Home from the Disney Fantasy!

We are home once again after having a wonderful week aboard the new Disney Fantasy cruise ship. It was an absolutely splendid week and I was no where near ready to leave. We have sailed twice before with Disney, aboard the Magic and the Wonder. While both of those voyages were great, I do believe this was my favorite. I love the art nouveau and art deco design of the classic ships, and the Fantasy didn't disappoint. It was absolutely gorgeous! I will write some posts about some of the things we did during our week in paradise....but for today I thought I would show you at least some of my favorite details of the ship.

The lobby of the ship is the first place you see upon boarding. It is breath taking and my pictures don't do it justice.

The peacock-inspired chandelier.

A view of the lobby. Can you spot Aurora?

Looking down onto the lobby carpet.

I love the low-key bit of Disney fun!

Yours truly by the Mademoiselle Minnie statue.

The Walt Disney Theater, where all the big productions are held, is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, I did not get any pictures of it. I did take some pictures of the area right outside though.

The big kids and Walt.

While it is a little odd, I admit, I am enamored by the elevators on the ship...

The elevator area nearest our stateroom.

Elevator doors...note the Mickey hand pointing to the floor it's on.

The floor inside the elevator. It is actual stone that is inlaid!L

Because our little girl has to frequent the bathroom often, I saw many of them around the ship. I absolutely hate public restrooms, but every one I entered while on the ship was wonderfully clean and beautiful. They also have actual doors and walls, not stalls. Just one more way that I wish the real world were like a Disney cruise. I normally did not have a camera on me while in the restroom, and that might freak people out anyway, so I don't have many pictures. At one point I was the only one in one of the restrooms in the adult area of the ship and so I just had to take a picture of this mosaic.There were many wonderful mosaics around the ship...I just found it incredible that this one was in a bathroom!

If course, being on such a beautiful ship is so much better when you are sharing it with those you love.

My handsome hubby.

Cake Friday

Just one week! That is all we have left before we leave to start our cruise on the Disney Fantasy. The advent chain I set up for the kids is looking extremely short. I am beyond myself excited. It will be a bit of a hectic week with all of the packing and getting things ready that needs to be done, so I am sure it will go by quickly.

The kids really liked the cake I made today. The ship on top was made by baking a small cake in one of my mini loaf pans and then doing a bit of carving. It is a very simplified version of a Disney cruise boat, and not all that accurate, but I did not want to spend hours on it. And in the end, it brought smiles to my hubby and kids' faces, so I am happy.

FYI, it is chocolate cake. :)

Cake Friday

Can you guess what type of cake it is? Hopefully, it is fairly obvious that it is carrot cake.

I have never been a fan of carrot cake, which is probably why I have never made one, gluten-free or otherwise, before today.  In fact, today I came pretty close to never making a finished carrot cake at all. Not one batch of cake, but TWO, completely flopped. I am not sure what went wrong, since the recipe I first used had good reviews. Sometimes cakes just don't work out though. I wish I had taken a picture of the sad mess just so you could feel my pain. They puffed up, overflowed into a big mess, burnt on the bottom of the oven (which had to be cleaned up after each attempt), and then slumped into a nasty looking bit of cake-sludge in the pans. 

For the third try, I tried a slightly different recipe which I found here. It sunk slightly, so I may want to fudge around with the amounts of baking soda and baking powder, or perhaps I just overbeat it. Taste-wise, I thought it was marvelous. The cream cheese frosting was the perfect complement. Since we eat casein-free here, it was tofutti cream cheese, which is actually pretty dandy stuff.

Although this was my first time baking carrot cake, it was not the first time I have made fondant carrots. Just for fun, I thought I would throw in some pictures of a cake I made for Thanksgiving a few years back.

It's a turkey cake, complete with fondant carrots, potatoes, greenery, and white leg poof things (I have no idea what they are called). Since I am nerd, the breast portion of the cake was white chocolate, and the dark meat portions were pumpkin. I suppose this isn't really the correct season to post this, but working on today's cake just reminded me what fun it was.

Packing for our Cruise

Our Disney Cruise is quickly approaching, and although I am not packing the suitcases yet, I have been making sure we have what we need. With a family of six, packing for a week long vacation is no small feat. When you add in special outfits for formal evenings and pirate parties, it is enough to make steam start erupting from my ears. That is why I made up this nifty little chart to help me out. Each member of our family gets a sheet of their own, and we just fill in the necessary outfits.



Packing Chart
I am offering it up here so that maybe some other frazzled cruise-planning mommies (or daddies), can have a bit if an easier time packing. If you can drop me a line if you decide to use it, it would make my day.

Cake Friday

Yep...I know....St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow. It was just too close to resist making a themed cake though, especially since tomorrow I will most likely be too busy. The shamrocks are a bit pathetic looking, I admit, but I did have a lot of fun piping them. It is almost meditative to sit and draw with frosting. I have to remind myself to stop before the cake looks ridiculous. There is always a bit of piping that never shows up on a cake. A while back, I started giving the kids what we have come to call Frosting Tattoos. With a little bit of leftover icing, I pipe a design on the back of one of their hands. Squirt has already started holding his hand out when he sees me with a piping bag.

But wait....there is more....

Ta da! My first successful attempt at marbling a cake! I have tried the more common way of marbling that involves putting half the batter, that is normally colored, into the pan first and then covering it with the colored half of batter and swirling it around with a knife. That has never worked for me, so I tried to think of something that would. In the end, I just had two bowls of batter, one colored and one regular, and alternated them with plops of batter into the center of the pan. Afterwards, I just gave the pan a little jiggle, and it was good to go. Unfortunately, my first batch of cakes this morning sunk. I tried to color and flavor the colored portion with lime jello. I guess the cake spirits decided in was getting too cocky because it has been a while since I have had a cake fell and decided to teach me a lesson. Lime juice and green gel food coloring worked much better.

Dr. Seuss Birthday Cake Friday!

In honor of Dr. Seuss's Birthday today, I made a Green Eggs and Ham cake! Well....a cake decorated like green eggs and ham, the inside is chocolate with chocolate chips buttercream filling. The kids all liked the wonky shape of the cake before I even got the fondant put on, so I guess this one is a winner. Since I really wanted it to look like the illustrations in a Dr. Seuss book, I tried a new technique and painted the blue coloring on the bottom and the big black lines. I am pretty pleased how it turned out, especially since it will just be devoured in a couple of hours anyway.

A close up of the decorations.

I tried to get another picture just so the crookedness showed a bit better.

Young Entrepreneur Fair

Gizmo and Spike recently had an opportunity to participate in a young entrepreneur fair held in our area. They had to choose what their "store" would sell, figure out the profit and pricing, produce the item, and then set up a stand to sell their wares at the gymnasium where the even took place. Me and Brady felt that it was very important that the kids paid for all their materials and ingredients, and subsequently keep all the money they might make,  so that they would better grasp the risks and benefits of starting a business.

Gizmo made a variety of cute soaps, and even some tub crayons, while Spike had some gluten and dairy free baked goods. We worked on figuring out how much each item cost them to produce, and then decided on what would be a good price to sell it for. Although I knew it was a great opportunity even if they didn't earn any money, I was pretty nervous that it would be a sad drive home. However, they both made a profit!They both learned a lot about what worked and what did not, and since the mom who organized the event would like to make it a bi-yearly thing, they will hopefully be able to test out those lessons sometime in the late fall.

To explain the method of figuring out how much the items cost them to make, I first started by just showing them the series of math problems needed on a piece of scratch paper. It quickly became apparent that it was not making clear sense to them. I think that having a very visual way of laying something out often makes things easier to understand, so I made a couple of worksheets for them.

The first is a graph used to find out cost of materials in the amounts used, such as how much is an ounce of flour or soap base.
Cost of Materials

The second is the process of adding up all the costs involved, dividing by the amount produced, and then figuring out how much profit will be made.
Cost per Item

Hopefully they can help someone else out as well. :)