Happy (Belated) Mother’s Day

This year for Mother’s day I was fortunate enough to celebrate three Moms!  But what to get for the super women who do it all?

Well, I love sharing our family recipes because my mother is particularly notorious for accidentally leaving out ingredients or crucial steps.  So it’s important to write them down to remember exactly how to make them!  Since chalkboard style printables are all the rage (see a million examples on Pinterest like this board), I decided to craft up a few family recipes chalkboard style – one for each of the ladies.

I started with finding a chalkboard background and downloading a few key chalkboard fonts.  There are tons of great posts on chalkboard fonts from Jenni from the blog, Lil Blue Boo, and Side of Sneakers just to name a few.  Don’t forget to download some doodles, dingbats, and ornaments.  I found quite a few helpful ones like LCR Kitchen Dings and Sugar Coma that were cooking themed.

Then I grabbed a few family favorite recipes and set to work with my Mom’s favorite dish from her mother.  This particular recipe cracks me up because when my Mom gave it to me, I got practically NONE of the actual assembly instructions.  So I was pretty anxious to see if I was able to interpret them correctly to see if this is actually how Nana makes the mac n’ cheese.

I haven’t gotten any edits back yet, but she may be saving them up to let me know in the future

Next up was my Mother’s chocolate chip recipe which I like to enjoy sans chocolate chips.Finally, Heather’s recipe for my favorite – Black Bean Hummus.  Probably not her signature dish (see Jello Pretzel Dessert) but this one had so many comments in it that I thought it was pretty funny to see how she’d changed it up from the original. 

So there’s the whole set!  I put them in frames and all the Mothers had a great treat on their celebration day.

–Martta

Race for the Cure Survivor Wall

I was digging through pictures to find images of my Race for the Cure quilt which will be auctioned at the Perfectly Pink Party coming up on May 4th when I ran across photos of the flower wall we created in this year’s Survivor Booth. 

When I was planning out the booth for the year, I was trying to brainstorm a way to incorporate the names of survivors into the booth and I came up with the idea of a flower wall.  Now, I’m just the idea man on this one folks, because the fabulous Karen is the one who actually hand made all 1400 flowers for the wall.  Here she is all decked out in gear from the photo booth props. To assemble the wall we had volunteers write the name of a survivor on each flower.  Each flower was then taped to a string that was about 9 feet long (make sure to only make the flowers on the string about 8 feet long and you’ll have room to tie the string at the top and bottom.) I then got two 1″x2″ boards that were 8 feet tall and drilled a hole in the top.  We had a handy dandy chain link fence which I attached the boards to using zip ties.  I strung a line through the hole drilled in the top of the of the boards and we began to tie the flower streamers to the line.

The idea was we wanted the flower wall to flutter and move in the breeze, but it turned out to be a heck of a windy day and we ended up tying the bottom of the flower streamers to another line at the bottom of the boards.  We still had plenty of movement and folks weren’t battered by streamers gone wild!

It even worked from the backside as our race co-chair showed peeking through from the outside. 

The end result was great and many ladies took pictures with their flower or when they found their flower, they plucked it from the wall and took it with them.  We had spare blank flowers and racers were able to add names of other survivors they knew so any holes were quickly filled in.

I loved using the survivor’s names in the booth and will definitely find a way to incorporate this idea for next year’s booth!

–Martta

Pink Ombré Chevron Cake

It has been a full week of decorating a baking at my house and I just looked up at the calendar to see that Easter is just next weekend!  Crikey!  Part of the baking extravaganza was a cute baby celebration cake I made. 

I’m rediscovering the star tip after years away from it.  Here, I used a 16 to create an easy chevron effect with three different colors of pink buttercream icing. I freehand piped the chevrons which ended up slightly uneven at the back, but pretty good for not laying it out beforehand!  I wish I’d make the pinks a bit darker, so you could really see the color gradient, but overall I was pleased with the effort.

The best part was when we cut into the cake to see the ombré effect in the cake layers too! Definitely worthy of a celebration of a new little baby!  – Martta