Elijah's Birthday Cake

Elijah turned 4 yesterday! Happy birthday Elijah! This is the cake I made him and he loved it! Here is how I made it!

So first I made four round cakes, stacked them, and did a crumb coating and left them in the fridge over night to let it set up. If I had to do it over again, I would have trimmed the parts where the cakes met and made it look smoother instead of just putting then next to each other.

I then took the centers out of oreos and put the chocolate cookie part in the food processor to make them nice and fine.

Then, as you can see I used a glass to leave a center and put the oreos around the edge.

Then I just used a star tip and iced the rest of the cake and put the cars on (which I found at Fred Meyer) It was a big hit and Elijah loved it! Next cake I'll add more to it, like a checkered flag and that sort of thing, but for the first one, I think it turned out alright. :-)

Merry Christmas and Happy Birthdays!

I just noticed that I hadn't posted in awhile, sorry about that. The holidays have taken over in the Evans' house! Had a great time seeing family over the holidays and have had to awesome birthdays, mine and Elijah's! So, I'll just a few photos for you all to see. It will probably be after the first before I post again. So, everyone have a great holiday season and happy new year!

Santa came!

Happy 4th Birthday Elijah!

Coupon Binder!

I have redone my coupon binder. I was filing by insert and was running into issues with not knowing exactly what I had and I could not take it with me and shop clearance deals very effectively. Now, Terri's Coupon Tracker did make it easier to find what I was looking for and if you do file your coupons by insert, then definitely check it out. I decided to redo my binder and clip all the coupons. It will take more time, but I believe it will help me to find what I need much faster and I can bring it in with me and see what I have right away! Now for pics.

Just a regular 3 ring binder.

On the left: Current weeks sale ads, store coupon policies (always a great idea to keep them with you just in case you need to "educated" an employee), and receipts.

This is the right side of the page. As you can see it has a spot for this weeks coupons and coupons for checkout. On the next few pages I have spots for my stores for the on your next order (OYNO) Catalinas (cats) that print out and reward coupons I get in the mail.

I have:

• 5 divider tabs: Freezer, General (like for canned good, cereal, etc.), Health and Beauty, Household (batteries, toilet paper, etc.), and Refrigerator and Dairy. You can organize it by the order your store is laid out in, but I shop at several different stores which each decided it would be wise to have their stores laid out differently, so this layout was easiest for me.

• Many pages of photo sheet protectors which I use to hold the coupons. The spot that holds the coupons are 4x6. It is large enough I can easily put my hand in and pull out what I need and it can hold a lot of coupons in one pouch without ripping, but it's small enough that I'm not loosing coupons in a super large pouch.

•  I gave each section it's own color (to match the tabs). You do not have to do this, but I thought it added a bit of personality to it. Took much longer to do as I had to cut the construction paper that we had to fit into our printer, but if you had colored card stock it would be much faster, but I used what was on hand. 

That's about it. Nothing to difficult, but it did a bit of time. Easily can be done in one day or spread out of a weekend. I'm just happy to say that it is done and I love it :-)

Baking...

So, remember the new bread recipe I was going to try out? It was a fail! It just didn't rise like it should have (I did proof my yeast) and became very dense. It tasted just fine, so we are still eating, but it just isn't the way it should be. So, today I am going to play with it some more and see if I can get it to turn out like it should. If I can't get it to work this time, I will go back to my old recipe.

On another note, I got my Pampered Chef order yesterday that I placed on Monday. $5 for two day shipping to Alaska! Can't beat that. Thank you Patricia for letting me know about the special they were running! In that order I got my cookie press so I am excited to experiment with it! I may do that today as well. So I believe today is turning into a baking goodies day! Forget the laundry and the cleaning and lets bake some yummy treats!