My latest (and greatest) cakes...

Okay, so this is a post with a lot of pictures!
I thought that this time I would show some of the 'process' in making the cakes.

This first one I is probably my best cake I have made yet! It turned out WAY better than I imagined it would when I first started considering the design. When my friend asked me to do this cake, I began googling pictures of ladybug cakes. After seeing a few of them, I created my own way of making it and I was really happy with the final product!

My old roommate Lori asked me to help do a ladybug cake for her daughters 1st birthday (because they call her ladybug). Originally I was going to 'help' her...but with her busy schedule right before her husbands graduation (family in town, too), not to mention having a one year old; and the fact that doing this cake was a 2-day process of baking cakes and then doing the frosting...I kind of ended up doing it on my own. Lori did come over for a bit one night and helped dye the frosting, as well as provided wonderful conversation (we haven't talked in forever!)

First I baked all the cakes and then trimmed them so they would all fit together!

I pieced the german chocolate body pieces together with a fresh raspberry middle.

(Sorry the picture is turned! Not sure why it did that...it's the right way in my file.)

I also baked the 'grass' piece and then split it in the middle for a chocolate pudding filling.
Once they were all pieced together, I frosted the grass piece with a thin layer of buttercream frosting. I also frosted the bug with a thin layer of chocolate buttercream frosting and drew the line for the wing design. Then I placed the bug on the grass.

Then I finished up the wing design with a star tip.

After that, I took some of the original thick frosting and rolled it flat and cut the eye pieces out.

Then I finished up with the actual 'grass', added some flowers, finished the eyes and inserted some edible black licorice antennaes.

Lori took some pictures of the cake at the park where the party was.

I'm glad Addie enjoyed it!

I LOVED making this cake!
It was one of those cakes that when you are done,
the HOURS you put into it seemed worth it!

Thanks for the opportunity to make it Lori (and Addie, too!)

(here's a nice shot of all the layers!)


Here is just a quick picture of the about 90 cupcakes I made for when I taught Relief Society

Easter Sunday. I thought I'd add in a little 'spring' treat with flowers, etc.

Unfortunately it did not stop the snow that still came after that!

And lastly...the Easter Bunny!

My friend Amy has a 3-D cake pan of an Easter bunny that she bought last year.

Since I had cake decorating stuff, we thought we'd give it a try!

Here we are trimming and piecing the halves together...very important. :o)

The artists at work!

The finished product!

Amy with her masterpiece!

No worries, I didn't really eat it (since I'm sure you all thought that).

In fact, I have yet to eat a piece of cake of any of the cakes I've made.

Funny enough, I'm not a big cake person!
That's probably a good thing or else I'd definitely be adding to my midsection.

Then we took the cake to work the next day (Amy and I work together),

and this is what happened...

Our boss decapitated it...

and then left the head and a friendly note on a co-workers desk!

Twisted...I know!

We are the Champions!

So many of you may remember the post I did a year ago about taking second place in our intramural basketball league after losing by a couple points in over-time (click here).

Well...NOT THIS YEAR!!!

We won the coveted t-shirt by winning our championship game.
And it wasn't an easy road either!

During the season we lost one girl in a game when she was totally taken out by an opposing player (cheap shot) and had to have surgery for a torn ACL and MCL.

Then we lost another girl (in the pictures below) who sprained her ankle REALLY bad in one of our tournament games (her foot was CRAZY! The entire thing was black and blue and incredibly swollen! I've never seen anything like it and I've seen lots of ankle sprains in my day!)

Most of our regular season games were played with 4 girls (so many scheduling conflicts).

1st tourney game: we started with 5, ended with three and still won.

2nd tourney game: played with five (one player with four fouls all 2nd half), and won because the other teams fouled us ON THE BUZZER when the score had been tied! (We still don't know what they were thinking to foul us when the game would have gone into overtime!)

3rd tourney game: that when Kristi sprained her ankle. We played the second half with four girls (and one had four fouls the entire time). It ended after two over-times!

4th tourney game: little easier win for us because we actually had everyone there!

(this pic is after this game...on our way to the championship)

5th & Championship game: beat a team that absolutely demolished us in the regular season!
Redemption is sweet!

Us in our intramural championship t-shirts!

(BELOW PICTURE (Top-Bottom, L-R): Kristi, Janet, Chelise, Becky, ME, Jessica and Rosey)

And our 'fans' who came out to support us!

It was fun playing with all you girls!



I now have a championship t-shirt in every sport I've participated in at BYU

except FOOTBALL!!! Those darn Thundercats!

One day I'll complete the t-shirt collection!

We got in!

We were picked in the raffle for the

Burley Idaho Lions Spudman Triathlon

Last year I got in and Rand didn't because they had a very flawed registration process.

This year, because of all the problems from last year, they went to a raffle system.

I did this triathlon 3 years ago (my first ever) and LOVED it!

I'm not a strong swimmer (it's more mental that physical) and this triathlon is

made for those who aren't strong swimmers since the swim is downstream in the river.

The bike is a pretty good ride too.

A few good hills and a smooth ride.

The run is...well, the run.
After a mile swim and a 25 mile bike ride,
the 6 mile run is what it is...a 6 mile run in the hot sun!

I'm so excited...let the TRAINING begin!

Speaking of Training....

We started a new workout program about a month ago:

It's awesome!
We started out really well on it for the first two weeks
and we were feeling great and seeing results!

Then Rand had finals, and I got really busy wrapping some stuff up with my calling,
playing 4 intramual basketball games in one week, and making some cakes.
Therefore we got off it a little, and I CAN TELL! Ugh!

All that hard work seemed to go down the drain for me!

But, we are still going and hopefully a few weeks of slacking won't kill us too much!
not to mention the major training addition we'll be adding in now of
biking, swimming and running!

It won't be long until we are looking like this (haha!):

If you want a good workout routine, I recommend it.

It has GREAT variety, lets you control your intensity (which can be detrimental to you if you aren't willing to push it), and gets you paying attention more to what you are eating.

Downfall: the 'diet' portion of it (not really a diet, but a food plan during the workout) can get
pretty expensive at first with all the protein (meat and powder) that you take.

But I'm FAR more conscience about what I am eating now

(even if that just means that I'm more aware that the cookie I'm eating is REALLY bad! haha!)

The votes are in...

Well, it was pretty close:

52% say I look more like my Dad

47% say it is 50/50


I pretty much agree with this. I think I have more facial features of my dad. But THANK GOODNESS I got my mom's spanish heritage in my skin (my Grandpa is from Spain). And I think I got more of my body type from my mom.

Personality: well, that's pretty 50/50 for sure. And therefore, things that my parents have in common really come out strong in my brothers and I. Anyone who knows my parents could probably easily pick those things out, haha!

Let's take a vote...

All my life I have heard the following lines:

"You have to be a McFadyen."

"You must be Gary's daughter."

"You look just like your mom."

"You are your mothers/fathers daughter."

I could keep going, but you get the point.

Anyway...I hear all the time from different people (depending on who they know better) that I look like one or the other of my parents (who I act like is a whole different question, so don't factor that into this!) And they usually say it while leaving no room for me to

look like the other parent.

So, just for fun, let's put it to a vote! Looking at the picture below of my parents at their wedding (when they were a little closer in age to me now), vote to the right side of the screen on who you think I look more like!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!

Happy 36th Anniversary

to my parents!

Here's what they have to show for it so far, with one more arriving in June:

(Thanksgiving 2007)

And a belated Happy 80th Birthday to my Grandma Triano!

More Cakes...

Here are a few more of the cakes I've done in the last few weeks:

Our nephew had his baby blessing on the 15th of March and my mother-in-law asked me to make a cake for it. I couldn't bring myself to do some cutesy baby boy cake and so I was trying to come up with something more creative. His name is Nash (J. Nash to be exact). I thought it would be fitting to make a camoflauge cake with his name in it like 'M*A*S*H'. It's a little hard to see the lettering next to the light tan color (an unforseen problem until it was too late)...

but now I know (and knowing is half the battle...GO JOE!)

I also wanted a good excuse to try a baseball cake. And since Rand and his brother LOVE sports and especially baseball, I thought I'd go ahead and make two cakes for the occasion.

We had a ward Relief Society birthday celebration enrichment last week. I said I'd make a cake (another excuse to practice) and I really didn't know what I was signing up for. I'm sure a simple, single layer cake with brown frosting on top would have been fine. But I thought I'd try to make it more 'fun'. And again, I started the piecing together and frosting of the cake WAY too late (the cake arrived 30 minutes after the start time.) I kind of had to rush the frosting part of it all (hence the blue isn't really the correct navy color of the RS Seal, and the gold looks a little more orange that it should.) I would have liked to have had everything a little more 'clean' looking, but oh well. Next time, right!

This cake was 12" round (first time making it that big) and had three split levels (it was two 12" cakes, each cut in half.) The cake was chocolate, the top and bottom filling layers had real raspberries and the middle layer had chocolate pudding.
Oh...and sorry Candace, but it was just a box mix for the cake!
(Time is money and the box mix was cheaper! Maybe someday I'll be more domestic!)

A girl in my ward was throwing a birthday party for her husband. At first I didn't think Rand and I would be able to go and offered to make a cake for it in our absence (equal trade, right?!)

Well, her hubby is a carpenter. I knew that with my limited skills I would have a hard time recreating the look of wood (I didn't have tons of time to practice or research it)...so I settled on something that was seeminly a little easier; a tool box.

Again I didn't plan my time well and the frosting part of it all took so much longer (especially using fondant for my first time ever!) I really wish I would have started this the day before because it could have turned out SO much better. But I was running

so late and had to super simplify thing

(and I didn't get the frosting as smooth as I wanted it.

The perfectionist in me is so bugged!)

And just for fun:

On St. Patrick's Day I took some plain cupcakes into my work, along with all my decorating tips and bags, and we had a cupcake decorating party. Here is a lot of what we came up with

(we will definitely be keeping our day jobs!)

Sadly the cupcake that our student accountant made was eaten before taking this picture.

He created a nice T-account form atop the cupcake!

Oh, and I also make some fun chocolate and vanilla treats the night before to bring in.

April Fool's

April Fool's Day is kind of an anticlimatic day in my book. All this talk of what will be done, and then everyone is so paranoid the next day you can't actually pull anything off. My apologies to Lauren because she was out of town and asked us to prank her hubby. We wanted to break in and steal his truck key and move it in the middle of the night...but alas, we never actually got to it.

Of course yesterday was FULL of pranks here and there...yet none of them really seemed to cause a huge stir.

1. Our student employees took a 'picture' of our bosses screen and then set it as the screen picture. They also slowed down the mouse speed and tried to get him to think he had a virus that was supposed to hit yesterday. Usually he gets ticked really easily when his computer 'doesn't work' (aka: he's doing something wrong! haha). But he hadn't even heard of the virus, he didn't really react at all...instead he just walked down to the IT guys to get help. They came and knew right away it was a prank. Blah!

2. We gave my co-worker a message from a 'mom' named Myra Maines and asked him to call her back ASAP because she had questions about registering for a camp. He called the number written with the name (actually a mortuary) and proceeded to ask for Myra Maines. The girl on the other end reponded, "sorry, there is no one here by that name." He just said, "Oh, okay. Sorry." Who is this girl?! It must be her first year working at a mortuary on April Fool's day. I'm sure she was confused at why she was getting calls all day for Myra Maines (my remains). We then had to explain the joke to our co-worker. Again...blah!

3. THIS WAS THE WINNER: My boss (who had the computer prank pulled on him) had one of our secretaries call another administrator in our division (works next to us over the cubicle wall). He was just recently released as a bishop for our church, which he had served in for a number of years. It had been about a week or two since he was released and he didn't have a new calling yet. Well, she called and said that she was Elder Oaks secretary and that Elder Oaks wanted to meet with him and his wife the next day. I was listening on the other side of the wall when he got the call. It was hilarious. He asked questions about where to park and other things (which she was already prepped for giving the official answer). When he hung up he was silent. This was how we knew we got him (otherwise he would have been asking everyone who did it.) He then disappeared into our directors office for 15 minutes (our director was in on it too) and proceeded to talk to him about this whole thing. He was skeptical that it was a joke...but also scared that it might not be! haha. After he got out of the office my boss finally went over and started asking questions that gave it away. I think he was relieved more than anything!