How to of baby sign language part 1

It took me a while to start blogging again. I guess that is what happens when you give birth to this amazingly happy and pretty little girl, she just takes up most if your time. Right now she seems to be fighting a cold her grandmother kissed on her, which means she sleeps a lot more than usual. So, I decided it would be way more productive to start my blog writing again than playing the Simpsons app...

While watching Ellen Degeneres I learned about baby sign language. My girl was just 3 months old but she could already get frustrated so I was super excited about teaching her some useful signs. I found a great website babysignlanguage.com and after reading the tips I decided to start off with the signs for things she was doing the most. I also did not want to do too many at once because she was so little. I figured it would just look like a chaos of hand movements to her and not like a sign. So I started with milk and sleep. Especially the last one seemed very useful as it was hard to tell the difference between just lazy and really tired.
The signs for both activities are really easy but when to sign them was not. When I put my girl to bed I sign sleep. That is easy enough but when she gets milk there just is not a good moment to sign because she gets breastfed. I try to sign right before the feeding, but she does not seem to make that connection and when she is already nursing she cannot see the sign very well, and frankly does not care either. So therefore after a month she signs sleep very well, and milk not at all. I might just drop milk until she is a bit older and start with mommy or something.

But to conclude my first try at baby signlanguage: it is amazing! If you have a baby, you should definitely try it. It cuts down on a lot of crying do to misunderstanding. When my girl signs sleep, I lay her in bed and she will not cry because that is where she wanted to be. Sometimes she does not even sleep right away but plays for a while first. Gives mommy some free time too :) sweet!

Check out part 2 HERE

Mickey Mouse (Christmas) cookies

I made some really cute looking Mickey Mouse cookies the other day. Mostly because I have to do something while sitting out the last weeks (days??) of my pregnancy, but also because they are fun and yummy!

Check out the recipe here, it's from Disney.

It does look like they might have coated the bottom of their cookies in chocolate. I considered doing that if the ears weren't sticking but they turned out great so I left them plain.







I also made an English Sticky Toffee Pudding out of a Disney World cookbook:

 

It's made with dates and put in the oven where it creates a nice chewy top with a pudding like center. Over the top came the toffee, which I totally screwed up by letting it overheat. It became really hard candy so we scooped it off. And adding custard, made from scratch which is ten times more yummy and just as easy as custard made from powder.

It looks a little unappetizing in this picture but I can assure you it's not!

Dora and Boots cake - how to

I made this Dora and Boots cake for a friend of mine who's daughter turned 3. It wasn't necessarily hard to make but it did take a while! It was like making a puzzle!

I started with a 24 cm round vanilla cake which I filled with strawberry flavored butter cream. I also thinly coated the outside with it. Usually I use ganache to make the cake straight and easy to work with but the roundness of the cake was already pretty perfect so I didn't feel it was necessary.

I then coated the cake with pink marzipan and let it harden overnight. This way I could trace my Dora and Boots picture into the cake so I would have a good reference for adding all those puzzle pieces.
The picture I took from internet. It was really tiny but I have an easy way of making it exactly the right size.

I open the picture in microsoft picture viewer and zoom in until it's the size I need. I then take some sturdy paper and trace the picture right off the screen. It saves the hassle of having to blow up the picture with a copier or something and printing it out.
After the marzipan had hardened a little I took the picture and placed it on the cake. I then used a thin pointed cake decorating tool (a scriber I guess) to trace over the picture. You have to press a little so the lines go into the cake, but not too much that it goes right through the paper.

After this I cut out all the different pieces of the picture so I had little templates. And then it was just a matter of cutting them out of fondant or marzipan. The hassle was really coloring all the fondant and cutting all those little pieces. Because the picture was scribed onto the cake it was very easy to put the pieces in the right place.

I placed the eyes on top of the face because I thought it would make them stand out more, as they also do in the animation. Dora's mouth I pressed down a little to create depth, and Boots' mouth I actually just painted on (except for his tongue) because I found it too delicate to try and cut it out properly with those extra lines. The noses are also painted on.
Boots' hair stands up a little and Dora's hair rests partly on her forehead, just for a little added depth. I also scribed some of the lines into the fondant pieces (like the collar of Dora's shirt) and painted some too (like Boots' hand). 

I added some big flowers from corresponding fondant colors to the side and the name plus age on top, just to finish it off.

I think it turned out really sweet!