The Birthday Girl's Birthday Candles

I had to craft up some long and skinny birthday candles for Syd's star cake--

--so I went ahead and made up some extra rolled beeswax birthday candle sets for for my pumpkinbear etsy shop:

 
 
 
And yes, that's Willow having a pretend birthday party out in the backyard, complete with strawberry bundt cake and a real birthday candle, lit. What's the point in having a million handmade birthday candles if you don't get to light them, make a wish, and blow them out every single day?

No point at all, if you ask me.

A Little Bit of Sibling Rivalry

I found this lying in the hall this morning, after Willow had disappeared in a huge funk about the very existence of her little sister--Sydney has apparently stolen Willow's love for the Rainbow Fairy books, even though Sydney can't even read them herself but has to have them read to her, and Sydney has also stolen Willow's love for the Petz computer game from the library, even though she doesn't even teach the animals any tricks, just dresses them up in silly costumes, AND Sydney has stolen Willow's love for the Crazy Machines computer game from the library, as well, even though she always cries at the third problem because she can't get through it:

My favorite part is the monsters at top and bottom, laughing evilly.

Syd can hold her own, however--here's a picture that she drew at the library yesterday, and presented to me in a sealed envelope with my name on it:

It's a family portrait, with me, Matt, and Sydney, all three cats, and the goldfish.

Who's missing from the portrait? Hmmm....

We love the Rainbow Fairy books and Crazy Machines!

Writing versus Composition

Willow does not enjoy the physical act of writing, although she does greatly enjoy the mental activity of composition. Therefore, I require only a minimal amount of the former, and let her indulge in a massive amount of the latter, such as this little ditty, which Willow dictated, I served as amanuensis to, and she illustrated:

Poor Ned.

Willow's fine motor skills and hand strength are on par with her peers--I know this through watching her create Perler bead mosaics and Spiderman up all our door jambs--so my next move is to see if she'd like to learn how to type. Writing by hand is all awesome and old-school and I couldn't make a to-do list without it, but if I really want to sit down and write something, and I'm NOT following the kids around the Wonderlab or the playground for a change, then I know that I, at least, prefer to be able to get thoughts written down as quickly as I make them up. Why should the kid prefer any less?

Tutorial: Rainbow Layer Cake

Easy rainbow cake is all well and good and pretty special (if you're looking for my easy rainbow cake tutorial, by the way, good luck--Blogger crashed last week and lost it. They're supposed to be manually reposting the stuff they lost, but if they don't, expect a bare bones re-do next week), but if you need a dessert that's not just regular special, but very, very, VERY special--say, for a fifth birthday party, for example--then a rainbow layer cake is where you want to go. Yes, it's more work and it takes longer, but it's not actually any harder than the easy rainbow cake.

And it looks AWESOME.

To start the rainbow layer cake, mix up a double-batch of white cake. I don't care if you make your batter from scratch or use a boxed mix, but I do care that you mix up WHITE cake, not yellow. You'll get the best results with your dye by using white cake.

Preheat your oven and grease as many 8" round cake pans as you own. I own two, but if you borrow even just a couple more than that, you'll make this process a LOT easier. You can also make this layer cake with pans of different shapes and sizes, but then you'll have to experiment with baking time.

Scoop one cup of cake batter into a separate bowl, and dye it one color. It's most efficient to bake your layers in reverse rainbow order--you'll be building your cake from the bottom up, so if you bake violet and indigo first, then you can get started while red and orange are still cooling. I let all my layers cool overnight, though, so I dye and bake them in whatever order I feel like, so please yourself.

Scrape the one cup of dyed batter into its own cake pan, and use the back of a spoon to smooth it out over the bottom of the pan:

And yes, that store-brand butter-flavored pan spray does make me gag at the fake butter scent whenever I use it. Blame Matt for buying it, because the man has no sense in the grocery store.

Bake these super-thin cake layers for approximately 15 minutes (you probably know if your oven cooks on the fast or the slow side, but if you don't, check on it after about 12 minutes), and let them cool completely.

When you're ready to decorate, melt white chocolate (harder to use) or white candy coating (also in the baking aisle and easier to use, although the ingredients are all total crap for you). You can use a double-boiler or the microwave, but my method of choice, which I also use for building gingerbread houses, is a fondue pot:

The big benefit of using white chocolate or candy coating over frosting is that it dries hard. You have a lot of slidey layers here, and you want them to stack neatly and perfectly all right on top of each other. How do you best do that?

Glue them!

Put a dab of melted white chocolate down on the cake plate, then rest your bottom cake layer on top of that. Spread melted chocolate all over the top of that layer, then stack your next cake layer on top, and so on and so on:

Decorate the top of your cake however you wish. I used the last of the white chocolate, dyed it pink right in the fondue pot, then spread it over the top and doused it in rainbow sprinkles:

I like to leave the sides unfrosted so that you can see the rainbow, but it's easy to frost the sides if you'd rather keep the rainbow a surprise.

It looks beautiful now, but when you cut into it, that's when everyone gets really excited, because I hate to brag on myself, but it is kind of the coolest thing ever:

Birthday Girl agrees:

Goodness, life just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?

Giveaway: Win a One-Month Subscription to Green Kid Crafts

The little girls loved spending the last week as my "official reviewers," putting together all the craft kits that they scored for my write-up of Green Kid Crafts over at Crafting a Green World:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I'm also mediating a give-away from Green Kid Crafts--run over and enter (up to four times!) and then you and your kiddos can play, too!

Stamping the Stars

Draw the stars:

 

Have the Momma cut out the stars.

Add paint:

 

The full tutorial for our hand-drawn, hand-carved rubber stamps is over at Crafting a Green World. Normally, I use the rubber stamp carving blocks to carve stamps for myself, simple shapes such as the ones that I use for gift bags, but the girls had so much fun drawing stamps for themselves that I may soon teach Willow, at least, how to use a linoleum cutter so that she can do her own rubber stamps from start to finish.

3D Wooden Puzzles for Studying Birds and Fish

My aunt gave Matt a few of those 3D wooden puzzles for Christmas, but before he could get to them all by himself, the little girls griped and griped and griped that THEY wanted to put them together, too!

Coincidentally, we've been playing around with unit studies in our homeschool (in an unschool-y sort of way, if that makes any sense), and thus Willow was studying the ocean that week, and Sydney was studying butterflies.

Coincidentally, one wooden puzzles was of an adult and baby penguin, and the other was of an angelfish. The day's unit study activity is therefore set!

It's good that these were meant to be a "together" sort of activity, because these 3D wooden puzzles are a little too hard for a six-year-old to work independently, and a LOT too hard for a five-year-old to work independently.

You do, however, get to use the "good" glue:

For some reason the girls HATE Elmer's glue, and only want to use Aleene's. I respect the opinion, but we have a flat-out ton of Elmer's hanging around, so until that's used up...suck it up, I guess.

I'm loving this activity as an exercise in reading a somewhat complicated diagram:

And yes, Willow is wearing a ton of make-up.

The angelfish comes together with a little help--

--and a lot of glue:

Phew!

The penguin and the angelfish now have spots of honor on high shelves in the girls' bedroom. What with all the models and kits and other various projects that we've been doing lately, we may have to add an entire trophy room onto our house soon!

The penguins:
The angelfish: