The Monkey Cake

It has become a tradition to share the "how-to" for each of our birthday cakes so here are directions for the monkey cake. This turned out to be a really fun one for me, and Beckett just loved it! Here is what I did...

Before beginning I wanted to add that if you are new to my blog, I am not a professional cake decorator; I have never even taken a cake decorating class. I have learned mostly from friends, viewed YouTube videos and of course, watched Ace of Cakes on Food Network! I make no claims that I do things "by the book". I just love doing these very special cakes for my boys birthdays. I hope my experience can help someone else along the way!

Monkey Cake

You will need:

• Wilton's Animal Crackers Pan. This pan was one of the best investments I have made in the cake decorating department. I used it to make the cow and pig for Beckett's first birthday, the frog for Beckett's second birthday and now the monkey for his third. Gosh, I didn't realize until I typed that that this child has only had animal-themed parties. ;)
• Directions from Wilton site on how to turn the cake into a monkey. You can see I left out the pink on the face and made the nose differently as well.
  
• a 16 inch round pan (same one I used to make the pizza cake) for the belly. If I had it over to do again I would probably consider using my 14 inch round pan instead. I wanted a fat monkey but this one bordered on obese. ;)
  
• extra cake pans of any size large enough to cut out your monkey's arms and legs. You will use the scraps from this to support his head as well. I used a 10x10 and a 13x9 I already have in my pan collection.
  
• two larges piece of cardboard free from framing department at local arts and crafts store to use as cake board. I got mine at Michael's. Cover with regular foil or Wilton's fanci-foil. Here is a video that will show you how to do this. If you make your monkey as large as mine you will want to tape the two cardboard pieces on top of each other before covering with foil b/c it's a heavy cake, especially if you are going to transport it for the party. My neighbor, who helped me move mine, said I should've used plywood! :)
• extra cardboard or cardstock to make template for arms and legs- any shape and size you like. You can see mine were very simple! I only made one arm and one leg and just flipped them around the opposite way for the other side.
• two 24 oz packages of pre-made fondant. You can make your own but I haven't gone there yet. You will want to tint one whole package brown for the tail. For the second package you will tint some yellow for banana and polka dots, some blue and red for polka dots and don't foget to leave some white for the banana and the cover for the mini-cake.
  
• latex-gloves to use when you are adding dye to fondant. Here are directions on Wilton's site for how to color fondant. It is really very, very easy.
  
• Wilton icing colors in brown, lemon yellow, red and royal blue - or whichever colors you prefer.
• Foam pieces from floral department at Wal-Mart or any craft store to make the little cake. I chose not to make this from real cake because I already had enough to feed all our guests, their families and the entire neighborhood. ;)
  
• Bake all cakes you will need using your favorite recipe. I use Duncan Hines Classic White and prepare according to package directions except I add 1 tsp of almond extra for each box. Let's see...that means you will 1 box of cake mix for the animal crackers pan. I think it took 3 mixes to have enough batter for the 16 inch pan, one more mix for the 13x9 and 2 more for the 10x10. That's a total of 7 cake mixes. You might consider buying an extra one or two just in case.
• Wilton's Ready-To-Use Icing in black. This is much easier than trying to make your own black frosting. Trust me!
  
• a batch of Wilton's buttercream frosting x 6 (give or take). I make the variation that says "For pure white icing" so I can make it way ahead of time and my cake won't require refrigeration due to all the butter. In addition to the butter extract and the vanilla extract (I usually use more vanilla and butter flavorings than the recipe calls for) I again add a few tsp of almond extract to compliment the flavor in the cake. You may need more or less icing depending on how thick you ice your cake. Leave a tiny bit white for the eyes. Tint enough of the icing light brown for the middle of the tummy and face as well as the crumb coat. Most of it will need to be dark brown for the remainder of the body.
  
• Icing bags, couplers (here is a video that will show you how to use couplers with your icing bags) and a #21 star tip. I usually use a #16 star tip to ice all my cakes but I knew I would be up until 4AM icing this guy if I used one that small. #21 did the trick for me, but you can use any star tip you like. You will also need a #3 tip or any of the round decorating tips to outline and then fill in the eyes, nose and mouth.
  

Directions:

• Make the banana from fondant. I actually bought a real banana to look at while doing this. The inside, white part of the fruit it is basically a long fondant roll (remember playdough snakes?) slightly narrowed at the end. The yellow peel started out as a large circle I cut into a tear drop shape just large enough to wrap around the the white part I just made. I cut the tear drop starting at the top middle point and cut down a few inches then "peeled" it back. Add some water to your white part to act as the glue then wrap the peeling around. The underside won't show so it's okay if it's not a perfect fit. Tweak until it looks like what you want. The fondant will set up and harden so get it just right and leave alone to dry.
• Make fondant polka dots, enough to decorate the mini-cake and extras to affix to the board.
  
• Make the mini-cake. I just used a tiny coating of icing right on the foam circles and laid the rolled out fondant on top. Then I trimmed off the excess with a sharp knife and set to adding polka dots. Again use water as "glue" to hold the dots in place. Too much water and they will slide right off leaving a streak right down your pretty white fondant. Believe me, I know. ;) I used dots of white frosting on top to hold the candles in place.
• After cakes are baked and cooled you will use the cardboard template you made to cut out two arms and legs. I just lay the template on top of the cake and "trace" around it with a toothpick. Then I carefully cut the pieces out with a good serrated knife.
  
• Assemble cake on prepared cake board. Start by placing belly down first. Then use scraps left over from the cake(s) you used to make arms and legs. Place scraps at the top of the belly where the head will rest. These scraps will support the head. Place the head made from the animal crackers pan on the belly with the top of the head resting on the scraps. Using your serrated knife follow the shape of the monkey's head around top edge and cut off the scraps below so they follow the exact shape of the head. When you ice it all, no one will know this part was formed from left-overs.
• Once all pieces are in place you will do a crumb coat over entire cake. Make sure your icing is super-thin (put small amount of icing in a separate bowl; add a T or water or so to thin out. I used the lt. brown frosting for my crumb coat but you could use white or even the dark brown) or it will take you forever, use too much icing and essentially be a nightmare. A crumb coat is essentially a very thin layer of buttercream frosting that goes over the cake before the final layer of frosting. The buttercream will "crust" slightly and keep all crumbs out of your final cake. This step is especially important since the arms and legs have been cut out from a larger cake and will covered in messy crumbs.
  
• Draw circle in middle of monkey's tummy with toothpick. This will be the area you ice light brown. Since I used a 16 inch pan, I simply laid my 14 inch pan on top of his tummy and traced around with a toothpick. You could certainly free-hand this, use a lightweight plate or mixing bowl or any other circular object that is about 2 inches smaller in diameter than the original circle. Fill in circle with light brown stars.
• Ice remainder of tummy as well as arms and legs. Ice white part of eyes, and then add black of eyes as well as nose and mouth. First outline with #3 tip and then fill in. Smooth out by dipping your finger in very hot water and gently patting out icing. Add light brown section of face and ears and finish with dark brown.
  
• Add fondant polka dots to board by again using water as the glue.
  

What you can do two weeks (or more) ahead of time...

1. Purchase all supplies: icing colors, items for icing including all flavorings, cake mixes, eggs, oil, fondant, foil/fanci-foil...
2. Pick up cardboard for cake board.
3. Make template for arms and legs.
   
4. Sketch monkey out on your cardbord to make sure you are happy with how the legs and arms look with the size of the animal crackers pan and the tummy you have chosen. Adjust if necessary.
   

What you can do a week (or more) ahead of time...

1. Make the icing. Tint the different colors and store in airtight containers.
2. Get cake board ready. You will need to know what size your belly, legs and arms are going to be so that you don't make your board too large or small. Cover with foil and set in safe place where foil won't get torn.
3. Color fondant and make tail, banana, mini-cake and polka dots. Don't tint your fondant if you are not going to go ahead and make these items because it will dry out once the package has been opened. You can store it for a short time by tightly wrapping in a few layers of saran wrap and placing in baggie with all air removed.
   

Happy cake making!

P.S. Don't forget to become a follower of SSA and leave a comment on this post before midnight tonight to enter my very first giveaway! :)

Two Fun Sites to Share

Thatcher and I have come across two great sites we use almost daily between our therapy and schooling. Online-stopwatch.com is a great site with all sorts of timers and stopwatches that make "beat-the-clock" a much more fun game! Thatcher loves trying to beat the bomb countdown when doing his math and I love the egg timer best. We use the stopwatch for his math drills and there is a great online calculator as well.

We also have found jigzone.com. This is a site with 100's if not 1000's of puzzles you can solve online. First choose your desired puzzle from that week's options or go back in the archives for many more. Next, choose how many pieces you want and what cut you desire. We prefer "classic cut" so it's most like a traditional puzzle but there are tons of other options. We use this site daily. Haddon has become very proficient at solving 20 piece puzzles and Thatcher has worked up to 64 piece puzzles in under 10 minutes. This would be a great reward as part of school if you are looking for some quasi-educational but still fun treats!

P.S. Don't forget to become a follower of SSA and leave a comment on this post before midnight on 7/13/09 to enter my very first giveaway! :)

Thoughts on Frugality and Being "Green" - Part 1

I have blogged much about our journey to healthier eating. I am truly thankful I have been able to initiate positive change in this area, (not that we have "arrived" at any sort of official destination; we are still very much on a journey) yet in recent months I have begun to ponder what many of these changes have meant to our grocery budget. A very few have reduced our budget, like making our own bread, but most have increased our budget - in some cases dramatically. It's happened slowly over time. A few cents for this product, a dollar for that one. It all adds up...really quickly.

Our grocery budget is definitely higher than I want it to be but I just haven't been able to reduce our expenditures enough to really make a difference. I've always tried to be careful with money. I've cut coupons for years. I try to stock up on items when there is a good sale. I make a monthly trip to Wal-Mart to get items that never have coupons and are significantly cheaper there. I have switched to generic products for 80% of what we buy. I even did Grocery Game for 18 months. Still our grocery bill has risen over the years. Then I saw a thread on the message board I frequent that talked about frugality and I was intrigued. There is a whole world out there of others on this quest to be frugal who are sharing their insight and wisdom - websites, message board and blogs. Who knew?! ;) This is a new area of learning for me. I'll blog more about changes we've made in Part 2.

Another area I have been noodling on (love that expression - lol!) is living "green". Eliminating chemicals from our diet has been very expensive so when I began researching how to get rid of them from the rest of our lives - at least the ones in my control - I have been delighted to find that these changes can be much more budget friendly. You can go two routes here. There is a huge market for enviro-friendly cleaning products, and at my local grocery store I see new items each and every week. Most of these are considerably more expensive than their "non-green" counter-parts. Or you can go the homemade route. I chose the latter having replaced all the cleaners in our home with four simple ingredients: white vinegar, baking soda, lemons/lemon juice and borax. In my research, you can pretty much clean every single spot in your home with some combination of these four products. A gallon of white vinegar cost me $1.50, a box of baking soda was $1.00, three large lemons were $1 and a box of Borax was $4. I also made a one-time purchase of spray bottles at Home Depot for $.96 each. One I filled with pure vinegar and the other with 50-50 vinegar/water. Not bad considering I won't need to buy another item, other than lemons, for several months.

Here a few links I have found helpful in learning how to clean "green" on a budget:
vinegartips.com
The New Homemaker
3 Homemade Natural Cleaning Products
Non-Toxic Bathroom Cleaners and Homemade Cleaning Solutions

This is still all very new for me so I am learning as I go. For every person the exact formulas that will work for them varies depending on the surfaces in your home (I have white linoleum, white laminate counter tops, and very light beige carpet...and lots of each - ICK!), the type water you have (ours is hard) and the types of stains/grime/dirt you are likely to be fighting (with three boys and a dog it's any and everything in this department- grin) . At first I was very daunted by this try-and-see process, but I finally realized it's no different than my trying several store-bought products until I found just the right ones that did the job - some work and some don't. This is no different. I will soon be trying homemade laundry detergent and dishwasher powder as well.

It's been nice to make some changes that are good for my family's health, the environment and our pocketbook. How refreshing!

P.S. Don't forget to become a follower of SSA and leave a comment on this post before midnight on 7/13/09 to enter my very first giveaway! :)

Happy 3rd Birthday, Beckett!

My littlest man turned three just a few short weeks ago. Here are some photos from his special day...

Each of my boys has celebrated their 3rd birthdays at Chuck E. Cheese. This photo turned out over-exposed but I still had to include it; he doesn't look like a baby anymore. :(

What do they say about boys always love their mommies?!

This child is passionate about a few things...Thomas the Train, GeoTrax and Cars. He hit the jackpot on this birthday in all three departments. He was one happy child. :)

The baby of the family. He truly relished this moment when all eyes were on him. ;)

Blowing out the candles on Year 2 and hello Year 3.

One of the loving nicknames we use for our boys is, "monkeys", as in, "The monkeys are awake for the day," or "Okay monkeys, it's time for dinner." Not exactly sure how that came about or why, but it has definitely stuck. About a month before B's birthday, as I was looking through cake decorating magazines for inspiration, I jokingly said, "I think I'll make you a monkey cake, you little monkey!" Well he thought it was hilarious and began talking about his monkey cake to anyone who would listen. I had no choice at that point...a monkey it was. Then I just had to figure out how.

This was my second time playing with fondant after the Lego man on Thatcher's cake.
It was so much fun! It's just like playing with play dough.

The idea was that the monkey was supposed to be holding a banana in one hand and a birthday cake in the other. It was a lot easier than trying to form some sort of monkey hand for sure!

Happy Birthday, my sweet Beckett.

P.S. Don't forget to become a follower of SSA and leave a comment on this post before midnight on 7/13/09 to enter my very first giveaway! :)

SSA's First Giveaway!

Did you notice the new doohickey on my right sidebar just below the photos of my boys? I added the "Follower" gadget! I want to start making changes to my sidebars so that my blog will be more helpful for visitors to find useful information quickly and easily. In the process I wanted to make a few fun changes as well. This fits that category. It's so motivating to sit down and blog when I see all the faces of those who will possibly be visiting to read my ramblings. Thanks to those of you who already signed up!

If you check this blog with any regularity, would you consider adding your sweet face as one of my followers? It's super easy. Just click the "Follow" button on the right and it you're just about there. And just to make it more fun, I will be having my first giveaway! Leave a comment and tell me that you are one of my followers or that you have just added yourself as a new follower. The winner will win one of these three books, winner's choice. All three have been mentioned in previous posts and all three have had a huge impact on me personally and on the direction of our school.

Hurry and add your face and don't forget to leave a comment before midnight on Monday, July 13th to let me know. I will use Random.org to select a winner and will post the results on Tuesday the 14th! Good luck and thanks for stopping by!

Happy Belated Anniversary!

Oops! I missed my 2nd Blogoversary. I started this online journal Memorial Day 2007 and this year it slipped right past with no recognition. I am so sorry, blog. And belated,

"Happy Blogoversary to You!"

Thanks for being a such a joy to me. You are a place for me to reflect and process. A place to chronicle both our triumphs and struggles. You are a good friend. And though you are oft neglected, you never demand anything of me. You sit patiently and wait for my return. I will be back soon.

Creating My Own Homeschool Conference and a Plan for More "Teacher Inservice"

Our local homeschool conference was this weekend in Houston. I have attended for three summers now and received great encouragement each time. I had pre-purchased my ticket and was ready to go...until I sat down on Thursday night to read over the seminar schedule. There were lots of new speakers and several new workshops on all sorts of topics. But none of them spoke to me and where I am in my journey. I couldn't justify spending two days and a half a tank of gas to sit listening to talks that really didn't apply to me at this time. Not that they weren't great; they were. They just weren't great for me.

Immediately a thought jumped into my mind, "Why not plan my own two-day conference?" Dh was already planning on staying with the kids and I really needed some time off re-ignite the fire that had somewhat dimmed in recent months. I made my own schedule, packed a bag full of books and goodies, grabbed the laptop and headed off to Panera Bread, a place with free Wi-Fi and yummy food. I think their Cinnamon Crunch Bagel and Honey Walnut Spread just may be my new passion in life. ;) I spent the next two days reading, researching, listening, reflecting and journaling. I was able customize my day and utilize so many mediums: books, websites, blogs, message boards, my trusty journal and seminars on MP3. It was wonderful, enriching and a very motivating time.

I missed the fellowship of friends but most of them were not attending the conference this year for various reasons anyway. I also missed walking around the Exhibit Hall at the conference; it's so fun to see all the great resources out there. But I had fun replacing that with time walking around Lakeshore Learning. I found some great things to add to our wishlist!

Saturday when my "conference" was done, I thought back to when I was a ps teacher; we had regular "Staff Development" and/or "Teacher Inservice" days scattered throughout the year. They were nice days to recharge batteries, get some fresh ideas and have a little fun in the process. As a homeschooler I could definitely benefit from some ongoing "Staff Development" so I decided I will try to schedule my own "Teacher In-Service" days about once every eight weeks or so. Next time I will invite other homeschool moms to join me. We may all be doing different things but just to be able to visit on our breaks would be such a treat!

Here is the schedule I went by:



And here are links to most of the things listed in the schedule:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 in Modern English at Ambleside Online
HANDLE Therapy
Grace Based Parenting
AO - Ambleside Online
SCM - Simply Charlotte Mason
Laying Down the Rails MP3 from SCM
Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival
Higher Up and Further In Blog
Handbook of Nature Study Blog
Lakeshore Learning
Masterly Inactivity e-book from SCM

If you are thinking about your own planning your own conference/teacher inservice here is what I would suggest for your consideration:

1. Start making a list now of things you might like to do. Research online seminars you can download and or CD talks you can go ahead and order so they are ready. What homeschool related books are sitting half-finished or maybe haven't even been started? Any new curriculum you've been wanting to take a good long look at? Order the catalog now so it's ready. Need time to do some goal-setting or long term planning?

2. Then, prioritize. I tried to make the majority of my conference a time of enrichment. Conferences are supposed to motivate, inspire, introduce new ideas or new ways of doing things. Make sure your conference has plenty of time for personal growth, not just practical planning out your year (although I did a tiny bit of that, too). This is a time to recharge batteries! What will recharge you?

3. Make a schedule and stick to it, just like you would at a real conference. The accountability of having mine printed and on the table next to me kept me on-task and not mentally wandering off.

4. When I made my schedule, I tried to alternate between reading, computer time and listening. I didn't want to be staring at a computer screen for 4 straight hours or plan all my reading back to back.

5. If you have a laptop, research places with wi-fi, preferably free to keep costs low. If you don't but internet access is needed during your time, consider going to a library so you can use their computers. When choosing a place for my days, I chose restaurants where you order at a counter and get your own drinks; tips are not expected. If you go to a traditional restaurant and sit in a server's section for several hours, it is appropriate to tip him/her enough to make up for the money s/he would have made from all the tables during the time you sat there. Now if you are there during a dead time and you are really, really low maintenance (don't need your drink refilled every two minutes) , don't worry too much. Can you tell I worked at restaurants for years? ;)

My two days were just the start of my plan to fight off the burn out I've been facing. And what a great start it was!