24 Days of Advent Calendar Fun: Days 5-6

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Here is your next installment in my 24 Days of Advent Calendar Fun! I’m going to focus on day 5 and 6 today. One thing I learned in the past couple days is not all activities and ideas go as planned.

Day 5

Yesterday our activity was to make a stocking for our cat, Martooni. He’s a rambunctious two year old tabby we picked up at the local SPCA this past summer. This is his first Christmas with us, and what better way to make him part of the family than make him a stocking? I’m a crafty girl, so I pre-made parts of the stocking and planned to have my grandma help me put it together as her advent calendar activity.

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I went a little overboard and decided to embroider his face! This took forever and was the first time I’d attempted “drawing” with thread. I made the face, a bow tie, the green stocking foot, and the red cuffs ahead of time and figured my 93 year old grandma could handle tacky gluing the face, bow tie, and cuffs onto the stocking and I’d hand stitch the rest together. Unfortunately the tacky glue was not working very well and it kept falling apart, so I ended up having to sew it all instead. I could have used hot glue, but I was afraid my grandma would get burned. I’ve had plenty of hot glue burns (and blisters) over the years, and I’d never wish that on my grandma ever.

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24 Days of Advent Calendar Fun: Days 1-4

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IMG_4883_2This month I will share with you the advent calendar that I put together for my grandma. I found this fantastic D.I.Y. mitten advent calendar tutorial over at Holiday Crafts and Creations. It took a while to make because I did it all by hand, and did some fancy decor on some of the mittens, but I think it was worth it. It’s turned out great!

In each of the mittens is either an activity for her and me to do together, candy, or a present. For the activities I typed out little notes that fit into the mittens.

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Day 1 was a fun one. I got out my mini fake tree and I helped her decorate it. I did most of the work due to my grandma’s arthritis, but she helped me decide where to put the ornaments.

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Merry Christmas!

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Photo background credit: seelensturm on Flickr

Hey folks! It’s been a while. I don’t have any Christmas or holiday theme cupcakes yet, but if all goes to plan, I will have something up by the end of the week. I feel bad for neglecting the blog for so long but lately I just haven’t been in the mood to bake or even write. Don’t you hate that?

What do you do to get out of a funk? I need to start brainstorming some projects to work on for the blog next year. As you can see I didn’t stick to my resolution of blogging at least once per week. Oh well.

Have a fantastic Christmas and New Year!

What are you doing for the holidays? Got any special plans?

 

*Photo background credit goes to seelensturm on Flickr

Christmas Tree and Reindeer Cupcakes

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Merry Belated Christmas!

I’m sorry I haven’t been as active on the blog lately. I blame my holiday laziness, but I did whip up some cute cupcakes this past week that I want to share with you. I hope your families had wonderful get-togethers for the holidays these past few weeks no matter what you celebrate at this time of the year!

For a Christmas party I went to this past Friday I made two cupcake decorating ideas that I’d seen floating around the internet this past month. The first were these cute reindeer cupcakes:

And the others were these Christmas Tree cupcakes:

Both were fairly easy to make but took a long time to put together. For the less experienced decorator, I’d suggest the reindeer ones. I think even kids could put these together. The supplies you’d need to make these are a cupcake (made from scratch or boxed mix), chocolate frosting, Nila wafers, round candies in white, brown and red (I used peanut butter M&Ms for the brown and red noses and white coconut M&Ms for the eyes), black gel frosting for the eye pupils, and pretzels. If I were to do this one again I’d chose smaller pretzels. It’s probably pretty self explanatory by looking at the pictures how to construct them, but I’ll give a quick run down of how I put them together anyway.

First frost the cupcake and put the Nila wafer on near the bottom of one side of the cupcake, then use some frosting to attach the nose. Next shove the pretzels into the frosting near the top, almost to where they meet with the cookie. It was hard to keep the pretzels from slumping over that’s why I put them so far down on the face. If you use smaller pretzels, this may not be necessary. Then attach the eyes with more frosting near the top of the cookie. Unless you want them to be blind reindeer, add a little black pupil to each eyeball with the gel frosting.

For a little more of a challenge I made these Christmas tree cupcakes as well. These ones require a little bit of frosting technique and frosting tips.  Start with a cupcake frosted with white frosting. For the structure of the tree place an ice cream sugar cone upside-down on the white frosting. Then make some green frosting and pipe it on using a closed star tip. Just rest the tip near the ice cream cone and then pull outward as you push the frosting out to make it look like the branchy peaks on the tree.

For decorating the tree you can do a wide variety of things! Some ideas are chocolate covered sunflower seeds, sprinkles, small candies like mini M&Ms, etc. I used some light blue pearl candy sprinkles I had on hand but the decorations are limitless.  You could even try  to find a star shaped candy as a tree topper.

If you made cupcakes for the holidays this year I’d love to see them! You can either post a link to them in a comment below or post a picture on my Facebook page!

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