Saturday, May 15, 2010

Local Squirrels Celebrate Earth Day!

I love to celebrate holidays.  Mostly my family and I celebrate the mainstream ones, like Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas etc.  We've never celebrated holidays such as "National Talk like a Pirate Day" or even Earth Day. 

So this past Earth Day started like any other regular day.  I packed the kids lunches and got them off to school.  Then I sat down at my computer to check my email and take a peek at Facebook.   One of my friends wrote a funny post that made me almost pee my pants laughing.  I will not mention her name - you know that whole protecting the innocent thing.  Anyway.....first a bird was trapped in her fireplace.  Then she went down to her basement to get something from the laundry room and was greeted by a squirrel.  Yes.  A squirrel.  Eating chocolate chips that it had retrieved from her food storage.   This alone may not strike you as funny, but the local animal control people came, captured the little critter and promptly  released it in my friends very own back yard.

I'll give you three guesses as to what appeared in her house the very next day.  If you guessed "A Squirrel" you would be ................wrong.  Well sorta.  After that first squirrel was captured and released, they trapped four more squirrels in their basement!!!   Following their story was almost like watching a soap opera.  Had they trapped them all?  Would more suddenly show up?  How were they getting in?  Over a period of a week they trapped them all in a live trap and released then in a park a little bit further away then their backyard.  

I'm sure this was stressful for my dear friends.  I would be stressed out waiting for squirrels to jump out at me at any moment!  I almost had a nervous breakdown when I had crickets in my house but I'm sure they will look back at this in a few years and laugh.

About a week or so after their home was squirrel free, I was shopping for some cookie cutters and I came along a particular one I thought would be perfect for my friends.

So I baked up a couple of these:

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Ladybug Cake

My friend Lynette called me and said that her little lady wanted a ladybug cake for her birthday but she couldn't find one at any of our local bakeries.

She said "Feel free to say no."    But who could say no to this face?




I have to admit I was a little nervous - I've never made a ladybug cake before, and I'm soo critical of my own work.  In the end, I came up with this:






I think the end result was cute.  The head was a little big and the fondant was far from perfect, but everyone seemed happy with it.  The best thing of all - Carissa, the birthday girl loved it.