and now he's 6!

My oldest monkey turned 6yrs old yesterday.  It was a long, full, but fun day.  He got to open the gifts his two grandpa's had shipped to him (they both live long distance) before church.  Then we came home and let him open our gifts.  He had a friend come over to play for a couple of hours while the two youngest ones napped.  Then Grammy came over for dinner and cake.  It was a full day.

This year he asked for a transformers cake but as he has never even seen transformers nor does he have any of the toys I resisted and once my husband mentioned that a friend recently had a transformer cake at a party I did not attend with them I knew where it was coming from.  I try to urge him to carve his own little path and not copy others for the sake of going with the crowd so I asked him to pick a cake that HE wanted/would like.  A nascar race track.  Then he starts giving me details - it must have a pit and such.  I told him to draw me a picture.

So I had a tall order for this cake but really a track cake is pretty simple.  He had a track cake for his 4th birthday too but it wasn't an oval shape and was just small scale.

So I started by baking the cakes.  Which wouldn't come out of the pans.  So I had to literally scrape them out.  So I had to make new cakes.  This time I put parchment paper in the bottom of all the pans so there would be no risk of sticking.  This time they came out with no problem.  I will say though that I used a yellow cake recipe and added strawberries that I had pureed and it made the cake turn out more pound cake like.  Not sure why.  But now you know.  Then I sat in the silence on Saturday morning while my husband and children were have quality time at the McD's play area because I desperately needed some peace!  KOJ is awesome!  So I sat and worked on the details.

I colored the coconut green:

I scored the tootsie rolls to look like stacks of tires for the pit area:

I crushed up the cookie part of the oreos for the track "asphalt":

Then after the kids were in bed Saturday night I sat down with the strawberry cream cheese frosting I'd put together and the decorating elements and I created this:

The scale is totally off but my mom told me it would be going overboard to move the "fence" made of graham cracker pieces out towards the edge further. So I didn't.  But I really wanted to! lol

I found that set of stock car race cars at the store and I couldn't resist it for the top of the cake.  Monkey's reaction when I pulled the foil off was amazing.  He loved it but I think he was mostly excited about the cars on it. lol

Happy birthday baby boy!  I hope it was everything you hoped for and more!

Today I baked bread

It's true.  We're out of bread.  I've been meaning to try my hand at a simple recipe an online friend shared but I haven't gotten around to it.  I had everything on hand, bought the bread flour a couple of weeks ago but never "had the time".  Well I'm learning that I don't ever have the time, I just have to take the time.  Not just for bread making but for other things too.  So I started with the kitchen aid mixer that I love and adore and don't remotely regret purchasing.

I didn't think to take pictures of the actual progress so here's a pic of the empty mixer bowl:

Once I did the initial mixing I took the ball of dough out on the counter here:

and I kneaded it a little more until it was still sticky but not too sticky.  Then I oiled this bowl here where I plopped the ball of dough to rise:

Then I punched it down and split it between these three bread pans like so:

Then I let it rise so it was an inch above the glass as the instructions said.  And then I popped it into the oven.  It baked for about 25min and I pulled it out and moved it around a little bit to make sure they cooked as evenly as possible (our oven is super old, lol).  I pulled them out and brushed melted butter on the top (per the instructions) to keep the top from becoming rock hard as it cooled.  See how amazing it looks?

Mmmm, yummy!

And for those of you who may ask I used this recipe from allrecipes.com to make this bread.  I'll let you know how it tastes later after it's cooled.

And in other unrelated yet startling news my daughter just walked several steps across a room.  See what I miss when I'm blogging people?