Cinnamon update

It's not often that I mention Cinnamon any more. All of the kids' stuff always overshadows him. He’s almost 11 years old now and is starting to get some grays, but is still thriving. He still loves following us when we go for walks and on occasion still gets into a really playful mood. He sleeps with us every night, and can be pretty vocal if we lock him out of a room.

Ashley and Katelyn really love him. They want to shower him with attention. The problem is that most of the time their hugs, kisses and squeezes are rather rough. The cat enjoys every bit of attention that he gets, even when the kids are rough he doesn’t run away.

Ashley loves scooping him up. He’s too heavy for Katelyn, but I’m sure as soon as she can, she’ll be doing this too :)

Tea Party at Ashley's Preschool

Last week, Ashley's preschool class hosted an international themed tea party. We got to bring Nana, Busenka and Grandpa Chuck to see Ashley's preschool, meet all of her talented teachers, enjoy lunch and entertainment!

Both Ashley and Katelyn got dressed up in their favorite Spring dresses with fancy white shoes. Ashley was very proud to show off her preschool! She really loves going there. The high school student teachers that work with the kids genuinely enjoy spending time with them and turns out they have some talents as well! They put on a show to entertain us while we ate our lunch served to us by the High school cooking class. They had people sing, dance and do sign language!

After lunch Ashley stayed back to play with her friends before we headed home. It was a very nice afternoon.

Nastya's Wedding Cake Story and the Wedding

Last Sunday was Nastya’s wedding. (Nastya was our second au pair. She watched Ashley from the time she was 22 months and until Katelyn was born, after which she moved to NYC to study.)

I volunteered to put my cake making skills to a test and bake her and Danny a wedding cake! She had about 50 invitees, so the cake would have to be the largest I’ve ever made. Luckily for me, my friend Nadia (yes her name is same as mine) is also into cakes and graciously offered to help me with this project. So, here’s how it went down..

We decided on a two tier cake, 14” round on the bottom and a 10”round cake for second tier. I started by baking trial run cakes from recipes and making frostings early in the week to try to figure out the flavor combination.

On Friday, Nadia came over and we had a tasting. The winner was a lemon cake with raspberry jam filling and whipped vanilla butter cream icing. Mike, Indira, Dan and Nadia all agreed that this was delicious, however Mike, who’s not a fruity kind of guy, said that he wanted a chocolate cake, so we decided to make lemon-raspberry be the bottom tier and chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and fresh strawberries for the top tier.

The plan was to decorate the cake with daffodils to match Nastya’s flower bouquet. I whipped up royal icing in different colors, and Nadia made some beautiful daffodils, just like we learned in our cake decorating class in February. We also make some little violets, but later decided not to use them. I baked the three bottom tier cakes Friday night, while Nadia worked on the flowers.

Saturday, as soon we were back from Ashley’s gymnastics I started baking the three chocolate layers for the top tier. Everything was going smoothly. Nadia came over after lunch, I assembled and frosted the bottom layer, Nadia decorated it with a shell border. We inserted the dowels for top tier support and around 4 o’clock we had the chocolate cake cooled, filled with ganache and strawberries. It was frosted with buttercream icing and was set to chill in the fridge. It looked like we were on track to be done with everything by 5pm. No sooner than I mentioned that we were making good progress we had a disaster…

When it was time to start smoothing out the icing on the chocolate cake we noticed that we had a land slide on one side. The weight of the icing was pulling down a big chunk of the cake and there was no way to save it. We just sat there and watched it. Nadia tried to save the cake by removing the chuck that was falling off, and then sticking it back on with the help of a lot of icing. There was no way this cake could go on top of the bottom tier. We made a decision to bake two 10” lemon cake layers for the top tier. Nadia had a hard stop at 7pm, so we scrambled to get as much done as possible, but she had to leave before the 2nd layer was finished baking. Nadia promised to make time Sunday morning (the day of the wedding) to come back to help decorate the cake.

Saturday night, I finished baking and making frosting and I ran out looking for shoes for the kids to go with their dresses, and while out shopping I was happy to hear from Nadia, who called to tell me that their Saturday night plans were cancelled and she could come back to help me with the cake! At 10pm Nadia was back in my kitchen! Yay! I frosted the top tier, and we gently lowered it on top of the bottom one. Nadia decorated it with more shell borders and we spent some time arranging the daffodils on the sides and top of the cake. The cake came out gorgeous! I can’t be more proud of us, it weighted a lot but was solid, tasty and very good looking :)

Next we revisited the chocolate cake with was still in my fridge awaiting its destiny. The frosting has hardened and it looked like it may be possible to bring it back, however the question still remained if it would survive the car drive to Brooklyn. Nadia smoothed out the cake, and decorated the top with some buttercream roses and sweet pea flowers. It was after 1am on Saturday night when we finally were done! Both cakes came out looking good after all!

The next challenge was to make sure we can transport the cakes and not damage them on our one hour ride into Brooklyn. The two tier cake we loaded into a 18”x18”x16” cardboard box from Lowes, while the chocolate cake I covered with a dome from my cake carrier. Mike drove extra careful, and I carried them into the church very slowly to make sure I don’t trip on anything. Both cakes made it to the wedding in perfect condition!! :)

The wedding ceremony and reception were very nice and simple. Ashley was very excited to go, since this was her first wedding ever. She couldn’t wait for Danny to kiss Nastya at the end, and was very excited about how beautiful Nastya looked. Ashley also made a friend with the Pastor’s daughter, so the two of them had a blast playing during the reception. Katelyn was also a very good girl, she behaved during the church part, and then tagged along with Ashley.

Then it was time to cut the cake, I served the cake, and couldn’t slice it fast enough. The cake got a lot of compliments both on how it looked as well as on the taste. The chocolate cake was all gone as well as half of the lemon raspberry cake. Here are some pictures from the wedding:

It was another amazing weekend - dressing up and going out as a family to a wedding, as well as a super satisfying experience making a wedding cake! It was really fun to work with Nadia on this project! I hope we can do more projects like this together again soon :)

Braids!

Ashley has been into watching Disney movies. By now she’s seen Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Snow White, Little Mermaid and Tangled. Tangled just got released last week, so we had to buy it! In that movie princess Rapunzel has long beautiful hair in a braid. Needless to say, hair has been a very important topic in our house lately. Ashley’s been paying close attention to the way her hair looks and has asked me to braid it for her almost every day. While Ashley has come a long way since her peach fuzz which lasted for more than 2 years, we still don’t have the longest hair in the world. Nevertheless, she still really likes her braids! Here are some pictures:

Awesome Weekend!

We love busy weekends with fun things to do. Saturday was definitely one of those days. We started the day by taking Ashley to gymnastics, after which we went to Freehold Mall to look at puppies (Mike’s favorite), Ashley went on a Carousel ride, Katelyn gets motion sickness, so she doesn’t like these kind of rides. I browsed through Sur La Table (one of my two favorite kitchen stores), and we had lunch at Food Court. The kids ate well, and then it was time to go home for their nap. Ashley didn’t nap, but Katelyn did and we had to wake her up to leave for Lana’s 3rd birthday party. It was a fun princess theme birthday party, filled with a lot of activities. Ashley was happy to participate in everything and Katelyn being one of the younger one was also surprisingly cool with all of the big kid activities! She doesn’t get intimidated easily. They made crowns, danced to princess music in tutus, had pizza, and got to play in this toy house with a slide and a ball pit. It was pretty cool. Ashley ate 3 slices of pizza and some cake. Katelyn ate a slice of pizza, a bunch of fruit and enough cake for the two of them!

While they were eating Katelyn she a couple of 5-6 year old boys sitting on the end of the table, burping, so she picked up her plate and moved closer to them. She is a very loud belcher, so she thought these boys were hilarious! She was laughing so much, almost flirting with them! I guess she could appreciate their humor! She’s so outgoing and friendly, we really love that about her personality although I image we’ll have to keep that in check as she gets older.

During the whole birthday party, Ashley kept an eye on Katelyn and took her with her to do all of the activities. Last year, Ashley was not so outgoing, she was pretty clingy to me, and I think because of her preschool program, she’s really come out of her shell. She doesn’t need me to be in sight all the time, and loves to keep an eye on Katelyn when we are out.

As if the gymnastics, mall trip and birthday party weren’t enough, we then decided to stop by my mom’s house, since it was only 25 min away. Pumped with sugar from the cake, Ashley and Katelyn continued their hyper screaming-dancing-jumping-laughing fun for another hour at their house before we packed up to go home. As always, Katelyn took a break by sitting with Chuck. She has a very strong bond with him, even though she doesn’t see him too often. Every time she sees him she wants to sit with him. It’s very sweet :)

On the ride home they were so tired, that they both fell asleep in the car. We carried them into the house and didn’t even make Ashley change into PJs. In the morning Ashley was so surprised, to be still wearing her clothes from the day before! She didn’t remember how that happened.

We had such a fun Saturday that we decided to attempt a breakfast out at Perkin’s for the first time in a long time. Eating out with kids has been rather challenging, so we’ve tried to avoid it. And again, to our surprise, this time both behaved very well, and we had an enjoyable breakfast out! We are starting to think that perhaps we are over that difficult period where two kids are unmanageable to take out.

Sunday the kids got to play with the neighbors while we did some yard work, and for dinner we went out for pizza! Two meals out in one day! And again, both kids did extremely well! Wow! I can’t describe how big of a milestone this is. It really makes things so much more enjoyable, knowing that we can have a stress free meal out! We are still not talking about a prolonged dinner with appetizers and dessert, but it’s still better than nothing :)

I know this post came out kind of long, but oh well. I hope that one day when Ashley and Katelyn are older then can go back and look at some of these and get an idea of what it was like for them growing up :)

Spring is here!

Well we can tell spring is officially here, our local ground hog is awake and back hanging out by our shed, he survived another winter! Baby bunnies are out, and we have a new visitor to our backyard - a baby Cooper’s hawk. He’s been coming over and hanging out the beam of our swing set. Mike was able to capture a great picture of him by taking it through the lens of the binoculars (our camera zoom was not enough to get a close shot of him)

Ashley got a new bicycle!

Ashley’s little tricycle has become way too small for her, so last weekend we went out to get her a bicycle with training wheels. At first she couldn’t figure out how to pedal forward (the pedals don’t turn backwards) but got the hang of it pretty fast and was zooming around the Toy’s R Us store on it. This is a pretty cool new trick for her. She’s very proud of herself :)

Another cool trick that our neighbor Emma taught her is to pump her legs on the swing herself, so we don’t have to push her. She can go really high without any help!

She’s becoming so grown up so fast, definitely huge changes even from 6 months ago!

Katelyn's Dancing Bears Music Class

Since January, once a week we’ve been taking Katelyn to a music class at Dorbrook Park. This is the first semi-structured class she's ever attended. The instructor plays guitar, blow bubbles, they sing songs, dance around with scarves, drums and bells and play with balls and parachute. At first she was a little shy, didn’t want to participate, and preferred to go out in the hallway to climb the stairs. But now she’s really into it. She likes to help clean up the stuff the instructor hands out, and pays attention for the whole 45 minute duration of the class. It’s very cute. Here is a small video of the “Good Bye” song that they sing:

Ashley's Driving!

Spring is almost here, so Ashley has been practicing a lot driving her pink Cadillac. She and Katelyn hop in and off they go. A lot of the kids on the street have these, so they get together go around the cul-de-sac. Ashley started with 2.5 mph setting and now Mike's bumped up the speed to 5 mph for her.

Typically we keep her car in the shed, but sometimes if we are too lazy to walked it there at night, we back Mike's car out of the garage and park Ashley's car there instead. It looks so funny there next to my minivan :)


Here's a video of Ashley and Katelyn (this is her second time driving)

Mike's Birthday Cake

Since I've been on this cake making kick for a while now, I offered Mike to make whatever cake he wanted for his birthday. He chose basketball theme. So with a little help from Google, here's a cake that I made for our family dinner:

For dinner Mike requested Coq Au Vin with spaetzle and French string beans. Coq au vin is a french chicken dish, slow cooked in red wine, with bacon, pearl onions, mushrooms and herbs. Spaetzle is a dish of German moodles enhanced with fresh herbs. Both of these recipes came from William Sonoma cooking demonstration classes that I did last fall. We really liked the flavors, however I had to tweak the recipes to make them more healthy.