Thursday, November 19, 2009

Kactus Kapers 2009

Kactus Kapers is the annual 3-day long, member-guest golf tournament that the ladies at Picacho Hills Country club host. In an earlier post I have photos from last year's KK. Below are some from this year.

1st: some shots of the cupcake tower and individual treats I made for Tuesday evening's dinner:
(need to get these off of the camera's memory card... which this laptop won't read... argh... will have to post later)

2nd: This is the "dummy" cake I made for the raffle:

The winner of the raffle was Lynn Z., who happened to be the tournament organizer... needed a cake for the post-tournament thank-you luncheon to all who helped. Her request was a cake for ~20 people - a chocolate cake with mocha buttercream. This is the result: (and btw Lynn, you still have more to your raffle winning to claim!)

The first update of many... Butterflies and weddings!

Here are some of the pictures that I was trying to get off of flickr... until I realized that they were indeed in a folder on my desktop... go figure.

So first up are the chocolates:
Butterflies
30 (thirty) 3-D, freehanded chocolate butterflies. They were made for a caterer (A Catered Affair, Las Cruces, NM) who needed a party favor for a 90 year-old lady's birthday party. Each butterfly and pedestal were individual packaged in a plastic cup and wrapped and tied.

Below is an image of the chocolate-covered (vanilla, actually) Oreo that I made and packaged as wedding favors for Kim & Mike O. With their wedding colors being pale yellow and pale blue, the hearts were shaded accordingly.


And next: their wedding cake! White & chocolate sour cream cake with Raspberry filling and Lemon Buttercream.


Lastly, since the blog title reads "Butterflies and weddings"... it would only be appropriate to include the following pictures. This cake was made for a ladies' member-guest tournament at Picacho Hills Country Club in June, with the theme... "Wedding Bells". Same cake as the wedding cake above (actually, the above wedding was in Aug., so they actually had the same cake as the one below, but anyway...) - white and chocolate sour cream cake with raspberry filling and lemon buttercream. The butterflies and tees around the bottom layer were made of candy as well.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Catching up...

Or, trying to, at least... So pictures are on the memory card, still in the camera. I will upload those later. I'm still trying to figure out how to link images from flickr to this blog, and am not getting anywhere. I tried to link to the chocolate butterflies I made, but after 5 attempts, I am taking a break.

So in the meantime, here is what's been going on:
1) Made a "wedding cake" for the Ladies Golf Association (LGA) at Picacho for the member-guest tournament back in June... That was followed by over 300 cupcakes (standard and minis) in 3 flavors (Mocha, Pumpkin and Vanilla filled with either raspberry or apricot filling) for this year's Kactus Kapers (remember last year's cake with the prickly pear cactus on it?)
2) Made a batch of chocolate-covered Oreo cookies to hand out as Halloween treats to kids of friends... and only one family came by the house tonight... so took the rest to the Bitton's annual Halloween open house. These oreos were made in the Wilton skull/crossbones cookie mold that just came out this fall. Packaged each individually, and tied them closed with a ribbon, then attached a handmade tag that read "Happy halloween" on the front, and " the Rupps" on the back.
3) Working on trying to put together some Etsy listings and trying my hand at that. The official site will be http://www.crucescreations.etsy.com, but I have not listed anything yet. I want to make sure everything is "just right" before launching. I will update here when it is ready to go. Hopefully, in time to sell some christmas cards and tags and such. I also think this might be the right venue to sell my molded candies and chocolate covered oreos... for now...
4) I think I have decided to "officially" spend some quality time on this business venture as of January. There's just too much to get done before then, but as of January, I would like to devote at least 1 Saturday and 1 Wednesday per month (if not more) at the Farmers & Crafts Market here in town, as well as keeping up with this blog on a weekly (if not week-daily ) basis. I see all these other awesome blogged sites with daily updates and challenges and such, and know what can be accomplished!

I know there are other things I want to post about here, but can't think of them at this point. So I will leave this post as it is, and will work on uploading photos at a future time... maybe Monday. :-) Hope you had a great Halloween, and as it is after midnight here... "Happy November"!