Budget Art

I love signs with sayings or verses on them. As my house budget right now is pretty much non-existent I decided to try and make them using only my printer. They aren't perfect but I am pretty happy with how they turned out.



I got the fonts here. This site is so cool. Hundreds and hundreds of FREE fonts! For the bible verse I used the Jane Austen font and added a clip-art from Word to the background. I need to reprint it a tad smaller so it isn't running out of the mat. Sometime I'll get around to it . . . The mat was a lot smaller than what I wanted so I used a rotary cutter to trim it to the right size. Thanks to my sister for that great idea. I was tearing it to shreds trying to use my dull exacto knife. The first saying is by my desk to try and motivate me to stop reading craft blogs and clean my house:) I used the Inked God font for that one.

Cake Balls

I made these treats for Katie's birthday and love how they came out. Easy and looks like you have real baking skills.

Ingredients:

1 box of cake mix

1 can of frostings

candy coating or almond bark

Directions:

Bake the cake according to package directions.

While the cake is still warm crumble it into fine crumbs.

Mix in the frosting. I let the crumbs cool before doing this step.

Now, take your cookie scoop and drop rounded balls of the mixture onto wax paper. I then roll them by hand to make sure they are smooth and rounded.

Put them in the freezer to make dipping easier.

Dip the balls in the candy coating, almond bark or chocolate. I researched online for the best way to do this. I had tried dipping them with a toothpick which was really frustrating for me. I found that it worked the best to coat the cake-ball and remove it from the bowl with a fork, scraping the excess coating off the underside of the fork when you take it out. Then jiggle the fork to roll the ball onto the paper. I ended up with some coating puddling around the bottoms. I decided not to bother trimming it.

As the last step I put the extra coating in a pastry bag with a small circular decorating tip and just squiggled it all over the cake. I also made some 2's for the birthday girl.

I made chocolate cake with cream cheese icing and Katie picked out strawberry cake with rainbow chip icing. I found the strawberry ones to be way too sweet. The possibilities are endless with the variations of cake and frosting you could try.

Have fun!