Sunday, July 24, 2011

Baby Shower Festivities

Last weekend I went to a baby shower for a friend of mine. I volunteered to bring cookies but I am friends with the girls hosting the shower so I got to help out with the decorations and desserts too. I LOVE crafty things like this so I jumped at the chance to help out and to be honest I was a little afraid that my single Manhattan friends would be a little out of their element hosting a baby shower :)
I was totally wrong about the girls being out of their element because the shower was probably the most sophisticated baby shower I've ever been to! Everything turned out really well. The diaper cake one of the girls made was so fantastic everyone thought it was ordered, not homemade. I have to give her credit, it was the fanciest diaper cake I've ever seen!
Most of you probably aren't familiar with cake pops but they're kind of this new fad. They are absolutely adorable in theory but in reality they are ridiculously hard to make. I ended up helping one of the girls try to make them for the shower. We were trying to make cake pops that looked like babies with pacifiers. We got maybe three to turn out halfway decent.
The general idea is that you bake cake and then crumble it up and mix in icing, then roll it into balls and dip in candy coating and decorate.....easy right :) The candy coating we were dipping the cake balls into was so thick it was almost impossible to get a smooth coat over the cake ball. We eventually gave up and did a textured pattern instead. Even though we didn't get the cute babies we were hoping for the textured cake pops still tasted fantastic and ended up displaying really well in the vases, like little flowers :)
And finally the cookies that I made....I think they are adorable if I do say so myself :) I got cookie cutters for Christmas that have slots to hold letters and you can insert any words you want. I was really happy with the cookies and everyone seemed impressed and kept asking how I did it; the secret is they were super easy!

As you can tell I love this kind of stuff and I'm really excited about my friend having a baby. She will be the first one of my NY friends to have a baby and I'm very curious to see how the whole baby in NY thing works.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Shakespeare Garden

Earlier in the summer John and I went to check out the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park. We don't go to Central Park much since its not really near our neighborhood but I needed a little nature :) 
So serene, maybe that's why I like it :)
Or it could be the lilies, I love lilies and these were gigantic!
We also stopped by Belvedere Castle overlooking the Turtle Pond on our little outing.
Clearly its called the Turtle Pond for a reason :)
Now its entirely too hot to even be outside :( I know people think up North it doesn't get hot but today's high was close to 100 degrees....try walking to work in that! 

Monday, July 11, 2011

Apartment Projects

 I've been dying to put some pictures up from some of our travels so I decided to do a travel gallery. I spent way too long trying to find precisely the right frame and then realized how expensive buying ten of those frames would be so I ended up going to Ikea for basic white :)
I am thrilled with how the travel gallery turned out which is good because it took me FOREVER! First it took me way too long to decide on a frame and then decide if I wanted all the same size or different sizes. Then mat or no mat. Then days to decide on a layout. I'm just a tiny bit anal retentive if you didn't know that already :)
I tested the layout on the floor so I could work on and adjust the math which also took forever! I finally put the inserts from each of the frames up on the wall so I could make sure the layout worked and check the spacing and the math again. By the time I was putting screws in the wall I was calculating the thickness of the screw so I could make sure things were centered, I know, crazy!
Now on to my next project....
Check out the mirror I found in the basement of my building, I'm so excited! Its huge which makes it even more exciting because I'm sure it would have cost a ton. Now to find a frame :)