February Celebrations

My mom and dad decided that February would be a nice time to get married, since it would break up the winter and give them something to look forward to.  It was a great plan...until both of their daughters wound up being born in February.  It's the shortest month of the year and we end up with four "holidays," not counting ground hog's day which is Mom and Dad's anniversary.  Plus, my sister and I both teach in Catholic Schools and Catholic School's Week (a busy week full of open houses, book fairs, and other 'extras') usually starts on the last Sunday in January and runs into February.  Yikes!  We didn't make cupcakes for Mom and Dad's anniversary.  They wanted to go out to dinner with us all, and since it was a school night, we didn't have time to do both.  However, I still have two sets of cupcake pictures to show.  We made the ducks for Maureen's birthday and they made the "string monsters" for mine.  (If you are wondering, "why cupcakes?" visit this post, where I do a little explaining about this tradition.)

We had some trouble getting the ducks to set up again after we'd dipped them in the icing and put the beaks and eyes on...we think they should have gone back in the freezer afterwards to help.  They looked kind of droopy.

Mom and Maureen used the fun silicone feet for the string monsters, but found that they were very top heavy.  If you look carefully you'll see that they are propped up on icing tips.  We always learn a lot about what we'd do differently next time.  They are very cute, however!

Celebrations

A couple of years ago, we came up with the idea to make and decorate cupcakes as a new birthday tradition.  This idea came from the fact that we either made a cake, ate 5 pieces (1 each) after the birthday dinner and then had leftovers and ate way too much sugar for a week, or tried to make a healthier dessert and the birthday boy/girl ended up feeling cheated it didn't really feel as much like a birthday cake.  With cupcakes, we each get one and then we can either throw away the extras or (more often) send them to work with someone (you can't take 1/2 of a cake to work, but you can take 12 cupcakes).  My sister got this great book, Hello Cupcake, and we started trying different designs.  Some are very complicated.  We've also bought What's New, Cupcake and tried some out of there.  These designs tend to be easier.  Yesterday was my mom's birthday and we all got together and celebrated today.  The cupcakes we chose to make for her were, by far, some of the easiest we've made.  These were in the What's New, Cupcake book and only took a couple of hours to decorate (as opposed to an entire day).  We were very happy with how they turned out.  On a side note, I can't take credit for the pictures...my sister is the photographer in the family.