, and throw him on a big '100'.  The original idea was to have a hundred dots on the cake too, but we just made them too big, and couldn't really fit all of them on there. oops. 

With every cake we make, we start with a sketch, then get to creating... I usually hate the cake half way through, and feel like things are not looking as good as I'd like. Without a doubt there are a few struggles here and there, and then by the end, we're always quite happy with the outcome. This was no exception. Here's the logo, the rough cake sketch, and some pictures of the end result.