Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Easter Recap

This post might be a little shorter than I originally planned. Over the weekend Joe dismantled our office and therefore our computer in order to get started on finally making it look nice (see home-related goals.) As a result I am on the laptop now with limited access to pics and no photoshop. I am going to do the best that I can with the pics still on my memory card...

I got home from work a little early on Friday afternoon and had a little photoshoot with JJ. Here are some choice outtakes:


Yes, I bribe my son with water bottles.




"Ok, enough of this Mom"
I decided to use this one and add a cute message. I printed out a couple copies to give to family we would see, and emailed it out to those we would not:


Saturday I started baking. My intent was to create this adorable "Carrot Cake" as seen in this pin:

Source: The Partiologist
using some sugar free (and therefore diabetic friendly) cake mixes I searched for. My plan was to use this recipe for the carrots and this one for the chocolate cake. My first issue was that I couldn't find an extra long loaf pan anywhere. So I went for the deepest cake pan I could find at (where else?) Michaels and after some brainstorming with Joe we thought to make two rows of carrots and just cut the cake down the middle. I should have seen the disaster coming at this point. I made the orange cake Saturday, let it cool, then used a pennant cookie cutter I had some a sports pack to cut triangles:

It was very very messy and pretty frustrating. But I soldiered on and froze the little carrots and before I went to put froze them in the pan. In between, I whipped up some puffy sugar cookies knowing that I would have some sort of backup. They came out delish:


Sunday morning, after JJ explored his basket:

You like our "babyproofing" of the fireplace opening? "Use what you got" is the motto in this house!
I set out to make the chocolate cake. I mixed it up, boiling water, chocolate shavings and all...


and poured it over the carrots. I have no pictures of this because it was a mess. They didn't really "stick" to the pan so they floated up a bit when I poured. Also, the chocolate cake batter didn't cover the tops of them. Still, I cleaned it up best I could and threw it in the oven. It took almost an hour for it to cook completely. By then, the carrots that had floated up were hard and it was very misshapen. I took a break from the whole thing and let Joe try and save it. I then made this icing following the tips in the comments by warming up the milk to dissolve the pudding mix and I still ended up with lumpy icing. This, I am ashamed to say, is the final product:

I bought oreos to make a "dirt" topping and cute little fondant leaves, but after two days of baking and this was the best I could get, I gave up on making it pretty.

I will say, though, that when cut correctly, it did make a carrot (sort of):



Although my baking was a frustrating mess, overall our Easter was lovely. I took a vacation day on Monday and the family just recovered, relaxed and enjoyed some playground time. I will leave you with a pic of my little man rocking his sweater vest and bunny bib while playing with his new toothbrush (if only he actually liked getting his teeth brushed!):

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend! 

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