St. Patrick’s Day Rainbows

Top of the Mornin’ to ya!!  It’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, and we do have a few rainbows around here on this cold and frosty and blizzardy day!  Like I mentioned before, I feel the need for rainbows!  Especially since it’s been snowing for a few days and my son is feeling discouraged that the walks that he has shoveled keep filling in!  Every morning it looks as though the walkway was never shoveled at all.  At least we’ve had a bit of sun, in between the snowy clouds.  But we need some cheering up, an assurance that spring really is around the corner!

 So indoors is where we must fabricate our own rainbows….
Wee little Leprechaun hat pops!!  I found them and a tutorial on how to make them here.  I made my own cookies with holes in the middles to help out when dipping them in chocolate, and in order to have the hats on sticks so I could call them Pops.  Leprechaun Hat Pops.I made a few more St. Paddy’s Day cookies and my daughter and I were trying to take some different photos of them for LilaLoa’s cookie photo contest where she’s challenging us to change up our cookie photography.  It’s very hard to photograph in our weak winter kitchen light, but we did our best.  Lyra took some shots that are a bit different than I usually get….  🙂  Shamrocks and Rainbows!

I keep forgetting the order of the rainbow so I found this fun little video to help me remember….I watched it before I iced the cookies (I know I have different colors on my rainbows, but that’s all I had at 10pm last night!!)

Hope you have a fun Rainbow Sunday!!!  😉

Ice Cream Cone Cake Pops!!

This is one treat that I’ve really enjoyed making….cake pops, but disguised as ice cream cones!  I made this batch in a hurry, so I didn’t photograph the “how to” but I will someday.  They pack a sugary punch, but look so cute and sweet and innocent…just sitting there, wearing their chocolate splash and colorful sprinkles….sitting there and sitting there and not melting…it’s a sight to behold.  I think these pops tend to confuse younger children…..(heh heh!)

I was thinking of adding lollypop sticks to make it even more handy to hold, but realized that I’d have to saw away a good chunk of the bottom of the cone, and decided not to destroy the sharp sugary point of the perfect mini cones….(have I mentioned that I don’t like to destroy things?)These little cones had a surprise inside…rainbow colors of cake!  I didn’t bite into any of the cones, but I did bite some sample cake pops! 😉And here’s one that I was experimenting with, trying to make a real rainbow cake pop!I must say that I need to work on getting the flavors a little more….uh, flavorful (they all kind of tasted the same to me, especially in the rainbow pop).  The kids seemed to enjoy them, though….  The yellow ice cream cones were lemon inside, the orange ones were a light orange flavor, the white ones were blueberry and blue vanilla.

some more pics!  I definitely get tired of eating them, but never of looking at them! 😉

a Hello Kitty party, cake pops and a recycled cake.

Oh that cute little kitty with her perfect red bow!! She’s a lot older than she looks, with her smooth white plasticky face and those perky whiskers….I know, because she’s been around as long as I can remember, and I’m not so shiny smooth and perky anymore…

Sometimes I’m surprised at her universal appeal…oh, hey, I just went to my favorite wikipedia to look her up, see what I found:

“In 1962, Shintaro Tsuji, founder of Sanrio, began selling rubber sandals with flowers painted on them. Tsuji noted the profits gained by adding a cute design to the sandals and hired cartoonists to design cute characters for his merchandise. The company produced a line of character merchandise around gift-giving occasions. Hello Kitty was designed by Yuko Shimizu and was added to the lineup of early Sanrio characters in 1974. The character’s first appearance on an item was a vinyl coin purse in Japan where she was pictured sitting between a bottle of milk and a goldfish bowl. She first appeared in the United States in 1976.

Sanrio decided to make Hello Kitty British because at the time when she was created, foreign countries, in particular Britain, were trendy in Japan. In addition, Sanrio already had a number of characters set in the US and they wanted Hello Kitty to be different. Shimizu got the name Kitty from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where in a scene early in the book Alice plays with a cat she calls Kitty. Sanrio’s motto is “social communication” and Tsuji wanted the brand name of the cat to reflect that. He first considered “Hi Kitty” before settling on “Hello” for the greeting. Spokespeople for Sanrio have said that Hello Kitty does not have a mouth because they want people to “project their feelings onto the character” and “be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty.” Another explanation Sanrio has given for her lack of a mouth is that she “speaks from the heart. She’s Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to any particular language”. Representatives for Sanrio have said they see Hello Kitty as a symbol of friendship, and they hope she will encourage friendship between people across the world. There has been some suggestion that Hello Kitty has its origins in Maneki Neko, and that the name Hello Kitty itself is a back-translation of Maneki Neko, which means beckoning cat in English.”

Imagine that, we are the same age!!  Enough Hello Kitty trivia…let the cuteness continue, on with the party….

I’m crazy about Hello Kitty…so a party for my girl seemed like a good time to try out the kitty cake pops!  Luckily, she likes the cute white cat, too!  I saw these Hello Kitty Pez dispensers, and thought they would make great party favors:Just today I thought of some more party favors that would have been so cute:  each girl could have had a headband with a cute Hello Kitty red bow!! Wouldn’t that have been cute for photos!

A fast and easy party idea, Kitty Koloring pages for a little party activity…There was also a teaparty for the little girls and play food to….play with.

Now on to the food.  Here’s a shot of the pieces of the cake before being frosted, it was a jello poke cake:But just a cake wasn’t good enough, I had seen Bakerella’s Hello Kitty pops and really wanted to try them….so here’s what I did:

Made cake balls or ovals (cake+frosting), then with frosting, added chocolate chips for ears…refridgerated for awhile….Dipped the balls into melted white candy melts, starting to look more like ears now…And with chocolate, added some details…For the bow, I cut up some of the disc-shaped red candy melts and “glued” them on with more melted candy melts..Now to frost the cake….oh, and add some easy fabric bows to some of the HellosTa da!The birthday girlThe party was crashed by some (yikes!) boys!!

 But thankfully they were the gentlemanly chess-playing type of boys, so it was all ok….And they were happy to help devour the helpless Hello Kitty cake pops…and all the kids were happy to eat food on swords!the birthday girl was very pleased with her party! 🙂And her Hello Kitty lego gift!  Who knew Hello Kitty was into little plastic bricks? So cute!The funniest thing was that I gave the kids the cake pops, but didn’t actually cut the cake and serve it.  When one boy was leaving he said “aren’t we going to get a piece of cake?”  Mean old me said that I thought the cake pops had been enough and I needed the cake for something else!!  Thankfully our friends are really good friends and we put up with each other’s quirks!! (so the boy was not scarred for life).  I needed to recycle the cake and use it for our Guatemalan Independence Day celebration!!  Here’s how the recycled cake looked:🙂 It all worked out just right!