Celebrations

Yesterday was Father's Day and we enjoyed a lovely day at our daughter and son-in-law's house, along with the rest of our family.  The weather cooperated with the perfect temperature, no humidity or rain.
With so many different schedules that everyone must follow it's difficult to get everyone together.

Besides Father's Day, this week also brings two more birthday's - Maddie's 9th birthday on Tuesday and Joe's 43rd on Wednesday. So we celebrated their special days too!

                     (Maddie with her Godparents, Aunt Beth and Uncle Kevin.)
Always great food when we gather.  One of the guys favorites are shish kabobs on the grill.  So along with steak, chicken, shrimp, salmon, tilapia and a huge variety of veggies skewered and grilled, there was brown rice, corn on the cob and homemade potato salad.  As if that wasn't enough, desserts and birthday cake came later.

When my kids were little I enjoyed making them interesting birthday cakes.  It's been some time since I have had fun creating a special cake.  I suggested that I bring a cake for Maddie's birthday.

She ended up with a five layer, rainbow, vanilla cake.  Vanilla pudding was used between the layers.Made three batches of homemade buttercream frosting, but only used about two to frost and decorate the cake.  Wilton has so many new and interesting things to use for cake decorating.  I used the spray coloring   mist to add color to the white frosting.  Used a star tip to make a simple decorated top and edging.  Of course I found a way to incorporate my Sizzix dies into decorating the cake.  Used the Tim Holtz Ornamental die to cut printed paper and a piece of plastic.  Used Sizzilit "Groovy Girl" alphabet for letters to spell out "Happy Birthday Maddie".  Created flowers that were cut from canvas with the 3D flower die and leaves from two dies for reusable embellishments.