Wedding Shower Cookies

One of my sisters got married this past summer and for one of her showers, my other sister and I made these cookies. I can't take any of the credit, my sister came up with the idea and I just helped execute, but they turned out so cute that I needed to share!!!

We tried to make a cake too....it fell apart....I mean literally fell apart.........don't know where we went wrong........

Beer Can Birthday Cake

For my husbands 30th birthday, I decided to put my cake decorating skills to the test. I looked around online for some ideas and found several different versions of a "beer can" cake.

Here is what the final version of the cake looked like:

My hubby really loved the cake and everyone who saw it was suprised that there was actually cake inside! It was really a lot easier to make than it looks. Just time consuming! I used a cake recipie from The Cake Doctor cookbook (I love this cookbook, every recipe that I have ever made comes out wonderfully!). I actually had to make a double batch and stacked the two cakes on top of each other. This was probably the hardest part of making the cake because I have never had to use dowels before in a cake, but needed to here because of the height of the cake and the fact that I had to transport it to the party (about a 30 minute car ride from my house....I aged about 10 years during this car ride....but thats another story). Since I had never used dowels in a cake before, I think that I probably overdid it. I think that I used 6 dowels.....anyone know if that was overkill????

After stacking the cakes, I frosted the outside of the cake and then added the "foam" on top using a large circular frosting tip. The handle, pretzels and circular happy birthday sign I made from a fondant gum paste mixture a few days earlier. The peanuts are real. The "beer" pouring into the can was just sugar, water and corn syrup that I heated up and then molded around another dowel.

All in all, I was pretty pleased with how cute this cake turned out and it had a great wow factor for all who saw it!