I participated in a blog carnival (which is a collection of articles written by various bloggers on a certain subject) about taxes. I submitted my turbo tax article! To view this article and others relating to tax time you can visit the Tax Carnival!
P.S. There are only 48 days until your taxes are due!
Stefanie is a stay at home blogging Mom of three. She writes for Making of a Mom. Connect with her at Google+
I hate when you go to make cookies and you have to shove your arm into a bag of flour to get however many cups you need and when you pull our your arm you are covered in flour! I have seen other people with cute canisters full of ingredients so I wanted some to. I got these cute
Now here is the 
Stefanie is a stay at home blogging Mom of three. She writes for Making of a Mom. Connect with her at Google+
So here it is! The finished product! I spent several hours last week making the little flowers and then I spent another 12 hours on Saturday baking, icing, sugaring, rolling fondant, and applying the little flowers. Sunday I put all the pieces together (which only took a few minutes) and it looked so cute! (And it was super yummy! The top tier was lemon cake and the bottom was chocolate.)
I prepared all of the battlements, but I left off 5 of them because it was too crowded for my taste, and I wouldn’t have been able to stick the princesses in top. (What’s a princess castle without princesses?) Also, are supposed to be more flowers around the bottoms of the battlements, but by then I didn’t care anymore! My niece asked me if I was sad to cut into it; if anything I may have taken a little too much pleasure in hacking it with a giant knife!
Making this cake was much like birthing a baby. When you’re in labor, you think, Why would anyone do this more than once? This is horrible!! But as soon as you see that sweet baby, you forget how hard it was and you are so proud and happy. All day Saturday while I slaved away, I hated that stupid cake, but then when the girls saw the finished product, I forgot how crazy time consuming it was and I was excited to make it again! What is wrong with me?!?!
Before I started, I read the directions several times to make sure I understood what I was doing. Since I am a TOTAL novice when it comes to anything culinary, I wanted to be sure. The one thing I got wrong was where the directions said “Bake 2 layer cakes.” I didn’t realize they meant 2 of EACH layer cake. So I thought I was done, but I had 2 more cakes to bake! Whoops! Other than that, it all went pretty smooth. It wasn’t difficult, just very time consuming! The next time I do it, (and there WILL be a next time since I invested a little money into it) I won’t bother with the fondant flowers, I’ll just do some cute icing swags or something (I now own all of the icing tips I could ever want!) and that would take make it a lot quicker.
In the end, the girls were super happy and I felt like the greatest mom EVER! Hooray for princess castle cakes! Maybe next time, I’ll do it in purple…
Now you know you want to buy the Castle Cake kit!
Ok here is my tissue pom pom tutorial. I am not expert, but as I said in my Cocoa Party post, I did make 30 so I knew a little something about them!
1. Start with a flat rectangular piece of tissue paper. In my opinion 
the best tissue pom poms come out of 13 sheets of tissue paper. Less than that and they aren’t very fluffy, more than that and it is VERY hard to cut the scalloped edge, plus it gets way fluffy very fast and it is hard to make it even.
2. 
Accordion fold the entire sheet. Make sure you are folding the short end so that you get more folds. I like my folds to be about an inch wide.
3. This is what it looks like when you are finished accordion folding all your tissue paper. It is an inch wide strip of tissue paper. You then need to cut the ends rounded. This will create a scalloped look when you fluff the pom.
4.
Wrap a matching color craft wire around the middle on your tissue pom pom strip. You need to pinch it so it looks like a bow tie, then wrap it up tight! I add an little loop of wire so that hanging the pom poms will be easier. (you want the wire loop to be on the side of the pom where all the layers are, not sticking straight up like is in the in pictures, this pom will hang crooked with a loop like this.)
5.
You then fan out one side of the pom pom. This makes it look like a turkey, right?! You carefully pull one piece of the tissue paper out towards yourself. I found that colored tissue paper is a little bit stronger and won’t tear as easy, but you have to be GENTLE with white tissue paper, because it will treat VERY easy!
6.
At this point I put the bottom half of the pom pom in between my legs to hold it steady while I fluff. You equally fluff one side then the next. Since I use an odd number of sheets of tissue when you get to the end there is one left. Don’t fluff it either way, just leave it in the middle. That will help with your blending fluffing.
7.
Once you are finished fluffy out the first half you turn it over and do the other half. Odds are you with smash the first half, but that is ok. Poms LOVE to be fluffed. When you are done you will fluff both sides getting it to look as even as you can. And you’re DONE! Or you can take the easy way and just buy tissue poms!
Can you see the difference between these two poms? The brown one only has 8 sheets of tissue while the white one has 13. The white one is much more full. The more paper, the more fluff!!
Please send me pictures of your pom poms the next time you party it up with some!!
Stefanie is a stay at home blogging Mom of three. She writes for Making of a Mom. Connect with her at Google+
Since I just moved to Kansas City what better way to get to know 
people than by hosting a party, right?! Of course! So together with a friend that moved here 3 days before we did, we decided to invite the ladies from church over for a Cocoa Party girls night out. We came up with 
colors (pink, brown and white) and planned the decorations and the menu. We decided to make tissue pom poms, have a wall of streamers and involve balloons somehow. We also got some cute candies in pink wrappers, made marshmallow dippers with pink chocolate and chocolate sprinkles, made chocolate peanut butter cookies, made chocolate cake balls and had a 
variety of toppings for the cocoa. We also decided to throw a couple of games into the mix to try to get to know everyone better.
The first game we had was to have everyone who came to the party bring their own mug. (I didn’t want to go have to buy twenty plus mugs) whoever brought the most unusual or funniest mug would win a prize. We had two prizes. That was fun to 
hear the stories of everyone’s mugs.
The second game was a basket full of many cocoa packets of different flavors. We asked everyone to pick a packet that would describe their personality. I picked French Vanilla because I have traveled quite a bit and hope to continue my world travels.
The third game was called “Trading Spaces.” Everyone was sitting in their own chairs in a circle. I would say a phrase such as “You are the baby in your family.” and everyone that statement applied to would stand up and have to switch seats. It was fun to see little facts about others and to switch up who you were sitting by. By the end of the game everyone had rotated so much they were by someone completely new. I love that we all 
got to visit with each other and new friends we maybe didn’t know as well before!
Overall it was a fun time! I loved getting to know new people and expand my circle of friends.
Next week I will be putting up a tissue pom pom tutorial. I am no expert but after making about 30 poms poms I feel I can at least offer up how I made them.
Stefanie is a stay at home blogging Mom of three. She writes for Making of a Mom. Connect with her at Google+