Gluten free Chocolate chocolate chunk sports cake

This blog is primarily meant to be a sewing blog, but cooking and baking gluten free and allergen free is very dear to my heart and necessary in my household. I have been doing it for almost 8 years now, because my son has multiple food allergies, not the least being a severe wheat allergy. He turned nine last week and this is the first time his birthday cake has included eggs (he is starting to tolerate a couple of eggs in baked goods).

Thanks to the recipe from here. I have made this bundt cake a few times as well as the cinnamon bundt cake. Both come out excellent. I made half a dozen cupcakes and used a 6" springform pan to make a bigger cake. I decorated them to look like a basketball and  soccer balls..my son plays both sports. A couple of his (non gluten-free) friends dropped by and ate the cake and really loved it!

Notes:
I used Baker's semi-sweet chocolate squares and broke them up into chunks and used Pillsbury frosting (this has been safe for my son, so I use it).

I frosted the cupcakes with vanilla frosting and used a #3 tip with dark chocolate frosting to draw the pentagons. I put on a layer of dark chocolate frosting on the cake and smoothed it out. Then I drew some curves with the same #3 tip and dark chocolate frosting, then filled in with #18 star tip and orange colored vanilla frosting. After filling in completely, I drew over the curved lines again with #5 tip to make them stand out.

A shorts to skirt refashion!

I admit it.. I've been bitten by the refashioning bug. Its hard not to, after reading all the wonderful blogs and pinterest boards. I have never been to a thrift store before this spring, for various reasons, the biggest one being not having one close by with easy parking (parallel parking is a huge deterrent, and not just for me I imagine!). So when I discovered the local church ladies running one on selected days I decided to check it out and came back with quite a number of possibilities, all for half price (score!), each was about $1-2.

I had to get these printed shorts, because I love printed anything. There are many tutorials on how to turn shorts into a skirt which mostly included a triangular piece attached in front. I felt I wouldn't need that because these were already way too big for me.

I decided to go for it and so, a date with the seam ripper! although this was not a sad one. Opened up the crotch seam and sewed a straight line down the back and about an inch in, then trimmed off the excess.

Those arrows on the picture should've been darker I guess.

Did the same with the front, but stopped at the zipper, mostly because I didn't know what else to do:-)

And here's the after! It's not too bad.. the pocket openings are a little off, I caught myself spending a couple of minutes discreetly looking for them to put my hands into, but overall quite wearable. Infact I stepped out wearing it for an afternoon of blueberry picking.