I's Fourth Birthday Party: Part 2-The Cake

The cake. Oh, the cake. It turned out way better than I could have ever expected. So, without further adieu, I present The Cake.

(photo courtesy of east.west.)

First, we baked three separate cakes: two 9" x 13" rectangles and an 8" square. I used the Deep Chocolate Vegan Cake recipe from Moosewood and let them cool. Next, I made the Fluffy Buttercream frosting recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and left it at room temperature. We stacked the two 9" x 13"'s on top of each other and centered pieces of the 8" square on the middle top of those and put them in the freezer to cool. Meanwhile, Huz made templates of the car out of cardboard to use for carving the shape. Then, he got the terrifying job of carving the cake.



He did a super job!

Once the cake was carved, we spread a thin crumb coat layer of frosting over it and returned it to the fridge to cool.





While it was cooling, I added color to separate bowls of frosting. I used blue for the main color of the car.

Then I decorated.












I found some vegan fondant at Michael's and was going to use it to add a bunch of details, but it was hard to work with and I didn't end up using it for much.

Some scraps of fondant became rocks to hold up the checkered flags I made from fabric and toothpicks.







And here is the birthday boy receiving the cake!

(lack of excitement is par for the course with this guy!)

Next post will be pictures of the party.

I's Fourth Birthday Party: Part 1- Preparations

A few weeks ago, my baby turned four. Its been pretty magical watching him grow into such a sweet and funny little person. I can't believe how fast the time has flown. Everyone says it does, but its hard to believe until you experience it for yourself. To honor his birthday, Huz and I threw him an awesome race car themed party.

Once little man turned three years old, he began asking for a race car birthday cake for his fourth birthday. I'm not sure if he saw one somewhere or just dreamed it up, but he repeatedly asked for one throughout the year. If you know me well, you know I'm a huge procrastinator and even though I had the whole year to plan this birthday party, I waited until a couple weeks before his party to start planning it. So, we called on some amazing friends to come help us clean up the yard and handcraft the activities and favors for the party. Huge thanks go to east.west and nortagemdar and their husbands for the tremendous amounts of help they lent us!

The first order of business was getting the yard cleaned up and ready to host 40 people. Huz built this amazing fence around the garden using reclaimed boards from our old garden boxes. It turned out better than I could have imagined and now I have a farm in my back yard!



Next he built a compost bin out of old pallets. We're planning on painting it an aqua color soon.



I missed out on taking pictures of our friends helping with yard work because I was volunteering at the lab.

A few nights later, the gang came over and helped us with the party stuff.

The Husbands pooled their creative ideas and painted this awesome bean bag toss game. I've recently discovered its actually called Cornhole. *Insert Beavis and Butthead laughter here.*



I made some bean bags out of random fabrics I had lying around.



Bee drew this awesome racing dude for Pin the Helmet on the Driver.






Sammi and her adorable hair helped me stitch up the favor bags. It took all of our efforts to print the race car on the fabric. Our poor printer almost didn't make it.








I also had a blast making these awards to pass out to all of the little winners at the party.












Finally, we made this special birthday boy race car shirt for I to wear to the party. This was made using the freezer paper stencil technique. I love freezer paper!




Stay tuned cause the next post in this series will be all about the cake!

Its Summertime!

And the living really is easy. When its over 100°, there's nothing like popsicle cheers and tiny hands covered in popsicle juice.

Restaurant Review: Amici's Pizza

It appears that I'm grasping at straws to find content to update this blog with. Its not that I don't have new things I'm working on, but I've been too lazy to ship out gifts and know that some of the recipients may read this and spoil their very overdue surprises. In the meantime, I'll give you a restaurant review.

A couple of months ago, Huz and I discovered a new vegan cheese, called Daiya, while vacationing in Southern California. This amazing new vegan cheese melts, stretches and tastes a lot like the real thing. We can't purchase this stuff in our next of the woods, so we bought extra and created a stockpile in our freezer at home. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and this is no exception. Our Daiya has run out and we've been brainstorming ways to get more. Daiya's website states that you can purchase it in San Francisco, but can enjoy it in Vacaville. Done. We loaded ourselves into the car and drove to Amici's Pizza in Vacaville and feasted on pizza with cheez! A rare event for a vegan indeed!

Overall, Amici's dining room was open and inviting. The service staff was decent, but we got seated quickly and our pizza arrived super fast. The kitchen was also wide open so guests could watch the chefs spinning pizza dough up in the air: a total treat for I. We ordered a large pizza that was half Asante (the menu stated that this was a vegan pizza!) and half Veggie with Daiya instead of dairy cheese. The pizza was amazing and the Daiya totally lived up to our expectations: melty, stringy and tasty. The crust was thin, but light and airy. So good!




Here's a close up of the Asante. This was my favorite.



Check out that crust! Oh, I wish I had more!



And here's a glorious slice of leftovers. On a side note, check out the new placemats, tablecloth and napkins I made for us. I quilted a strip of scraps into the top fabric and I love the way it turned out. I think I'm developing quite a love of tasteful patchwork. Think cool, not country cute, though. There won't be any ducks with bonnets or geese with fiddles around here.

Time to Update this Thing

Alright! I'm back and ready to start making this blog happen again. Oh yeah.

Contemplating Costumes

I've never been one to get very excited about dressing up for Halloween. I can only remember being pumped about dressing up for a couple of my childhood Halloweens. There was one year that I thought it would be great to dress up like a punk rocker in my pre-teen years and let my older sister spike my hair up with Knox Gelatin and then a few other costumes where I wanted to be a hobo (for some reason I chose this costume several times). Once my son came along and his first Halloween approached, I thought I should try being more enthusiastic about celebrating this day with him.

For his first Halloween, we adorned a brown winter bunting of his with a felt tail, converted a paci into some bucked teeth and whiskers and gave him a felt stick to carry so he could be a beaver. It was pretty adorable.



We dressed him as a Mariachi for his second Halloween.



At the time of his third Halloween, he was obsessed with the children's story Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, so he dressed as Mike. It was not much of a costume, and most people didn't know who or what he was. It appears that we're also condoning the use of corn cob pipes by toddlers. Oops.


Now that he's three, I was hoping he would come up with some crazy, imaginative and elaborate costume idea, but that's not exactly the case. For a couple of weeks he said he wanted to be this.



Now he wants to be this.

That's right. A blue letter I.

I Spy Pillow Bags

They're like hot cakes.

The Long Weekend

Lately, I've been on a long sewing hiatus. What's worse is that I have a million projects in my head that aren't coming to fruition because I'm not taking the time to sit down in front of the machine. A big part of it is due to the fact that I've been waffling over which one of my five sewing machines to use for my primary machine. The debate is now over and I'm happy to say that I'm back to sewing!

I had a local sewing machine repair man come over to my house and assess my machines, tune them up and lube them. He took on my Bernina 830 Record that wouldn't zig-zag, my Bernina 731 Record that didn't have any problems and my Singer Athena 2000 and put them all in great working condition. I now intend to use these three machines primarily because each has its own strengths and the repair guy reassured me that I'd be very angry with myself if I ever sold any of them. Problem solved.

I decided that I'd sew a project on the Singer Athena 2000 and the Bernina 830 Record this weekend to get a feel for which machine will be the best all around. I love the quiet, smooth feel of the 830, it really can't be beat. But the Singer has some attributes that I didn't know about and now love, too.

Since my boy just started pre-school this week, I felt a back-pack was necessary for his first day of school. I designed and developed my pattern on Friday night and had this completed by Monday. I'm pretty much in love with how it turned out. It was completely sewn on the Athena and this project gave me a chance to try out the zig-zag foot, the zipper foot and the buttonhole foot/1-step buttonhole feature. One thing I love about the Athena is the machine baste stitch. Even my new Brother doesn't have this stitch.

Here's the pack in its entirety. I used piping for the first time and was surprised how easy it turned out.

I added pockets on both sides and pleated them at the bottom, though the pattern design makes it hard to see in the photo.

It has an elastic loop that I salvaged from an old dappi diaper cover and a button that was part of a family friend's campaign to make the Tagua Nut a household name back in the 90's.

The straps close with a simple button closure. Those were I's idea. Its such a simple solution to a problem that I made out to be so huge. When in doubt, ask a three year old.

Here he is on the way to his first day of pre-school (aaacckk!), hand in hand with Daddy, wearing the pack I made him. He made sure to bring Bear and I'm totally happy that his Klean Kanteen fits the outside pockets.


Here's the Bernina Record 830. I really am in love with it. I started a quilting project on this machine, but haven't had a chance to take a photo. Besides, its a gift, so you may not see the picture until its completed and given to its proper recipient.

Oh, and huz and I also used the long weekend to our advantage and crafted together. We tried our hand at making cold-processed soap. This is the old fashioned way of making soap where one mixes oil with sodium hydroxide (lye) and water to produce soap through the chemical reaction called saponification. Fun and dangerous! We didn't get any photos of soap making in process, but we did get a picture of ourselves high-fiving our accomplishment!

Please excuse our grubby clothes. We were working with lye, what can we say?

Here is what the soap looked like once we cut it. For this batch we used a mix of olive oil, rice bran oil and coconut oil . Its dye and fragrance free.

Its now sitting on this drying rack to cure for 4-6 weeks. Anyone willing to be a tester for us?

Spokesladies Represent

A few months ago, my huz and some of his friends started a bike gang. Don't worry, they're really just a mild-mannered group of well-dressed fellows with great intentions of riding their bicycles to work and seeking awesome, cheap restaurants while on their lunch break. They refer to themselves as the Sac Spokesmen.

I'm not sure how it started, but at some point they decided it would be fun to do a "monthly" cover song challenge where they select one song and all create their own versions of it. Each man's cover song is kept on the down low until a specified date that usually involves a listening party. Being that us wives of the Spokesmen are subjected to listening to said song in its original and covered versions at least a thousand times before the song gets submitted, we ladies decided that we should have a say in the song selection process. Apparently, many of the members of the Spokesmen hemmed and hawed about the wives choosing songs and perhaps broke into cold sweats imagining what horrible song we could dream up for them to cover. I don't know why they would think we'd pick something awful. We all have fabulous ears for music and only listen to the finest. That being said, its ladies choice for Cover Song Challenge # _ (Six I think).

I've asked that the Spokeswives, or Spokesladies, submit their song rankings here in the comment section of my blog as anonymous comments. Each lady will post the twelve songs that we chose among ourselves (three songs each) and rank them from 1-12 with the first choice having the heaviest weight of 12 and the last choice having a weight of one. The song that gets the most points will be selected as the winner and our guys will have whatever amount of time they determine to finish it off and submit it. Then we all get to listen and party together! Did I mention the fact that we all have adorable kids around the same age that all play together so well, too? It really is great fun to attend and host these listening parties!

Update: There was some disagreement on the method of rating the songs for this challenge. I think the popular consensus is to rate the songs as a 1-5, instead of weighting them 1-12. The song with the highest rating is the winner.

.....and the winner is...... The Postal Service- Brooklyn Blues!