April Turns ONE!

by - Thursday, October 25, 2018

I truely don't know where the last year has gone! It flew by much faster than I could have imagined. Our littlest miss turned ONE last Thursday, and it snuck up on us so fast, that we just threw her a very last minute little celebration with our families on the weekend! But it was kind of lovely that way. It was very different to her big sisters first birthday! For Isla, I started planning and making things for her birthday party a whole 6 months in advance!! For April, we only started planning something roughly a week beforehand! For those of you with more than one child, I think you'll understand me when I say that 'second child syndrome' is a real thing!

None-the-less, it was still a beautiful little afternoon tea with our families, and was a whole lot less stressful than her big sisters party! And I still got to have some fun with baking and DIY. Her cute little white ruffle romper (above) was one of them for example! And it made her look like a sweet little baby bird. I made a few practice ones of these, and I love them all. See below for some more DIY party snaps.

I've never been much of a cook, and honestly cooking kind of scares me! But being a sweet tooth myself, for a long, long time, I've wanted to be an amazing home-baker! After talking to Isla about it and seeing her face light up about baking some cookies together, and all the ideas that she had for them, I decided that we shall become the worlds greatest bakers! Now, that is kind of a big call, and obviously is rather unlikely, but I do want to do more baking and get creative with it. Who knows, maybe one day she will become a baker! So I got onto Pinterest, and looked up a few tutorials and recipes. After buying a few essentials, I got my bake on! And guess what?! I didn't even burn the house down. It was a total success! The Fruit Pizzas below were made from scratch, including the vanilla cream cheese and they were a total hit! They were actually the most popular food item, and all but one of them were eaten. Joe was a big fan, and seemed excited about the prospect of me baking them again!
Talking of baking.. well, wait. Technically I didn't 'bake' her cake! I did however do a cake-hack by stacking 4 pre-made cakes on top of each other, coating in buttercream and then actually managed to cover it in fondant! I needed to watch a tutorial for that, but I honestly couldn't believe how well it turned out!! It stood really well, was so smooth and had no creases. I was shocked, and couldn't stop touching it. Before attempting the fondant, I did prepare myself and picked up a bunch of proper tools for it. The worlds greatest baker needs tools after all, ya know! Joe said that if I was going to buy all the gear, that I would be making all future birthday cakes!! But you know what, it turned out so well that I'm excited about that. I will do a blog post soon with recipe, and fondant tutorial link.
I did actually have a little drama after the fondant was on. I thought the decorating process would be relatively easy, but I was oh-so-wrong. It just didn't work out for me. I had these grand plans for a cake decorated with a drip around the edge, and heaps of yummies piled on top of the cake. That didn't quite work. My original plan was to make a pink smore's cake. But Joe didn't think that would look very pretty. So then I planned to do a Cookies & Cream cake, but that wasn't planned out properly. So I decided to just get the drip on to start with. I went off a recipe, but it was terrible! Once I had combined the white chocolate and the cream, it turned into this horrible mix of what looked like melted cheese!! It was yellowish, oily and separating. I was horrified! I put a drop of pink gel colouring in, but that definitely didn't fix it. It was unusable! After a slight meltdown, Joe came to the rescue and melted the little bit of chocolate we had left. We put a couple drops of pink gel food colouring into it and mixed up a pretty colour. Then Joe tipped it on top of the cake, and I spread it around with my cake palette knife, letting it drip down the sides a little. Then we popped the cake topper into the top of the cake, and the chocolate drip dried quite quickly around it. And that was it. We were out of time to do anything further! But you know what, it was actually perfect. It was so sweet in it's simplicity, and almost looked like a giant smooth marshmallow dipped in pink chocolate. So even after the drama, it was exactly right.
Unfortunately being a small gathering, and having quite healthy family and friends, the cake only had a couple pieces actually eaten! So after the party, I had the best fun 'smashing it'! It was a little sad to waste it, but as it was going to be thrown out anyway, I got some fun out of it. It was incredibly therapeutic! I filmed it, and Joe popped the video in reverse for some fun.
Another DIY mention are the 'A P R I L' letters that we made. I picked up the letters and some pink and white tissue paper from Spotlight. I painted the letters white, and then I cut up the tissue paper into roughly 6cm x 6cm square pieces. Then I scrunched up the tissue paper squares in the centre, creating almost a 3D flower-like shape, and using a hot glue gun, glued them all over the letters. I had no idea how they would turn out, but I really love them. You could use any colours you like for a different effect. We've actually kept the letters and plan to pop them up in Aprils room soon.
Just one more quick DIY mention, and that was the Highchair. We decorated it up a little for her cake smash. Which was actually just her touching a spongecake and trying to give it back to Joe. She had no idea what to do with it! It was Islas idea to pop the bunch of balloons behind the Highchair (clever cookie!). We also got some sweet little white tissue paper tassels from Spotlight and used the hot glue gun to glue the string to the sides of the Highchair. It was a couple metres long, so we folded it over a few times. Then I just cut out the letters 'O N E' and glued them onto the front. Really happy with how this turned out. April kept giggling with how the tassels were touching her toes!
The whole afternoon was lovely. Here's a few more snaps. 
I love watching our little April Elle grow. I wish she would slow it down a little! But it brings me so much joy to see her exploring the world and learning new things. Her little laugh is the cutest thing, and her eyes sparkle with happiness. She has so much determination and is very strong willed, and I'm excited to see her personality develop further, and really get to know the little lady that she's becoming.

I can't wait to see the adventures we go on this year, and the new things that April will learn. It's going to be a totally different year to the one we've just had! Especially as Isla will be heading off to her first year of Kindy, so I will have so much more one on one time with April.

I can't believe how fast both our girls are growing up. When you have a baby, you feel like you'll always have a baby, but you don't. It comes and goes so quickly. I'm so glad that our girls have each other. Their bond is strong and beautiful to witness!

That's all for now. Please excuse me while I go and get emotional about our growing girls!!

- A M Y  D A V I S


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