Happily Ever After

I've been a busy bee the past week preparing for tonight's Young Women in Excellence program. Malinda - I had no clue how much work went into these things. Thank you.

We're using Jenny Smith's "Happily Ever After" script and going with a whole princess/pink theme. Here's the program I designed for it:

Sisters Briggs and Barclay did most of the decorations, but I did make tissue-paper poms! Ok, Hans helped. I've always messed them up before. Dang Martha Stewart makes it look easy. But after finding a good youtube tutorial, I learned that the trick is more tissue paper (10 sheets, not 8) and pipe cleaners to tie it off. Amazing. (No pictures... my camera died :()

I also did food.

The pink lemonade cupcake recipe is from Sweet Cheeks. It's not my favorite, but they turned out pretty well and fit with the theme. My oven was causing me fits last night - I tripled the recipe for the first batch and about half of them burned in 18 minutes, though the recipe says to bake 20-25. Last night was NOT the night I wanted to re-make cupcakes, but I did another double batch and set 'em for 14 minutes. I kept having to add time and I think they finished in 20-22 minutes. Gosh darn inconsistent oven....

I've never used gumpaste before and was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have any difficulties with it. I bought the pre-made Wilton stuff from Hobby Lobby and added some light pink food coloring. Then I just used a small crown-shaped cookie cutter and let them dry wrapped around the round handles of every cooking spoon and rolling pin in my kitchen.

The sugar cookies are the same ones I made back here (apparently I only make pink royal icing. Oh well). I wanted to do some scroll designs on them but by that point it was midnight and I had icing in my hair and 2 dozen burned cupcakes and didn't care. So I just threw some edible pearl sprinkles on them.

The girls sounded beautiful and it was a great program. I'm so proud of all of them.