Baby Shower Bonanza

My best friend is having a baby and I co-hosted her shower this weekend. Since I live on the complete opposite side of town and she's really good friends with her neighbor, she (her neighbor) and I teamed up to host at her house.

I found the cutest invitations weeks ago at Hobby Lobby (quickly becoming my favorite store, btw) and slowly put together the rest of the paper products in the same pattern. The only picture was taken with my camera phone, so I won't bother posting it. You'll just have to take my word that they were cute. We all got together about a month ago to prepare the invitations and we heard back from nearly everyone. I must say it is nice when people are polite and RSVP.

So the week before, we started checking things off our lists. We'd decided to make a diaper cake for Momma and I found some interesting decorating techniques online. For example, I made washcloth roses.
I can't even begin to tell you how easy they were to make! I'm sure with more practice they would look better, for a first attempt this are pretty good.

We just decorated the diapers with ribbon and baby accessories (in this case, a teething ring and pacifiers). We thought it would take hours and it took less than one. While uncomplicated, I recommend working on this with a partner when assembling all of the diapers into the layers.

And of course, I baked. My mother came down from DFW for the shower and she was a big help. She'd given me a magazine full of cake-mix ideas, so I used one of those recipes for our cupcakes. I don't usually do cupcakes because I have a hard time judging how full to make the cups. We did a double batch, just be safe on the numbers. I didn't want anyone to miss out on seconds because we didn't have enough cupcakes. I also made the icing from scratch and while a bit of a pain, it was totally worth it. Homemade frosting with ingredients I can pronounce = win.

These are just a white cake mix, injected with lemon curd filling and topped with vanilla butter cream frosting. Mom insisted on mixing up lemon curd with bean curd, so we lost a lot of time due to hysterical laughter. She did offer an excellent suggestion of using my cooking press fitted with a frosting tip to inject the filling. While messy, it was a lot easier than how I had planned - using a plastic bag with a corner snipped off.

Focusing on the shower has helped me a lot this last month. February was probably the least fun month of my entire life and I'm still dealing with the loss of Mustardseed. I've been working on a tribute posting for him, but it just never seems finished. I think of new things I miss about him everyday.