Some Nib's to nibble on!

Looking through my previous posts I've realized how little sugar there is to my "Sugar and Spice and Everything else". I don't do as much baking as I'd like to these days. My "real" jobs, or my big girl jobs as we like to call them, take up some  time during the day. However, I am always looking for new baking recipes to try out.

A little more than a year ago, I discovered Stumble. I'm sure you all know what it is, but if you don't, I would actually advise against checking it out. If you have a life, a job, a family, or anything important to do in your life, do NOT Stumble. When I first started, baking was one of the interests I always stumbled upon. Around this same time was when cake pops where becoming popular. I tried making a batch, the kind with cooled and crumbed cake mixed with frosting, and they did not turn out. They were delicious, but man did they look like a hot mess. Then, a miracle happened. Babycakes.

I found this great cake pop maker! It looked like a glorified waffle iron but with little dome wells instead of squares. The best part, it was really affordable. The cake pops were also a lot lighter. The frosting in other batches makes them very rich. Delicious, but rich. I've found that you can make a lot more flavors this way. It definitely took a few practice rounds, but I was thoroughly pleased with the results.

I made cake pops for everything after that. Once that craze started, I remembered how much I loved to bake. I had great taste testers too; I lived with four other girls. One of my roommates said that she wanted a huge, Ace of Cakes style cake when her birthday came around. The brainstorming began! My other roommate and I made the greatest Wisconsin Badger cake that also played music. It was a pretty pedestrian version, but for amateur bakers, we thought it rocked!

After that, all of our birthday cakes had to be extreme. During all of the planning, I thought about how cool it would be to have my own little bakery. I started thinking of names because that's always what you do with a new dream. What are you going to call it? My partner in frosting crime's name is Nissa, so I tried to think of something with our initials. The first word that came to mind was Nib's. When I came home, I jokingly said "Hey Nissa, want to start a bakery with me and call it Nib's?" She looked at me for a bit and said "Sure!"

Our fantastic logo made by my man.

We actually became serious about it and started planning soon after that. It's been almost a year now, and we've had some pretty good business. We mainly do cake pops, but we've also done cupcakes, graduation and birthday cakes, and during Christmas we do Christmas cookies. It's mainly just for our friends and family, but we're trying to expand in our area. We have a facebook page, and we can bake pretty much anything! Give us a look see: Nib's.

We have a ton of photos, but here are some of my favorites. Enjoy!

One of my first successful batches.

The base of this cake had speakers hooked up to an iPod.

A Mt. Dew cake with Sixlet checkers for my man.

This was for our other roommate who LOVES Pokemon and Harry Potter.

Mummy cake pops for a Halloween party.

Our Christmas cookies!!

First attempt at cupcakes and a new star tip.

Wizard of Oz themed cake pops. Check out the site for close-ups.

Skeleton bears for a dance group.

Our first tiered cake.

A very sloppy, but effective 4th of July cake!

Our new favorite decorating design.

Questions? Shoot us a facebook message! We can pretty much do anything!

I almost forgot! a.k.a. Game Day

In my haste to get a new post up about our trip to Chicago, I completely forgot that I had a whole set of photos I wanted to add to it! I usually take all of my pictures with my digital camera but I've noticed that I don't take as many as I used to. Most of my pictures are done with the convenience of my iPhone now. So when I do take the time to upload pictures from my Canon, there are usually small sets that I've taken from months before. Today, I discovered photos from the day before we took my sister to Chicago. I thought I'd just make a new post, and you can pretend that it came before the last one :]

Game Day!!

I have lived in the same house for about 17 years (I live in my own apartment now, but it's still close to home). The neighbor hood is fantastic. It's one street off the highway, and there are a lot of people here that I've grown up with. Two of which are my best friend Ruthy and her younger brother. When we were all little, we would kind of babysit ourselves. We'd all stay at one house while our parents worked, Ruthy and I being old enough to take care of everyone, and we'd play games all day. This was around the time that Pokemon was huge, but we never played the card game. No, instead we played the most amazing board game Pokemon Master Trainer.

No idea where this game is today. I'm thinking of picking one up on Ebay.

If you dropped this board game in front of me now, I would have no idea how to play it. However, I know it rocked. We made our own Pokemon by mixing and matching different traits, and we played Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2 on the N64. We never battled like you're supposed to, we just played the mini games over and over. The final pieces of our nerdy childhood puzzle were these gems:

Best picture I've ever found on Google.

Every. Single. Day. We at Pokemon Mac & Cheese. We collected all of the little cutout pieces, and we traded them like we were real Pokemon trainers.

As we grew up, we grew out of Pokemon, but we did not grow out of game day. We merely graduated to Mario Kart, Mario Party, Double Dash, things like that. Another fantastic game we played was Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. It's a card game were you collect bunnies and carrots, and try to kill your opponents bunnies. At the end of the game, who ever has the winning carrot wins. Simple.

Now, the reason for this post. It's been difficult to continue our game days. Ruthy and I are in college, as is her brother, we all live in different places, and my sister still lived at home. However, fate was on our side the day before moving my sister to school. All of us happened to be free for the afternoon. Game Day was on. My boyfriend is just a big of a nerd as we are (which is why I love him) so he joined in on the crazy that day too. First thing was first, acquire lunch time foods from our childhood.

To our disappointment, they do not make Pokemon Mac & Cheese anymore :[  We got the next best thing which was Phineas and Ferb Mac & Cheese.

Four boxes seemed to be enough.

Soooo good.

We got full really fast, but my man knows how to finish a meal.

 When we were done eating, it was on to Killer Bunnies. It's the kind of game that could take 30 minutes or a couple of hours so we needed to get it out of the way before video games.

Now video games!

The day, while a bit short, was a great success. My sister got to see her favorite people before she left, and we all got a good fix of our childhood craziness. I think we'll have to make Game Day mandatory whenever she's back in town. That Mac & Cheese was delish!

Just some silly fun in the hotel the next night. This took a couple tries.