What's cooking Wednesday - My first fondant cake

 My very first fondant cake...

I made it in Feb 2009 for my 10th wedding anniversary. I made everything from scratch including the chocolate fondant. The inside cake was black forest and number 10 on top are sugar cookies covered in molding chocolate... 

Fingerprints Art

This is something that Princess R and I did together.

Princess R loves painting and crafts, but generally likes to follow directions and gets easily frustated if she does not know what to make. Or if she does not have a project in mind, she is shy to even start and explore. I try to nudge her imagination from time to time.

Pipe cleaner flowers

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I have a ton of arts and crafts supplies including a huge bag of pipe cleaners... and I was thinking of an easy pipe cleaner craft to do with Princess R. So I settled on pipe cleaner flowers.

However, all flower ideas I looked online were rather 2-dimensional... bend the cleaner in petal / leaf shapes and you are done, which is not what I had in mind. I wanted the flowers to be more full and have a body, not just shape. So I came up with the above flowers.

They are pretty easy to make.

1. For each flower, you need 3 or more colored pipe cleaners for the flower itself and 2 or more green pipe cleaners for the stem and leaves.
2. You start by rolling the coloured pipe cleaner into a coil on a small cylinerical shape. I used a AAA battery, about you can choose anything.
3. You then take a green pipe cleaner and use it to thread the coloured coils.
4. Then twist the green pipe cleaner and arrange the coils so that they form an round circle... your flower is ready. If you want, you take take one end of the green cleaner and make a small loop and push it in the middle of the flower like I did.
5. You now use the second green cleaner to make leaves if desired.

Enjoy... and do send me pictures of your crafts...