Teddy Bear Argyle Cake

This is the cake I made for my sister-in-law's baby shower, featured HERE.

The cake was my old standby - Martha's One Bowl Chocolate Cake/Cupcake recipe. It's the best. I made two 12 inch cakes, and put my classic swiss meringue buttercream icing in between and for the crumb layer. The cake is super moist and chocolately - dense, but not heavy. The buttercream complements it perfectly.

The bear was also made with the same cake batter. I've never used one of those molded 3D cake pans before but it was really easy.

For the fondant I made my homemade fondant from the usual recipe from the Food Network. I made two whole batches, and only used about one and a half. 

The argyle was just diamonds cut with a rotary cutter - after I had colored the fondant using gel food coloring. I probably should have measured them and pulled out my skills from high school geometry, but I just eyeballed it :)

Once the argyle was in place, I painted each diamond with pearl dust mixed with vodka. Not sure if you can see the shimmer...

For the "stitches" I just made a small batch of royal icing and piped it with a #2 round tip. I obviously didn't use a ruler!

The bear cake was piped in chocolate buttercream icing using a small star tip. The pads on his hands and feet were piped with royal icing, as were his eyes. His brown pupils are the underside of mini chocolate chips, and his nose is a regular chocolate chip.

Love the end result!

My sister-in-law, Alison, a cake and cupcake baker herself, really loved the cake - and of course it was delicious also!

Once the cake was cut, our young cousin, Holly, requested the bear for her plate. I think she liked it :)

She ate a pretty large portion of that bear all by herself!

The cupcakes to accompany the cake were vanilla buttercream cupcakes from Martha's Cupcake book.

Simply decorated with a swirl of chocolate buttercream (same as the bear) and a fondant cutout placed on top.

Another successful day of baking!

Alison's Baby Shower

My sister-in-law, Alison, is having a baby boy in April. We planned a surprise shower for her last weekend that went off without a hitch!

The nursery decor is blue, tan, brown and white argyle, so we took our shower decor cue from that, and added the teddy bear theme as Alison and Matt have temporarily named the baby "Ted" until his debut.

My talented friend Danielle designed the lovely invitations.

We had the shower at one of Alison's favorite restaurants, City Kitchen, and it was a great choice! We had the entire restaurant for the private party, had plenty of time to set up, and were given a wonderful staff to work with. On top of all of that, the food was delicious as usual!

The Sunday before the shower, we, the hosts, got together at my house for a craft day where we assembled the favors, made the diaper cakes, sewed the pennant banners, and assembled the take-home cupcake boxes.

The favors were chocolate covered pretzels made by my other sister-in-law, Carol. She makes these yummy treats every Christmas, so we asked her to make them with blue tinted white chocolate drizzled on top for the occasion.

I searched everywhere for the argyle scrapbook paper for the tops of the bags, but eventually found it!

I made the pennant banner for the shower, but hope that Alison will hang it in the baby's room in the future...

We had lots of fun games, courtesy of our game master, Claudine.

And we had a lot of fun creating the two diaper cakes.

The day before the shower I did the baking and flower arranging...

I had a lot of fun creating the cake and cupcakes for the shower. Details on the cake will come in a separate post tomorrow :)

The cupcakes were equally delicious and we made up single cupcake boxes so that everyone could take one home.

Loved the dessert tables and surrounding decorations!

The gift table was overflowing...

Happy Shower, Alison!

Panama wedding details - the chupah

For anyone visiting for the first time, to get the background on this story, read anything in my archives called "My Best Friends Wedding" and/or labeled "Panama Wedding". Too many posts to link to, but I will link to a few throughout.

So the biggest design element of the wedding ceremony was the chupah. I came up with the idea almost immediately after Zett and Bryan got engaged, and am thrilled that they loved the idea and trusted me with the implementation.

The idea behind the chupah ended up having even more meaning once they had settled on the idea of a destination wedding.

The idea was to send every invited guest a piece of fabric with their wedding invitation, and invite them to write some sentiments for the bride and groom on the fabric, and then return it with the response card. I would then take all of the squares of fabric, and make them into a "quilt". Then the "quilt" would be hung from four poles, held by dear friends, and Zett and Bryan would be married underneath the chupah made from all the love and best wishes from their friends. Of course the even more sentimental piece was that the fabric was representing the presence of some friends and family who could not travel the distance to Panama.

To get the ball rolling early, I spent a long time in JoAnn fabric trying to decide on what patterns of fabric would be good to use. 

Back in the beginning stages of the wedding planning, we decided on a color palette of turquoise, orange, and red - as discussed HERE.

Then, I found these 5 fabrics and decided that they would make a wonderful quilt.

Then it was time to design the invitations. What a stroke of luck that one of the fabrics I chose, and the rubber stamp we decided to use had a very similar flower!

The fabric, and...

The rubber stamp detail on the invitations. See more about the invitations HERE.

So I cut up all the fabric into 10"x10" squares. Each invitation got a square of fabric - no preference as to who got what color - just random.

(Note: the Obamas have not yet returned their fabric!)

Once the responses started to roll in, it was time for me to start sewing. 

First, I randomly paired up two squares at a time, and sewed them together side-by-side. I didn't exactly use precise measurements either - some people wrote pretty close to the edge so I tried my best to show all the writing. I had rough guidelines I used on my sewing machine - basically a half inch in from each side is where I started stitching.

After I got all the squares paired up, I laid them out on my living room floor - trying to make a totally random pattern - but also having no two alike patterns next to each other.

At this point I was still waiting for some fabric - don't worry I had enough to make a rectangle!

I had Zett and Bryan write messages to each other on separate squares. These two squares were the center of the quilt.

Then, I just sewed everything together (the lines were mostly straight!) to form a rectangle. I decided against making it a real quilt because I thought it would be too heavy for the poles. Good call I think based on the good breezes we had during the ceremony.

I offered to make it into a real quilt after the wedding if they want one. Or it could stay as is as a wall hanging. Their choice.

To finish the quilt I made sure to trim all the loose threads on the back, and then just edged the whole thing in some teal colored quilt binding.

Then, to be able to have a way to secure the quilt to the poles, I simply sewed two long lengths of satin ribbon to each corner.

The quilt was finished! I folded it up and brought it with my carry-on - I could not risk that getting lost!

After the rehearsal on Saturday, we discovered that we would need a little something more than just a knot to keep the chupah tied to the poles.

Luckily I had brought my trusty hot glue gun with me, so we just hot glued the knots to the poles. Actually, Jim did. Thanks babe!

The end result was just as I imagined it. Colorful, meaningful, and beautiful. I think everyone loved it.

For more wedding photos, visit my Dad's blog - the official wedding photographer - HERE at Hey Morand! Photography.

Panama wedding details - the aisle runner

Only about a month before the wedding, Zett called me and told me about an idea she saw in a magazine, and wondered if we could do it for her wedding.

She wanted a fabric aisle runner for the terrace - but not just a plain white runner. She saw this one in Brides magazine and wanted one similar:

I found the photo featured HERE 

Cute huh? Loved it. And since we were already planning on adorning the chairs with pompoms, we knew the two would look great together.

So off I went to JoAnn's, in search of pretty fabric. I wanted a pattern - but nothing too bold and flashy, but nothing too dainty either. We were originally thinking about orange, but when I found this, I decided that turquoise would definitely be better.

We would get orange and red rose petals to scatter on the runner - it would be gorgeous.

I bought all that they had - 12 yards. It was actually in two different pieces so I just sewed them together and hemmed the edges. Easy.

A beautiful touch for the colorful wedding. They loved it!

It's Panama Week! - Day Three - Wedding Day! The Reception

OK I'm back to talking about the wedding. 

In case you missed the other Panama wedding weekend posts:

For day one, click HERE

For day two, morning, click HERE

For day two, afternoon/evening, click HERE

For day three, the ceremony, click HERE

Also, to see a selection of photos from the official photographer (my Dad), check out his blog, HERE

So the ceremony was great - a little long and sweaty, but very beautiful and special. 

After we gathered all the guests in the resort lobby for this great group photo, it was onto the terrace for the cocktail hour.

Beautiful sunset that everyone was able to enjoy during the cocktail hour.

Some shots of the decorated ballroom before the guests arrived...

Not one, but two amazing ice sculptures on the buffet table!

The food was delicious, as were the desserts. Three different flavors of wedding cake, white chocolate fountain, other cakes, pies, pastries, and a two foot tall croquembouche!

Just a little over halfway through the reception, the surprise of the evening arrived - a 12 person Carnival band (Murga - I had to wiki it :) ). The "Panama coordinator" provided hats, masks, beads, and horns for everyone, and the place turned into quite the party!

The best table :)

Another fun and successful wedding! We had a pretty early flight the next morning, but the dancing continued on into the night. We were totally exhausted when we got home, but it was totally worth it for the amazing weekend we had!

Congratulations Zett and Bryan!