Mrs. C Does Stuff

The Little Mister loves fish.  He likes to talk about the fish in the pond behind our house.  He likes to look at the fish in the tank at the store.  He just loves fish.  So much so that I decided to do a fish cake for him for his birthday. We don't often let Little Mister have sweets.  We are slowly easing him into the world of the sugar overload.  I'm not a sugar free zealot or anything, but we are trying to keep him from being heavily dependent on sugar.  Since he is not a regular cake eater, I decided to make his birthday cake as simple as possible.  I made a white cake with french vanilla icing.  I will share that icing recipe with you in a later post. This cake is only a 6 inch round cake.  One batch of the french vanilla icing recipe did the trick for the entire cake.  I mixed up four colors of icing for this cake.  After putting a layer of white icing between the layers of the cake, I pull out about a tablespoon ...

It has been quite a while since I have blogged here, over two years, to be precise.  Those years have been well spent.  In that time, our son was born and we have spent time enjoying every moment with the Little Mister.  There was less time left for leisure blogging.  We completed fewer projects and the ones we have worked on seem to have taken us much longer to complete.  But, it's all worth it.  We have a happy, healthy and seemingly mature toddler to show for it, with whom we have already created so many great memories with our son. I feel like now is a good time to return to the blog and start writing again.  I have so many new ideas and projects to share.  It is time for me to get back to some of the things I love doing.  It is time for "the mommy" to get back to being herself.  I want to learn how to balance my life better and integrate things I enjoy doing while taking care of my responsibilities. So, I'm back, but with some c...

So, for now, let's take a break from nursery project posts. I'm pretty sure some are starting to get tired of them. Plus, I have some new recipes to share. This is one of Mr. C's favorite cakes. I am actually surprised i haven't already posted this recipe. It is a good coffee cake, for those in the world that actually like coffee. For people like me, it's a good cake to eat for breakfast with a nice glass of milk. Cake Ingredients: 1 box of yellow cake mix (I use Duncan Hines) 1 tsp of vanilla extract 1 cup of water 1/3 cup of vegetable oil 3 eggs 1/4 cup of flour Caramel Glaze Ingredients: 1/2 stick of butter 1/2 can of Eagle brand condensed milk (7 ounces) 1/2 cup white sugar 1/2 cup of light brown sugar To start, work on the cake first.  Here I have most of the ingredients laid out on the counter. Mix together the cake mix, eggs, water, vegetable oil, vanilla extract and flour. Spray a bundt pan with cooking spray.  This will help ...

Have you ever heard people say that assembling Ikea furniture will test your relationship?  Well, I have, and that is certainly true.  Good news, we survived the test! We took pictures as we embarked on this adventure. This tutorial is meant to provide a visual supplement to the Ikea instructions. It in no way serves as a replacement for the actual instruction booklet that came with the product.  The instruction booklet has no verbal instructions, just illustrations, so you may find this helpful. The best thing to do when starting on a project like this is to lay out all of the pieces grouped together by likeness. This will help you count to verify you have all pieces necessary to put together the furniture, but also helps to identify the pieces in the instructions. Not all companies are kind enough to label the parts and pieces as they are labeled in the instructions.  The first step was to lay out all of the legs, known as pieces L1, L2, R1 and R2. Then s...

Here is another wooden art project I wanted to do for the nursery.  I found this one on Pinterest too.  Here is a picture of the Pinterest inspiration.  It is from the Make It & Love It blog, a link to it can be found here . For this one, I used large flat cardboard letters from Hobby Lobby and a 24" x 24" piece of 1/4 inch thick Oak sheet from Lowe's.  We decided against using the beadboard as shown in the original picture because the sheets of beadboard were so big.  We did not have another use for the remainder of it if we were to use it, so we chose another wood product. Mr. C was so nice to spray paint the board black for me.  I used the same white acrylic paint used on the first wooden art, found here , to paint the cardboard letters.  Once everything was painted, we let it all dry for a day. Then, I placed the letters on the black wooden square to determine placement.  With a hot glue gun,...

I really enjoyed the book and movie "The Help".  I especially loved how the character Abilene Clark chanted the mantra "You is kind, you is smart, you is important" to the young Mae Mobley.  This is such a positive message to pass on to children to build their confidence.  There are so many negative forces children encounter outside the home, it's good to surround them with positive messages they can internalize in the home.  That is what I want to do for our son. Ever since I read that book, I thought, "I am going to tell my own children that same thing".  However, I wanted to teach them the mantra, making a few grammatical corrections.  Instead of saying "You is", I say "You are". I decided to create art using this message for our son's nursery.  I found a wooden plaque, wooden letters and used acrylic paint to create it.   First, I laid the letters on the plaque to get an idea of how I wanted to place them.  Have ...