A Life Quilted By God

After a busy weekend, we were pleasantly surprised to wake up to yet ANOTHER winter wonderland. Our area in Raleigh was a blanket of snow and ice, mostly due to the rain all day on Sunday-so I got a SNOW DAY off of work! As exciting as that sounds though, I am so ready for Spring. I wish the weather would make up it's mind and bring some sunny skies to stay.

Thankfully, the snow allowed me some unexpected and ample time to work on the cake I was making for a baby shower at our monthly CBC Grace Group. I saw this idea online and just loved it.."A Life Quilted by God." These past two months have been "baby crazy" for me with friends, co-workers, and new church family all experiencing the blessing of pregnancy and children. I'm so thankful for all of the new babies that God is bringing into the world around me, and am excited to meet them, watch them grow and hear their stories. :)

Cake Notes:
As I'm still at the very front of my journey in cakes and cake decorating, every new cake is a learning experience. This was a great cake for me because it gave me a ton of good practice with basic icing techniques and different tips. I had only done the "shell" a few times prior, but after this I fee like a pro! Of course there is always room for improvement :)

With this cake, I learned to plan for the unexpected. Always have an abundance of powdered sugar on hand should you need more icing. And again, a little extra planning time goes a long way! I hadn't thought out the color ratios too much, so I ended up wasting a lot of icing because I made WAYY too much of one color, and not enough for another. This cake was also very trying on my patience, because my mixer died about halfway through my first batch of icing...can we say CRISIS! In all fairness, this was not the best mixer and had lived a much longer life than expected considering I use it for everything. I just wish it had better timing :/ In any case, I was determined to press on and am happy to say that while far from ideal, it IS possible to hand mix buttercream icing. Plus, I sure did appreciate this cake much more when it was all said and done! And there's nothing wrong with a little elbow grease every once in a while...though I'll be keeping to that "once" part as long as I can avoid it!

All in all, I was really happy with this cake, and even happier to make it for a friend's shower. Most importantly, it was mmm mmm good!