Chevron Baby Quilt - Pinterest Success!

Months ago, I pinned this quilt to my "Crafts to Try" board on Pinterest:

This is the quilt from Pinterest; not mine!

Now that my close friend Jamie is expecting her first baby mid-May, I had a good reason to try and make it!  This baby girl will be my first "niece," and I couldn't be more excited to welcome her into the world.  Excited to make something extra special,  I dug out the ol' sewing machine, took a trip to JoAnn Fabrics and found an easy tutorial online for making a super cute, not-too-girly chevron baby quilt.  I chose a neutral gold-coated muslin and a pretty darker khaki and white flower patterned fabric for the top, and a cute pink polka dot fabric for the back. 

After some serious cutting and pressing, I pieced together the quilt top.

Trimmed off the edges...

Quilted the top to the pretty light pink polka dot backing piece, with a thin batting between them, and then bound the edges...

And voila!  My first quilt in four years was complete, and didn't come out half bad!  I was proud of the sharp corners on the chevron pattern, less proud of the not-even-close-to-perfect binding job.  I hope that my little niece loves it and has lots of cozy naps cuddled up in it!

My finished product!

Annnnnd on a related note, Jamie had the most amazing baby shower.  Here are a few snaps!  All of the amazing food was prepared by her sister who works in the restaurant business in Los Angeles, and the theme of 'peas in a pod' was carried throughout the whole party beautifully by her husband's family.  She's a very lucky girl!

In the bottom right, those are little shooters of homemade tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches - my favorite!

The adorable cake!

Not the best shot, but this is Jamie opening up the pretty afghan that my mom crocheted for her. 

Centerpiece; I was crazy about this flower!

Baby Shower Cupcakes

This weekend I had the pleasure of baking up 48 cupcakes for a baby shower!  Did anyone follow my live tweet as I worked on them?  It was a fun project, with one little whoopsy near the end (I dropped my bowl of flour/baking soda mix on the floor.  The bowl shattered into a million pieces and I had no idea how much flour I lost, so I had to eyeball it.  Scary!)  In the end, the cupcakes turned out great!

The order was for 24 chocolate and 24 vanilla cupcakes, all topped with raspberry frosting.  I was so excited for this order because I never tend to bake up the classics, so this was a great opportunity to do it.   I did some research and chose three recipes to follow..links and notes are at the bottom of this post.

Carol, thank you for the order and I hope today's baby shower is filled with love and fun!!!

For the vanilla cupcakes, I followed the Cupcake Project's Ultimate Vanilla Cupcake recipe.  I love this recipe and am keeping it as one of my go-to's.  The batter is super easy to put together.  I was a little nervous that the batter was so liquidy, but it baked up fine.  I had a little issue with crazy tops at first:

but when I filled the cupcake liners a little less and more evenly on the 2nd batch, they were perfect.  This cake is super light, nice and moist, and a strong, delicious vanilla flavor.  LOVE this recipe.

For the chocolate cupcakes, I followed the Magnolia Bakery recipe.  This recipe took a bit longer to make, mostly because you have to melt the chocolate and then wait for it to cool down a bit.  The nice thing about this recipe is that it made enough batter for 2 dozen cupcakes...I ended up getting 30 cupcakes from it.  The batter on this one was to die for.  My husband likes to "taste test" all of my batters, and he thought this one was frosting, not cake batter.  It is thick, moussy, delish.  The finished cake is much denser than the vanilla one, just as intense in flavor.  They baked up perfectly even, probably because I used a cookie scoop and made sure to put the exact same amount of batter in each cup.  LOVE love love this recipe.

Now for the frosting, I found a recipe for raspberry cream cheese frosting and tweaked it a little bit.  The original recipe called for adding a little liquor for taste and that just didn't seem right to do for a baby shower.  Here's the end recipe that I used.  It's sweet (but not TOO sweet!) and has a very intense raspberry flavor.  I know I've used that adjective a few times already-- I'm telling you, these cupcakes are so, SO flavorful.

Raspberry Cream Cheese Frosting:
Need:
-1 8oz pack of cream cheese - room temp
-1 stick of unsalted butter - room temp
-1/2 a stick of shortening (4 oz) - room temp
-1/4 cup of seedless raspberry jam
-1 1/2 tablespoons of raspberry flavored jello powder
-2 lbs powdered sugar

Do:
1.  Beat cream cheese, butter and shortening together until light and fluffy.
2.  Add raspberry jam and 1 tablespoon of jello powder, beat to combine.
3.  Add powdered sugar in 4 parts.  Add in the remaining 1/2 tablespoon of jello powder with your third part of sugar.

Note- using the full 2 lbs of sugar will give you a nice thick frosting that is good for acheiving a firm design when decorating like in my pictures above.  You can certainly add less for a more creamy frosting, or even a glaze if you'd like.

Enjoy!