For starters, I apologize for the delay in posting. I got a little lost over the holidays and have only recently found my way back to the keyborad. I find December to be all consuming and it takes a bit of time to recover, but I’m ready to completely return to routine. I was even able to host a private dinner party recently. Putting that little extra effort into creating a special birthday for a friend is well worth it. If you would like to host a private event at our venue in the Annex, with access to our commercial kitchen please feel free to visit our Birthday page. 

If you’re feeling crafty for your next party, try making a couple of these tassels to hang. Lots of websites list different ways you can create the tassel look. I was really drawn to the shiny tassel, after all which girl doesn’t like a little sparkle. Check out this DIY tassels for instructions. For mine, I used three different types of paper, wouldn’t recommend using the kraft paper, found it was a bit hard to fold. The crepe paper and the tissue paper were the easiest to manipulate and hung nicely.

For the cake, I wanted to try out the half-iced look. First step, do not google naked cake, some people have pretty interesting ideas of what could constitute a naked cake. The best part about this cake is that you don’t have to be a professional baker. If you’re not feeling like spending the entire day in the kitchen, you can always go the route of cake in a box. Otherwise there are a plethora of white cake recipes out there. I used this white cake recipe – and then swapped vanilla essence with lemon oil. The oil is much stronger in flavor and you only need a couple drops. Otherwise, you can also use lemon essence and then just replace 1:1 with vanilla. I also put a couple drops of the lemon oil in my buttercream icing, used Wilton’s famous buttercream icing. I doubled the recipe because I had 3 layers of cake. I picked up the edible flowers from St.Lawrence market, they do sell them in other parts of the city but not for the same price.