A Birthday, Some Cake and a few Valentines

Warning:  This is a picture-heavy post!

Birthday:  This past Tuesday was Adam's 25th birthday.  What an old man he is!  This is a gift card tin that we got for Christmas.  With a little help from fabulous PTI, a great manly gift. 

So what do you get the man who wants nothing but things that cost thousands of dollars but won't set aside money to save for them?  Well, I decided that most of his gifts from now on will be in the form of "gift cards" like below.  When you want to buy a snowmobile or a $1,000+ guitar, you need to save up for a while.  He liked it. :)

Cake:  So I've had this idea for a youth group snack for a while, just had to wait for Valentine's Day.  I started with two different cake mixes (strawberry and cherry chip) and baked each of them in jelly roll pans.

Then I used a cookie cutter to make lots of hearts.  (No, I did not throw away all of that wonderful leftover cake! More on that later.)

Here are the hearts.  Just waiting for some...

CHOCOLATE!!  I made some ganache (2/3 c. whipping cream and 60z chocolate chips) and made a big mess covering those hearts!  But the reviews were great from the students!  One person claimed to have eaten 15 of them!!

So the leftovers?  Well, there was just so much that I decided to make up my own trifle.  I layered most of the strawberry cake pieces, homemade whipped cream, more of the ganache, cherry chip cake pieces, whipped cream, ganache, the rest of both cakes, more whipped cream and chocolate chips.  Let's just say the ladies at work both loved and hated me at the same time!!

Valentines:  Of course Procrastinator Patti has stayed true to her name.  Today, the day before the Valentine's Day parties at school, I finally made our teacher gifts.  My original plan was to stamp on coffee filters, fill with M&Ms, tie with ribbon and add a tag.  Well, I just kept putting it off because I just didn't want to do all of that work for 36 kids.

So today I thought, "Who said that I had to use coffee filters??"  Thus I made these which I just adore!  I love working in miniature multiples (cards or cupcakes!).  They just look cute all together.

Here is a finished valentine.  I put all of the small hearts from the Heart Prints stamp set onto one block and stamped them all at the same time.  Add a little ribbon and voila!

Onto the back I stapled some glassine bags filled with valentine-colored M&Ms.  But of course I didn't have quite enough bags, so I made some with waxed paper!  Thank goodness for Score-Tape.

And of course the best way to look at all of my hard work is to put them all in a pretty basket.  :)

Well at least you can't say that I waste your time with tiny posts!  I do need to go clean though.  My parents and little sister are coming out tomorrow for  the weekend.  Friday night will be Fajitas and then to church to see "Fireproof."  Saturday we'll take the fam to see the sights of Madison and Dad's taking us out for Valentine's Day.  Then we're home so that my sister can have a web-cam date with her boyfriend in California and Dad and Adam can watch the big Ohio State - Wisconsin game.  They are both die hard fans of their respective teams.  Some trash talking will occur.  :)

Hope that you all have a great Valentine's Day weekend, whatever your plans are!! 

XOXOX  ~Patti