The love of my life

I finally got a piano! Well, that's how I justify the cost, anyway. Q took me to a luthier's shop and I played some basic classical pieces on this beauty. It was stunning. The sound is amazing. It's clear and deep and mellow. We decided it was way too expensive, and we'd wait to buy it. It was our 15th marriage anniversary on Wednesday, and Q phoned me from the mall where he was "looking for some perfume" for me. I hate perfume. What a joker. What he'd really done was pick up this guitar.

Not only is it beautiful, it's amazing. Wonderful, stunning, and intimidating. It has a 500 year old Colorado Blue Spruce top, blister Koa back, and an ebony fretboard. The builder focuses on wood and sound rather than finish, so it's not ornamented much, which suits my personality perfectly. All my musical mistakes stand out like sore thumbs when I'm playing this, but it sings like an angel. I'm really excited to finish Frederick Node Book One and move on to book two!

Q and I played Summertime together with my guitar playing bass and he with the lead on his spruce top. It was so much fun! When we get it sounding good, we'll put up a recording. So so much fun!

CH's "Elsa cake" from Frozen

Birthday cake with Frozen figurines and Frozen Fever flowers

I just love making birthday cakes. It's so much fun! My last one was for TM's 9th birthday, and we loved it, so I had a job coming up with this one. I was really really excited to see flowers on a cake in Frozen Fever, 'cause it was perfect for a birthday cake! Here's how I made them (using info and suggestions from all kinds of videos and blogs online). It was my first time making realistic (sort of) flowers like this.

These are made with marzipan, since I don't like fondant. I added some meringue powder and powdered sugar to the marzipan to make it easier to work with. Colored it with gel food coloring and rolled it out.

Plunge cutter sunflower for fondant

Flower from sunflower cutter

Smushing the flower

Squashing (shaping) the flower further and adding veining with a Wilton texture dealy bob

The flower petals with veining

This is my flower former, made out of aluminum foil :)

Here's the flower in the flower former thing. It broke, but it was fixable with water and finesse

See, I fixed it...

I added another layer of petals from the large cutter, then used the small cutter for a 3rd layer of petals

For the flower middle, I used another Wilton fondant texture kit pad thing

Here's the middle from the mold

I glued it in with water and added more bumps, and squashed it a bit into the flower

Here's the flower with its middle

I added some more veins to the petals with a fondant texture tool

Painting orange on the petals

The paint is orange gel color with butter flavoring as a base (the alcohol in the flavoring evaporates fast so the marzipan doesn't turn gooey)

Dark brown "paint" to color the center of the flower

Painting the center of the flower

Finished flowers!

I needed leaves, so printed out a sunflower leaf. The flowers are more like a Rudbeckia than a sunflower, but despite my botanist-side aversion, I stuck with a sunflower leaf

Squishing the edges of the leaf

Adding veins to the leaf (not botanically correct, again, but hey, she's only turning 4 yrs old...)

finished leaves

Here's the cake base -- I use whipped cream/cream cheese filling and a cream cheese buttercream frosting with butterscotch flavoring. I stuck on the flowers with toothpicks, which worked well!