Hello Kitty Cake

Hello again! It's hard for me to believe that nothing has been written here for over a month, but we've just been busy I guess. I'm sure y'all have been very busy as well and haven't missed me pestering you with blog emails :) Today I've decided to just show you another Birthday Blessings cake I made recently, then give you a quick run down on what we've been up to the last few weeks. I'd love to hear what you all have been up to as well!
 

I guess first I'll talk about the cake real quick. The little girl who the cake was for said her favorite colors were pink and purple, and some of the gifts she asked for were Hello Kitty toys. I figured since Hello Kitty was a very simple design, I could probably get it drawn on the cake. To draw the kitty face,  I just pulled a picture of it up on my laptop and sketched it in free-hand onto the icing using a toothpick. Then I outlined all of the parts in black. You can kind of tell in one of the pictures that the kitty's right ear has raised white icing. That's because when I was filling in the bow with pink icing using a star tip, I got carried away and filled the ear in with pink too :( I had to scrape it out then try and fill it in with a little white icing. The sides were done with the ruffle icing technique. I should do a blog post on that...

I hope little Miss Tyra liked her cake!

Now let's see if I can give some sort of quick re-cap of what Joe and I have been up to. Some of these things will hopefully have their own post eventually, but for tonight, I don't have any pictures to share of them.

In the middle of May, Joe and I celebrated his birthday and our 2nd anniversary. They were both pretty low key and as usual, we cooked at home and played some games :) That may sound boring, but it's always fun for us! Over Memorial Day weekend, I made a wedding cake that I delivered and set up on that Sunday. Unfortunately, I have no pictures because I was in too big of a hurry to remember the camera. Thankfully, the cake stayed standing and the bride and groom seemed happy with it. I'm going to ask the photographer if they have any pictures they can send me.

On the first Friday in June, I flew to Louisiana for a good friend's wedding. I got to see a whole bunch of my friends and Mary and Michael were nice enough to let me stay with them. It was a ton of fun, and as usual, I can't wait to go back! The weekend after that, Joe and I really got to work on the piano room on Saturday and got almost all of the work done. (That will have its own post soon. I promise!) All that is left now is finish painting trim. On that Sunday morning, we got up bright and early for me to participate in a duathalon race. This is the same race I did last year, but this year they upped the running segments to 3.2 miles (5K) each instead of 2.4. So the race was: run 5k, bike 13 miles, run 5k. I WAS DYING! To say I was under prepared is an understatement. At least I finished.

This weekend we drove to St. Louis to meet the newest member of Joe's family. Joe's sister, Abby and her husband, Albert, had a little boy on Friday, June 14th and of course we're all in love with him already! Baby Albert is just so sweet and adorable. I held him as much as I could this weekend :) We're already looking forward to seeing him again in July at his baptism!

We've also managed to get together with some friends over the past few weeks. It's nice to have people close by, but we're lucky if we can have free nights available at the same time to meet up with them!

Oh, and one more thing! Joe caught a glimpse of the "Deck Pooping Bandit" tonight! Turns out he also steals our birdseed! If you haven't heard the story, we often find little "gifts" from the Deck Pooper in the corners of our deck, but we weren't sure who was leaving them. Now we know!

I promise it'll be less than a month between now and the next post. Thanks for reading and have a great night!