DIY No Bake Fruit Cake

Hi there. Holiday greetings to you. Are you running short of time to bake a cake or looking for a healthy alternative? How about a no bake fruit cake for this Christmas or New Year? Let me show you how simple it is to make a gorgeous looking fruit cake in no time.

Ingredients:

• Watermelon (I used small )
• Cantaloupe (I used small)
• Strawberries
• Blueberries
• Sliced almonds
• Homemade icing or Store bought icing (I bought fresh vanilla whipped icing from bakery section in my grocery store)

Cut two 1.5 inch thick whole slices of watermelon and one 1.5 inch thick cantaloupe across middle part of fruits. Remove the outer skin and middle seeds part for cantaloupe. Shape them into circles using a plate or bowl as template.

Place the round slice of watermelon on your cake stand or plate, layer it with icing and top with a layer of cantaloupe slice. I filled middle hollow part of cantaloupe with berries. Add one more layer of icing and top it with another watermelon layer.

Here is how your fruit arrangement looks like.

Cover the fruits all around with icing like you usually do for a cake. Its not necessary to have a perfect smooth looking icing. We are going to cover it all.

Covering your cake with sliced almonds is the fun part. All you have to do is take a hand full of sliced almonds, keep your hand at 6 inches distance from cake and throw the almond slices aiming at your cake sides. Almond slices will stick the icing. Repeat this procedure until you cover all around the cake with your almonds. Clear away any of the almonds that fall around the cake. 

Arrange some blueberries around the bottom of your cake.

Slice the strawberries thin and group them according to size. Placing even sized pieces along a row makes the cake look more professional. We will start with bigger pieces for outer circle and lower the size as we go inside to the middle. You will see what I mean.

Take bigger size pieces of cut strawberries and arrange around outer circle of your cake top as shown.

Take next size group of strawberry pieces and arrange second circle just overlapping the outer circle a little as shown in above picture.

Similarly fill in a third circle of strawberry pieces.

Top the center with a cute little strawberry.

Tada!!! There it is. A stunning arrangement of fruits or a no bake fruit cake as I call it. Don't worry if your watermelon oozes out a little water but make sure you finish the cake as soon as possible. (As we added icing to the fruit it is not good to keep it or refrigerate it for long.) Make it fresh and eat fresh.

Hope you enjoyed my post. I wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you for stopping by. I love to hear your comments.

DIY Birthday Party Backdrop, Decor and More

Hi friends, this post is all about sharing with you how we (myself, birthday boy's parents and aunt) managed to DIY entire birthday party decor including all the knick knacks.

To see how I made this Colorful Bunting Birthday Banner check out my previous post here.

Coming to the backdrop, we got 2 white vinyl table covers and 4 blue plastic table covers from party city. We gathered 2 of the blue plastic covers in drapery style for the top border. We just stapled the plastic cloth after gathering it together and taped it around to be sure. Above picture shows how we did it before hand at home to save some time at venue.

For rest of the backdrop we just ironed white vinyl table covers we got to make wrinkles less obvious (always use a cloth on top of vinyl cover before you iron) and for the sides we just dropped blue plastic covers on either ends. Using table covers instead of fabric for backdrop makes it possible to achieve the looks way under budget.
Those cute little monkeys, lions and giraffes you see here and there are from fun to be one boy set from party city. However you could always print them at home or a print store.

Isn't that chocolate wrapper cute??? It screams cuteness to me and they are personalized with birthday boy's name :) We designed this chocolate wrapper from scratch using picmonkey.com . I am not paid to say this but I just love picmonkey for making it so easy to design amazing printables.

After designing we printed them at a office print press on to magazine style glossy paper. Once printed we cut them to size and stuck them using double side tape at the back where two ends overlap a little. By the way they are regular Hershey's chocolates behind the wrapper.

Here is one more simple DIY Cupcake Stand using dollar store plastic bowls and plates. We got 3 of those bowls for a dollar and the plates for dollar each at a local dollar tree. With just a little hot glue gun magic we joined bottom of the bowl to center bottom of plate and Tada! cupcake stand is all ready.

Here are the pictures of cupcake stands in action. We arranged them on either side of the birthday cake.

Yes! We made those Thank you tags too, without any fancy cutting machines. We designed the tag using picmonkey.com, printed onto thick glossy sheet at a office print press and then we hand cut each of the tags using a pair of scissors. It was little tedious to cut those fancy edges but the end result was well worth it.

We put together little bags of sweet treats and topped with a Thank you tag for everyone who attended the party.

Basket of sweet treats and little fun goodies for kids at the party.

Last but not least we also made a photo booth out of plastic table covers from dollar tree. I made a banner saying "Photo Booth" the similar way that I made Bunting Birthday Banner. Photo booth is always a fun option for both kids and adults.

My friend (Birthday boy's mom, Shriranjini) ordered few of the props on etsy.com and we got those colorful garlands from dollar tree. We made "Grab a prop and strike a pose" poster using picmonkey.com, printed and put it into a dollar tree acrylic photo frame.

Here is a close up picture of cute and delicious cake, just for you. I hope you enjoy this post as much as we enjoyed the party.
Thank you for stopping by. I love hearing your comments. Have a great day :)

DIY Colorful Bunting Birthday Banner

Hello friends here is one more DIY Birthday party Decor as I promised. Making this banner is really simple and fun. I made this for a little hero, Saketh's first birthday party. 

All you need for making this banner are a whole lot of colorful scrapbook papers, bunting banner template, scissors, glue stick, pencil, doilies, alphabet stickers, hole punch and a thread. Let's get to the fun part. Will tell you details about products I used as we go.

Google search for a bunting banner template image and you will find plenty. Pick whichever you like and print it on to a card stock paper. Cut out the template using a pair of scissors. (You could even draw your own template, its pretty simple and self explanatory.)

Start tracing your template outline on to backside of your colorful card stock papers. (I just showed tracing on front side of card stock to make it clear for you that I am tracing on color card stock and not a white sheet)

Cut out all the traced colorful flags.

 I am using Wilton 4 inch dessert doilies and glitter letter stickers. ( You can use whichever pattern you like instead of doilies or even leave them blank and just stick letters)

Stick doilies to all your color flags using glue stick.

Now is the fun part. You just gotto play with arranging color flags in which ever order you like and stick letters to the flags. I really got to the point of breaking my head with arranging a perfect order of colors to make it look good. But frankly it doesn't matter, the final banner is still going to look pretty with random colors. 

Here is my banner coming together. "HAPPY"

"BIRTHDAY"

"SAKETH". 

Punch holes at upper corners. 

Tie the alphabet flags together using a thread and making sure you keep alphabets in correct order. Often when you punch holes at corners and try to tie them together with a thread, the paper will be ripped in the process of tightening the knot. Here is a little trick I invented. Get the thread through the holes, place a pen (or anything similar) and knot the thread tight. Once you are done knotting, remove the pen. Try it! 

Finish knotting all the flags together. And that's it! It's that simple to make handmade birthday decor.

Here is a picture from the birthday party. More DIY posts from this party to follow. Hope you like this simple and fun DIY Birthday Banner. Thanks for stopping by. I love hearing your comments. Have a happy weekend :) 

DIY Butterfly Themed Birthday Party

I love everything about birthday parties. All the fun, Joy and Happiness. After all its one of the ways way to celebrate life and thank almighty for greatest blessings. This story is about 1st Birthday party celebration of my friend's pretty baby girl. My friend and I did little internet search for themes and she fell in love with butterfly theme. We stuck to 3 colors white, green and pink shades, so that we don't make it very busy for eyes. Here is how party decor turned out. And I am telling you it was way under our estimated budget ;)

         The venue was their apartment community hall. We weren't allowed to make any big changes to the hall or stick anything to walls. So we went ahead and used existing curtain rod to hold our background which is white tulle fabric (tulle fabric roll ordered on amazon).

          Happy Birthday banner, table cover, cupcake stand, helium balloons, cups, plates and kids blow out play treats were all from dollar store. Isn't it awesome??? They were all butterfly themed too. We saw kind of similar ones in party city and they were way too expensive compared to dollar store. I am a great fan of dollar store when it comes to single use items.
 

Cut and fold decorative tissue papers into fans. Join two fans together to form a circle. Mix and match to suit your taste.

Letters for banner and thank you tags designed using picmonkey.

We designed little girl's name banner using pic monkey and few color tissue papers as shown in above pictures. I love using pic monkey for the fact that its way simple for everybody to use and many features of it are free.

We planned to cut several butterflies out of card stock and stick randomly on background. Luckily I came across this butterfly die cut sheet at Michaels, its white with pretty pink glitter on it. We just had to cut individual butterflies out of die cut sheet and already done with 20 pretty butterflies!

Then we cut few butterflies out of card stock as planned. For an easy cut, fold card stock into half, trace one half of butterfly (1 wing and half body) on to it such that body part falls across folded edge of card stock and cut both the folded sides together along traced edge. When you unfold you have a completely symmetric butterfly. (I hope you got it. Let me know in the comments if its unclear to you. Will be happy to help.)

Tada! Yummy butterfly cupcakes with edible candy butterflies. Yes! I made them and its very easy to make. You can check my post on edible chocolate decor for details on how to melt candy.

As shown in edible chocolate decor post, melt and trace butterflies on parchment paper sheets. To make the butterfly wings stay up in V shape, fold a card stock paper into V shape as shown in the picture and carefully place traced chocolate butterflies into V shaped paper fold. Make sure the center body of butterfly falls in the center of paper fold. Now freeze the chocolate butterflies until they are set.
Once the cupcakes are frosted with your favorite frosting, (I made simple butter cream frosting) add the butterflies on frosting and you are done!

My friend picked this cutest two tier butterfly cake from local bakery. God!! isn't that cute?? Tasted yummy too!

These gorgeous butterflies are hand painted by my friend on a little canvas, personalized with birthday girl's name and date on the back to give as return gifts for the ladies who attended the party. Aren't those beautiful? She is one amazing artist I know.
Ofcourse kids got toys as return gifts.

So that's how our party went. Hope you enjoyed the party. Here is a pink and lavender banner circle template in case you want to make your own birthday banner too. By the way all the opinions stated are my own and I am not paid for any of it. Thank you for fluttering by. Have a good day :)