My first attempt at cake decorating

Keeping up to speed with my latest craze to become the next Martha Stewart, I decided to take a whirl at cake decorating.  Tomorrow we are going to have family/Abbie's 1st birthday pictures taken.  The last set of pictures are going to be of Abbie going to town with her birthday cake.  Well I have never been a fan of the cheap smash cakes from Wal-mart.  And I'm not going to spend a butt load of money on someone to make it for me.  So why not make it myself!! 

First of all, the cakes didn't come out of the pan like I expected.  We had quite a mess on our hands in getting it look leveled and ready to frost.  Then I didn't do the best at frosting the cakes so I had Charlie take over and he did a suburb job!!  Well that was until one of the sides decided to not cooperate (as you will see in the picture).  I did all of the piping.  Charlie wanted to do something fancy but I told him since neither of us have any experience in cake decorating, that we should stick with the simple dot.  Although the dots were looking more like Hershey kisses so I had to go back and take off all of the peaks.  Then I tried to fix the whoopsie that Charlie encountered.  I made it look a little better and tried to cover it up with the piping as well as I could but it's still pretty noticeable.

But for the first time at decorating a cake, I don't think we did too shabby at all!!  Who knows.  With a little practice, I may just become so good that Duff will hire me to become one of his cake decorators at Charm City Cakes!!

Now it's time to go clean my kitchen.  Why can't there be a fairy that comes in and cleans your kitchen while you are sleeping?!?

Made with Love by Daddy

Well I can finally say that the nursery is complete. So what if Abbie is now 6 months old. It's better than saying Abbie is six years old. You see we need to go back in time. When I was pregnant with Abbie, I had this envision. I wanted my daughter to have a dresser built by her father. Charlie is one that is into building things and doing what we call "artsy fartsy" stuff. Last year for Valentine's Day, he made me this.

So I had no doubt that he could build his daughter a dresser. Remember this post back in February. Well after buying the supplies and drafting up the dimensions, Charlie spent every week night and every weekend during the month of March out in the garage working on Abbie's dresser. His goal was to get it built by the time my mom came to visit for my birthday on the 24th which he did. He was staining and varnishing during my mom's visit. It was moved into Abbie's room before the end of March.

Besides deciding on the perfect color of stain, the major headache of it all was the hardware. We looked high in low for the exact hardware. We wanted it to be similar to the ones in the pictures of the dresser that we modeled it after. Well we found what we liked at Home Depot but you had to special order it because of the size...which was going to be $17 a handle!! Uh, on to plan B. So we start looking online and found a website that had the same exact handles for half the cost. I think total we spent $60 for all of the hardware and that included buying a couple spares in case one may break in the future. So now we waited...and waited...and waited for the hardware to arrive. It was on back order for at least six weeks. Finally they arrived!! I was so excited to have them installed!! I no longer was going to have to grab on to the bottom of the drawer to open it. Finally after 2 months of patience & hard work...it was complete!!

I present to you Abbie's dresser made with love by her Daddy...

I think he did a beautiful job. Hopefully Abbie appreciates all of the hard work that her daddy put into this some day. It truly is a labor of love.

Now I think it's time that he starts building our bedroom set...