Doughnut Cake

Please understand- I'm a Cook's Illustrated kind of gal all the way - all 40 ingredients and 80 steps (love this video). But for work - sometimes I go fast; cut corners, buy refrigerated sugar cookie dough, use canned frosting and food coloring.

I do. Sigh.

But this is not for work. This is for my boy who loves doughnuts; however, I broke my rules and used food coloring to give it a 4th of July kind of twist.

Gather:

3 cake doughnuts

White frosting in can

Red and Blue food coloring gel

Add a little food coloring (remember to use a clean toothpick to go into the food gel so you don't contaminate it) to 2 little bowls of frosting.

Slice the doughnuts (as fresh as you can get them) in half lengthwise.

Practice stacking the doughnut halves with one flat half on the bottom and the other half up on top.

Add the frosting - I layered it in red, white and blue but you do what ever you like.

Put it in the refrigerator to set up for 15 minutes or so- it was 90 degrees in the kitchen when I made mine so it was pretty goopey.

Frost the outside.

 

Add sprinkles.

  
Lots of sprinkles.
































 




Then break out the good Lego silverware.

Happy Summer!

Thank you all for the kind well wishes for the boys broken arm; broken on the day after school ended. Summer registrations for canoe camp, sailing camp and water parks have been canceled and changed to computer camps.
And it's back to work for me....but not until tomorrow.
Today, we'll eat lemon blueberry tart and sit in the sun.

Cork Printed Wrapping Paper

There are so many things you can print with- pretty much anything will make a print. For this project we needed fun wrapping paper- fast. And “confetti” is so:

a) fun
b) popular
c) easy to make with “wine corks”


We tested 4 cork types (not all made of real cork):
Natural, agglomerated (cork bits stuck together), a rubber cork and a synthetic cork.









The agglomerated and rubber corks were my favorites to print with but synthetic didn’t work very well at all (and I was surprised).

The natural corks printed with a lot of variations - sometimes very clean and fully filled in and others printed mottled dots.

 

We used pigment inks- which take a little longer to dry – hence hanging the paper up but they dry bright and they're what I had on hand.  
The boy twirled his cork and made some excellent patterns.














This is just a fun random project-perfect to do on a rainy day and then you have wrapping paper for the future.





















And it’s a good thing to do before you break your arm mountain biking-at the start of summer break.So sad.

Hello Cards

We took our pipe cleaner letter pictures from last week - which were tests for work (early readers) and made them into cards.
Pretty easy to print the pictures out onto card stock, trim and then fold. 
Add envelopes and tie with a string (yes, I tried ribbon but it obscured the "Hello").
Packing them up for teacher gifts.

We used my straight edge paper trimmer which I really like to use with kids so they can easily cut straight edges or trim a stack of paper to a specific size (specifically Thank you notes).