Making a Cake For Mom: Edible Playdough!

Here is my once a year absolutely unhealthy birthday cake story. I thought since it was my own birthday, I shouldn't make my own cake. It was a busy, busy day, so I bought one at the store, had them write "happy birthday mom" and hid it in the car so baby D wouldn't sit on it.

Well, shortly after arriving home, I found baby D in the car sitting comfortably on my cake and happily pushing buttons on the dashboard. He is so fast! I scraped the frosting off the lid back on to the cake, but it wasn't nice anymore.

The older kids are always thinking up cute things to do on my birthday, so I thought they would love to decorate my cake. I made up a batch of edible playdough in bright colors and when they got home from school I said, "welcome to my birthday party. The activity is to decorate my cake."


I was expecting a few flowers or something, but they wanted something really one-of-a-kind, so this is what they came up with: The characters are Yoda, Ahsoka Tano, Obi Wan Kenobi, and Aalya Secura from Clone Wars. My daughter said she couldn't do Anakin without brown, so she skipped him. The red everywhere was "laser fire". I was very impressed. It was a great birthday present.



The cake was brownies and the playdough was marshmallow, so it tasted a bit like rocky road. I liked it.

Marshmallow Fondant (Edible Playdough)

2 cups miniature marshmallows (4 ounces)
1/2 pound powdered sugar/powdered sucanat (2 cups)
1 tbsp water

This recipe does involve some cooking, it tastes like the marshmallows in cold cereal to me.

Melt the marshmallows with the water, either in the microwave or in a pan on the stovetop. Stir regularly until the mixture is smooth. You can add color now, or knead it in later.

Add the powdered sugar and mix as much as you can. Then tip out onto a surface dusted with more powdered sugar, and begin to knead in any loose powdered sugar. It will be sticky at first, but then will become a smooth dough.

If you want to save your marshmallow fondant for later, wrap in plastic wrap and store in the fridge.

Making an Ahsoka Costume part 2

First, I made Ahsoka's headtails. Basically it is an ivory jester hat with one tail fatter and longer and blue stripes glued on it. We use crushed panne fabric. A cheap, easy to sew on fabric that is easy to find at halloween. To finish this costume, we glued the gold halo part onto the headtails. Then for the dress I picked up a long sleeve orange shirt at a thrift store and sewed a maroon skirt onto the bottom. (The skirt is one and a half times the length of the t-shirt and then gathered.) To gather I sewed a wide stitch across the top leaving long pieces of thread at the ends. Gently pull one of the threads tight to gather the material to the proper length then sew it into a tube. Then sew the tube onto the skirt. (For Ahsoka's top I sewed that onto the t-shirt as well. It didn't have stretch so on the back I left about an inch gap in the tube top so it would stretch when my daughter put it on. We lucked out and found some floral print purple fabric on clearance that looked right for the belt. I had been planning on painting the floral print on lavendar fabric. The belt buckle is gold fabric glued onto cardboard with a pin glued on the back so we could pin it onto the dress. We just glued velcro onto suedcloth for the arms and legs, but this was a pain, I'd skip it or find another way if I did it again. I think the most comfortable would be to attach the gauntlets to tights and t-shirto, so they slide on and stay on easily. I did make a belt too, but it wasn't comfortable enough, so my daughter didn't wear it. This costume was a big hit with all the clone wars fans at school.

Lip Gloss Making Activity

I was teaching a lesson on uplifting thoughts for the activity day girls in our ward. We talked about having uplifting thoughts and how music can help us clean out bad thoughts. Then we made lip gloss. I wrote a little poem to tie it all together. It is based on Elder Packer's talk "worthy music, worthy thoughts" (http://lds.org/cm/display/0,17631,8045-1,00.html)

This is what the finished project looked like, I had some old pots in my craft cupboard that I recycled for this project it turned out really cute.

We used this recipe:
1 tbs petroleum jelly (melted)
4 drops stevia (or 1 tsp honey melted)
a few drops of koolaid (1 packet dissolved in 1/4 tsp water)
1/4 tsp mint extract (optional)

Lip Gloss Poem
The lip gloss I have made today
Reminds me I should smile,
And make the thoughts inside
My head uplifting and
worthwhile.

For ev’ry minute that I live
My mind is like a play.
With thoughts of either good
Or bad always on display.

Now sometimes in the theater
That is running in my mind
Little dark and impish thoughts
Come sneaking from behind.
And then it is my duty,
So the Spirit can abide,
To find a way to clean them out
And shape things up inside.

The prophets have advised us
On a way this can be done,
They’ve said when thoughts
Aren’t what we want…
The best thing is to hum!

So once again I grab my gloss
And rub some on my lips
And hum my very favorite hymn,
It always does the trick!

Family Halloween Party 2010

Clone Commander Fox


Doctor D

Ahsoka Tano

Jedi Master Luminara Unduli


little a was asleep, but I'll throw this picture in anyway...

My cousin's daughter hopped in the photo shoot and she was cuter than all of us...

Halloween Preschool Party

Happy Halloween Boo!

J made this picture in his spare time. I liked all the detail..bony skeletons, witches, bats, roof shingles, etc. I told him if he colored it I'd put it on my blog. So here it is!

AJ made this fun little picture at school which I enjoyed too. Especially since the skeleton has a very detailed Ahsoka Tano belt, that made me laugh.

Making an Ahsoka Costume

Anakin Skywalker's spunky Padawan, the orange girl...



Getting an idea on how to make headtails. It looked like a jester cap, so we looked up a free three tailed jester hat pattern online.

Tracing the shape on tissue paper

The front of side tails: Ahsoka's side headtails curve, the back one is straight, bigger, and longer, I cut 2 of these

back of side tails, cut 2
back tail, one piece


designing the stripes and pinning it all together.


I traced the pattern again so I could cut up for stripe patterns. It looked something like this. This part takes a lot of time, but it looked so cool, we thought it was worth it.

crushed panne fabric with indigo stripes hot glued on (note, sewing machine didn't sew through glue very well, imagine that! I should have avoided putting glue close to the edges where I was gonna sew and then just touched up later.)
we stuffed it with polyfill from JoAnn's and hot glued a ski cap inside to finish it off.

We were almost done here, I'll get the finished product later. She wore it comfortably all day at school and it stayed on even during a cartwheel!

Next a cute orange and maroon t-shirt dress to finish it off. See the finished costume!


one more photo...

Recent Pictures

Imagine there are pictures.

What we've been up to lately
I don't really know how to make a blog post without a picture, but here goes. We got a new computer. Hooray! I don't know how to use it yet though, so although my pictures are on there somewhere, I don't know how to get to them yet. If I had them, I'd show you some birthday party pictures for AJ's eighth birthday, the picture I snapped of the 20 minutes AP wore shorts instead of a dress one day, pictures of a messy preschool activity, lots of kid crafts and creations, baby D sneaking into my canning peaches (the very first time a kid sneaks is cute and entertaining and this was one of the first), baby D learning how to walk with a hot pink baby stroller, and the kids with their second cousins at Thanksgiving point having a great time.

Traffic on this blog
I realized last time I was blogging that blogger has a stats page for who visits your blog. I looked at it and after the Lego Art blog post which was publicized by some really big blogs, the most visited post was the one about AJ's halloween costume last year. Apparently there are lots of other people out there looking for ideas on how to make a "Crysta from Fern Gully" costume. How random. I would have never guessed.

I finished!

Have you ever taken on a major challenge such as remodeling an old house or running a marathon? Doesn't it feel incredible when the rooms are all done or you cross the finish line? Okay, I'd feel horrible at the end of a marathon, but the sense of satisfaction would be amazing. I remember when I decided to earn my BSA "mile swim" award in a freezing cold lake. I worked up to it over the summer. When I finally finished that swim, my body was so numb I don't know how I was still swimming, but I was absolutely ecstatic about finishing. When I finally got feeling back enough to walk, I was walking on air.

Well, I'm pretty excited today because I finished my year on the "12 steps to whole foods" nutrition program. Last year my GreenSmoothieGirl nutrition ranking on a scale of 1-100 was 23. I was eating no fruits or *vegetables unless you count spaghetti sauce and I ate half a box of granola bars a day. This year I'm at 76 and I feel much better.

*Let me amend that statement. We ate a TON of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zuchinni from the garden last August. I'm referring to all the other months of the year where all we had were a few spoonfuls of frozen veggies for dinner once a week.

Strabismus

D's glasses are to treat strabismus its not a strong prescription, but the theory is that his eyes have been over-focusing. Sometimes his left eye is turned inward and sometimes his right is turned inward like in the pictures below. Strabismus can be treated surgically, or with eye patches as well. There is no real proof about what works, its usually a lifetime thing that you keep working at. Our neighbor across the street has strabismus and has been helpful to talk to. We'll try glasses for a few months and if there isn't any improvement, the next option is usually surgery.

They determine the prescription for babies with a little machine that looks in the eye and uses light and shadows and geometry. Pretty amazing.

Baby Glasses

I was prepared for a major battle to get D to wear these, he went ballistic when we tried on glasses at the doctor or baby sunglasses frames, but these glasses are especially for babies and don't have any metal parts. He seems to really like them. When we first put them on he was all smiles and giggles. He has put them through a few crashes so far and they are super gentle and don't hurt his face at all, I'm very impressed. He knows he isn't supposed to take the glasses off, so sometimes he giggles and does it just to tease me.

Third Birthday

We asked AP what she wanted for her birthday lunch and she said "Pizza" then she said "But pizza won't turn me three, the cake turns me three!" Sorry about the blurry picture, it was supposed to be a cinderella cake.

Yellowstone 3 of 3

Yellowstone 2 of 3

Grandpa doing clown balloons at the cabin

D playing with logs at Old Faithful

One of the many crafts at our yellowstone cabin, this is the one I planned.