Baby Shower: The Spread

Today's baby shower installment is all about the spread!  This will be mostly pictures, and I'll post recipes for a few of the treats made later this week.

Check out that spread!  The shower was at 2 in the afternoon, so I opted for desserts and snacks.  The fruit salads and tomato tarts (I think that's what they're called) were made by three of the party's attendees.  Thank you again, ladies!  There were a few other treats brought, unfortunately there were no photos of the table once everyone got there.  There was just too much fun being had to remember picture taking!

The flowers were inexpensive bouquets from Publix.  The paper lanterns were purchased at Hobby Lobby.  I had originally planned to hang them, but ran out of time, so they became giant "bubbles" on the main table.

It was very convenient that the shower happened to be around Valentine's Day.   I had no problem getting colorful M&Ms.

The mom-to-be requested something of the peanut butter and chocolate variety, so I whipped up some from-the-box brownies and drizzled melted peanut butter on top before baking.

It wouldn't be a party without oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  Just sayin'.  I live and die by the OCCC.

This is the first time I've made a pinwheel cookie, and they were easy and yummy.  These have orange peel in the dough and crushed pecans, cranberries, and brown sugar in the filling.

This cake was my baby.  Cherry-almond cake with vanilla buttercream frosting.  Sadly, I have no pictures of the inside, but it's PINK, which was the whole reason I decided to make it.  It was seriously yummy, as was the frosting.  I'll post a recipe for this one later this week, fo sho.  The heart toppers are from the Dollar Tree.

So that's the food spread.  In case you're wondering, the little glass ornaments floating around the table are bubbles.  They were super easy.  I'll post a little how-to for those in this series, as well.

Baby Shower: Diaper Cake Tutorial

In place of today's usual Words on Wednesday, I thought I'd share the first in a series of baby shower posts!

One of my fellow Marine Corps wives is pregnant with her first child, a little girl.  I threw a baby shower for her this past weekend, and wanted to share a few details with you this week.  The official theme was bath time, but it was rather loose.  (I'd say the official "theme" was the colors pink, purple. and white!)

I was busy hosting, which to me meant being in constant motion, so the very sweet Elena took a bunch of pictures on the mom-to-be's camera.

I have decided to break up the baby shower into several posts over the next week or so.  The first post in the baby shower installment is my super awesome, super cute diaper cake!  (Totally tooting my own horn.  I know.)

I thought that this project was going to be much more difficult than it turned out to be.  It is actually quite simple and only took me an episode and a half of Gossip Girl.

Here's what you'll need to make a diaper cake:

double-sided tape
small and large rubber bands (I bought one bag of asst. rubber bands)
a sturdy base (I used some cardboard from one of the diaper boxes)
about 60 diapers (I used newborn sized diapers)
various ribbons
items to decorate the cake
large bottle of baby shampoo or wash
smaller bottle of baby powder
(depending on how large you want your diaper cake, you may want to select different sized bottles of baby product)

Begin by rolling the diapers individually, from back to front.  Secure them with a rubber band then form a ring around your large bottle of shampoo.  Secure the ring with a large rubber band.

Form two more rings of diapers around the first, securing each with a large rubber band.

Build a second tier on top of this one, except with only two layers of diapers.  Unfortunately, I got so into my diaper cake creating that I forgot to take pictures of the second and third tiers.  Check out this site for instructions with pictures for each step.

Place the second bottle of baby product on top of the first and keep it in place using a bit of double-sided tape.  Create one more tier of diapers (one layer deep) around this bottle.

You don't want the rubber bands showing in the final product, so use the tape to secure ribbon around the tiers.  I found my ribbons at the Dollar Tree.

Decorate the cake according to your theme.  The smaller bath toys were purchased at Target and the larger toys (turtle, hippo, & elephant) were found at Walmart.

And there you have it!  One diaper cake for an awesome mom-to-be.