Wilton, are you looking for a new spokeswoman?

Ummm ... I think I have a problem. I have recently accumulated quite a bit of Wilton baking supplies. But it's not my fault. I have to make a princess castle birthday cake. No, not because Hannah begged me to. She could care less. Because I decided I HAD to make it. I am gearing up for the process. I have watched enough of those cake shows and Food Network Challenges to have this in the bag. I think. The plan as of now is to make the cakes tomorrow evening. Then Friday night I will begin the assembly. Haven't decided yet if I will assemble the whole thing here or put the finishing touches on the cake when we get to my dad's. I am just hoping and praying that after all the materials I have purchased, that I will be able to turn out a nice looking cake. You can see what the finished product is supposed to look like in the box there.

Step 1: tint fondant and cut out 300+ mini flowers

Step 2: after flowers dry, pipe a flower center into middle of each flower

Step 3: bake the cakes

Step 4: Attach dowels to towers with melted chocolate

Step 5: frost cakes and insert dowels

Step 6: stack cakes

Step 7: decorate cake with various colors of royal icing

That is the super simple breakdown. Some of the instructions read like a manual for assembling some sort of huge toy or something.

You can be absolutely 100% sure that if it looks OK, I will post 101 pictures of it on this blog. Hopefully I will remember to take some of my darling little 4 year old as well.

A peek at what I have been up to

Wish I could say it's been more scrapping but that is not the case. Life is hectic as usual. A good kind of hectic though. I did manage to pull away for a couple hours to work on some SGT Design Team projects. Here's one layout I busted out. It's growing on me. Wasn't sure about it at first. It features Bo Bunny's "Kitchen Spice" line. I just love the colors in this line and new it would work perfectly with Makaela's Halloween 2008 pictures. Is she not the cutest mermaid you ever saw?! (please excuse the colors being a little off ... the lighting was TERRIBLE!)

Vegas Baby!

So it's been a crazy past week or so. My birthday was on the 8th. To celebrate Joel and I hauled off to Vegas. I have the BEST husband ever. He knows me too well. Back in March he booked rooms for us at the Bellagio. I never would have done this for myself. Too impractical. Too much money. Well that was then. After this last weekend, I am not sure I can do Vegas the old way (cheap rooms, food, etc.) This was by far the best Vegas trip ever. We had a full view of the watershow and sat at our hotel window for hours on end just watching the water dance and listening to the coordinating music via the TV. So mesmerizing! I will share more pictures later, but for now I will leave you with these.

At the Bellagio pool. Did I mention best-husband-ever also rented us a cabana!

The view from our room during the day.

The view from our room during the night.

QuicKutz Club Project

So if you're reading this, chances are you linked up from SGT's blog. And if that's the case, you might have heard about the QuicKutz club. Well for the month of September, I was responsible for designing the project and here's what I came up with. It's a sweet little 3x3 chipboard booklet. There are 4 pages in all. It can be given as a sweet little gift. Or kept to showcase a few special photos. This project is so easy to make and can be recreated with any other papers out there. Think Christmas gifts -- pop a few photos, or quotes, or Christmas song lyrics in it. So if you're interested in learning how to make it, call the store and see if there's a spot for you.