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Max - Oh Max, you have been an absolute handful this week. Naughty, cheeky, and pushing the boundaries left right and centre. I still love you to pieces though :)

Lincoln - Last night you slept for 8 and a half hours straight. Bliss! Back when you were 3 weeks old and screaming for hours on end in the middle of the night your Dad and I thought that a good nights sleep was a distant dream. Oh how you've changed my gorgeous boy!

{I love this photo so much because it shows how similar their eyes are. Lincoln's are getting browner and darker every day :). }

Valentine's Cheesecakes

I'm not really the kind of person that needs a special occasion before I'll make something sinfully delicious, but if I did, Valentine's Day would be it. It's the perfect occasion to make something sweet for someone special.

I first made these cheesecakes for Sean last Valentine's Day, but I completely forgot to share the recipe for them. He loved them so much that I thought I would make them again this year (and actually write a post about them this time!).

No Bake Oreo and Raspberry Cheesecakes

15 Oreo cookies, roughly chopped
225g (8 ounces) cream cheese, at room temperature
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
400ml (13 ounces) fresh cream, whipped (you can use cool whip, but I prefer freshly whipped cream)
1 punnet of raspberries
8 small jars (I used baby food jars and they were perfect)

1. Coarsely chop the cookies and set them aside.

2. Beat the cream cheese, sugar & vanilla with an electric mixer and set aside.

3. Gently stir in 2/3's of the whipped cream and 3/4′s of the chopped cookies.

4. Half fill each of the jars with the cheesecake mixture, add a layer of raspberries and then top with the remaining cheesecake mix.

5. Spoon the left over whipped cream into a piping bag and add a swirl of cream to the top of each jar. Sprinkle with left over oreos.

6. Refrigerate for at least four hours or until firm.

{Recipe adapted from here}

These are so yummy and the raspberries are the perfect partner for the sweet cheesecake flavors, Enjoy!!

Make Your Own Fishing Game

For Max's birthday party back in December I put together a little fishing game for the kids to play. It was a big hit and they all absolutely loved it. It was so much fun watching the concentration on all of their cute little toddler faces as they tried to 'catch' the fish!

After the party I decided to make Max a more permanent version of the game using felt fish rather than paper ones. I orginally planned on including it in his Christmas stocking, but I didn't quite get there... Last week I finally got my butt into gear and made it for him. I would sit on the couch making it as Max watched ABC for Kids and he kept asking me 'those fishys for me?' and 'can I play with my fishys yet Mumma?'. When I did finish and let him have a go he was beyond excited!!

It was so easy to make that I can't believe I procrastinated for so long!

I started out by drawing a basic fish shape and then cutting it out to use as a template. Then I traced it onto my pieces of felt and cut out my little fishys.

I chose a fun bright orange embroidery thread to stitch them up with. I guess I was still stuck on the colours from Max's party :).

I hand stitched around each fish until I got to the pointy bit (I want to say it's nose, but I don't think fish have noses.... or maybe they do, I'll stick with 'the pointy bit'). Once I got there I added in a little metal hoop so that the magnet would have something to stick to.

I kept sewing around the fish until I only had a little gap left, then I stuffed the fish with hobbyfill and finished sewing them up.

I used the same fishing rods that I made for the party. They were super simple to make too. I wound some jute around the top of the balsa wood dowel and secured it with hot glue, hot glued a magnet to the end of the rope and added some washi tape to the base for decoration.

Max really loves playing with it! I'm always so thrilled when he loves handmade toys!! It's a great game for hand-eye co-ordination and takes a bit of concentration on his part :)

Tell me... Do you like making or buying handmade toys for your kids to play with?


{Come and join me on Facebook or Pinterest - you'll often find me pinning at 2am as I feed my hungry baby!}

3/52

 

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013"

Max - absolutely loving the fishing game that I made for him (I'm slowly getting used to his newly short hair).

Lincoln - this kid loves swimming so much. Once he gets in the water he kicks his legs and paddles his arms as hard as he can. Completely cracks us up every time!

(Linking up with Che & Fidel).

Fish Party - Party Bags

I'm back with another post from Max's Fish Party, this time I'm sharing the deets from his party bags. After all of the effort that I put into his cake these might be a bit of a let down though!

I kept it really simple & cheap for these, all up each bag only cost me about $3.50 (which is a record for me by a long shot!!).

I was originally planning on making 'goldfish in a bag soaps', but after looking at buying all the supplies for them I realised they were going to cost way more than I had budgeted for. I really liked the look of them though so I decided to style my bags in a similar way.

I started out with clear cello bags from the dollar store ($2 for 25). I wanted the base of them to be flat, so I snipped off the bottom of them and then used this tutorial (and some washi tape) to get the shape I wanted.

Next up I found an image I liked online and digitally coloured it using fireworks. Then I printed them and cut them out.

I popped a cardboard fishbowl into the front of each bag, filled them with a couple of ballons, a mini slinky, some stickers, a fish colouring in page, colouring pencils and some sweet little lollies (I used ones that were left over from decorating which helped keep the costs down further).

Simple and cheap, and the best part was that Max loved them so much and he got such a kick out of handing them out to his little friends :).

You can see the all the photos from Max's party here and a tutorial on how I made his cake here.


Edited - Here's a link to the fishbowl image - http://stuck-on-glue.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/cut-and-color-printable-fishbowl.html

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Max - My happy little man, one of the last photos of him before he had all of his hair cut off.

Lincoln - 8 weeks old and looking a lot less like a newborn every single day.



Linking up with Che & Fidel for 52 - a portrait a week.

Fishy Cake

Back when I shared the details of Max's birthday party I kind of promised I'd be back with details of the cake and decorations. Umm yeah, didn't quite happen sorry! Between having a baby, Christmas and my etsy shop things got a little crazy in December. But as promised here are the details of the cake :).

Before I tell you about the cake though, I want to share the invites I had made for the party. They were done for me by the very talented Julia at Kuku Couture Invitations. If you need invitations for any occasion you have to go check her out. She's an absolute dream to work with and makes the most gorgeous designs.

Now for the cake!

After pinning images like this and this I knew that I wanted to do scalloped icing, but with a more fishy feel to it. My plan was for it to look a bit like fish scales all over the cake.

I started off by making three dense chocolate mudcakes, then I layered them together with buttercream (the recipe I used is here) and crumb coated the whole lot. I'm by no means an expert at crumb coating (or cake making for that matter), to see how to do a good crumb coat you can check out this tutorial here.

Once the crumb coat had firmed up in the fridge for half an hour I started with the scalloped icing. Using the same buttercream I made up three different colours, blue, green and white, and then I half filled three seperate piping bags.

To get the scalloped fish-scale look I piped a series of icing dots vertically down the cake using number 12 round tips on my icing bags (I forgot to take a picture at the start, but you can see the dots in the picture below).

 

Once each vertical row of dots was done I would take the end of a teaspoon, push it into the middle of the icing dot and then drag it to the right. Then it was just a matter of repeating the entire way around the cake. I tried to keep my colour patterns nice and random for that fish scale look.

After the sides of the cake was finished I did the same thing around the top of the cake.

It was time consuming (it took me about 5 hours to ice all up!!), but definitely worth it, everyone loved it and it tasted delicious!

For the party I also made some fishing pole cupcakes (or rod-n-fish cakes as Max liked to call them!). They were super simple. I saw the idea on pinterest and went from there. I made vanilla cupcakes, piped a swirl of blue buttercream on top of each and then added a little fishing rod that I made out of bamboo skewers, twine and gummy fish. Super cute!

There you have it, Max's Fishy Cake... Better late than never right!?

(If you'd like to see more from Max's party you can see the party photos here and details of the party bags here.)

Toddler Tuesday - Playing Matchy Match

Back before Christmas I made Max a matching pairs game for my project in the handmade gift round-up (you can see the tutorial here).

I was actually really nervous for him to open it on Christmas day, I thought he might just brush it aside in favour of the things he asked Santa for (Angry birds, chuggington, trucks, fire engines etc).

So when he opened it and actually loved it I was equal parts happy and surprised. When we were playing with it on Christmas Day he asked me 'why you make this for me Mumma?' and I told him 'because I love you'. He gave me the cutest smile and said 'I love this thing you made for me Mumma'. Toddlers are seriously the sweetest thing on the planet!!

We've played it several times in the last week and I can't believe how good Max is at it. He definitely has a better memory than me!!