It's Still Here

We got our first real snow storm of the season late last night. I know this because we were driving home in it and I was reminded that we need to put our snow tires on. Rain can quickly turn into snow this time of year - what fun!

Checking outside this morning, the snow had yet to melt away. The air was damp and cold and it made me long for hot chocolate, Christmas lights, and festive music. I think we still have some time before there is a constant blanket of snow on the ground, but like the Stark's say, Winter is coming.

 

 

Patio table with snow

Hanging basket with snow

Everything is a Photo Opportunity #22

A few summers ago I took this photo at my friend Taye's cottage. I had just started using the Hipstamatic App on my iPod and I was taking photos of anything and everything, as I was under the impression that a 70's filter made everything more awesome. It wasn't always the case, but this is one of the better photos I took.

My Once-A-Year Mug

This happened this morning.

Love using this mug!

Birthday Songs

It wouldn't be a birthday without some festive music, so I'm sharing some of my b-day faves and hoping you have a fabulous day too! :)

The Classic:




The New Favourite:




Memories of My Youth:

Rainbow Cake - Success!

It's my birthday tomorrow, so we had a big turkey dinner last night at Mom's. Like always, Mom's turkey was perfect and our bellies were full (over-full mostly). I elected to make a cake for last night's affair and I excitedly opted to make a Rainbow Cake.

Baking the cake was easy and fun. I used two white cake mixes, which I made one at a time and each became three layers of the cake. I absolutley love working with colour paste and over the next while I am going to find any excuse to use them. Colour is fun!

Prepare cake mix

Divide into three

Add colour (red, orange, yellow) and mix

Bake for about 22 minutes

And repeat!!

Add colour (green, blue, purple) and mix

And bake about 22 minutes

All the colours of the rainbow - baked!

The assembly of the cake was a little harder than baking, which I detailed in yesterday's post. I excitedly stacked the layers together (with a little parchment paper between them), and when I unstacked them, each layer ripped a giant hole in the layer beneath it. Whoops! Also, the more I handled the layers, the more fragile they became, with the green one actually breaking in three. If I try this cake again I know it will go a lot smoother, and I'm happy to say the cake turned out awesome regardless of the difficulty I faced.

While dealing with cracking and breaking cake layers, I forgot to take photos of how it was assembled. And while decorating, I was just hoping that it didn't collapse, so no photos of that either. Just imagine it being assembled with lots of wishing and hoping that it would work out.

To cover the cake and ice between the layers, I needed almost three full cans of vanilla frosting. I wouldn't claim that I have awesome icing skills, and icing a multi-layer, multi-colour cake with a tonne of icing is hard. The crumbs of each colour layer seemed to actively jump onto the icing knife so they could spread themselves happily throughout the white icing. Every attempt at correcting it seemed to make it 100 times worse. But not to worry! The solution is to distract the people with sprinkles. Sprinkles are my new cake decorating best friend.

Also, it is super fun to throw sprinkles at a cake!

Based on the complications, I wasn't really sure what it would look like inside. I'm so happy that it did not disappoint. This cake is definitely visually crowd pleasing. It tastes pretty great too.