Waiting for Spring to Spring

It's so cold this morning here in my office/craft room. Strangely, though, it feels as if winter never happened. I don't remember much about it. That's not to say that it was a good one or that it passed quickly; it was just unremarkable. And it's not as if we're having a great spring or anything that's wiping out the memory of winter. It all feels sort of...unremarkable. And yet here I am, remarking about the unremarkableness of the changing of the seasons so far this year. I'm waiting for Spring to start springing so that I can say that it has officially "sprung." If it has sprung, it has fallen flat on its backside. I guess I should stop wishing for snow days and just put away my sweaters already. Maybe that would help.

I've kept myself busy over the past few months, though. For one thing, I made some little felt magnets, which take more time than I could ever have possibly imagined. So cute yet so tedious. I made these during the winter and only just thought to take a picture of them last night.



They’re stuffed with polyester fluff so that they’re a bit plush. To get a sense of their size, the birds are about 2.5 inches wide, and the cup of tea is about 1.5 inches high. I mainly used clip art that I found online of things that I wanted to make and then resized them, printed the images, and traced the outline of those templates onto the felt. I modified this template to make the birds.



In late March, I made a 6-inch chocolate birthday cake for my father with raspberry jam filling and covered in chocolate buttercream and marshmallow fondant, which I made according to this Wilton recipe. It was my first time making fondant, and even though I only made one quarter of the recipe it turned out great.



In an attempt to make Spring feel like it was here, or at least on its way, I made mini chocolate spring cupcakes decorated with vanilla buttercream "grass", Hershey’s mini chocolate Eggies, fondant flowers, and flower sprinkles.



For Easter, I made more mini cupcakes. I made the marshmallow fondant again and used cutters to make chicks, bunnies, flowers and leaves.



And finally I made an Easter cake. It’s vanilla with raspberry jam filling and covered in vanilla buttercream.The pink icing had some raspberry flavouring added.



For some reason, the buttercream that I made didn’t turn out quite right and I wasn’t able to ice the cake to a smooth finish. In all my cake baking and decorating busyness, I likely forgot to put in the final cup of icing sugar and inadvertently made the consistency too soft. I tried to make the top look like a sky but I ended up putting a pink border around the edge to cover up the rough icing edges. Oh well. The little fondant birds don't seem to mind.