Thanks A Bunch!

Piper and I did a little baking for her grandparents this weekend.  These are Banana Bread Blondies with Browned Butter Icing --- little thank you gifts.

I found a great recipe online at Life's Simple Pleasures.  You can find it by clicking here.  Jess shows how to get the butter just right and notes in her post that she took the recipe from Christy at The Girl Who Ate Everything (click here for that one), where that blogger also gives baking times for using a regular loaf pan or mini loaf pans instead of the 10x15 jelly roll pan.  The brown butter icing is the cooked kind of icing and is perfectly paired with the banana bars (or any bar or the spoon or the bowl).  I like that wonderful brittle top quality matched with the creamy, melted-in part that lies on the very moist cake.  So easy yet all from scratch (perfect for giving), bakes in under 30 minutes... and a good one to do with a kiddo!  This makes enough bars for giving to two households as well as plenty for sampling here!

I made a quick little tag to go on them.

• The bananas were cut from Wild Card 2 (page 41) at 3-1/2" on the Expression.  Inked in brown.  The top layer was popped up using 1/4" pop dots for the bottom of the bananas only; the top was adhered flush.
• The scalloped circle tag base was cut from Art Philosophy (page 41) at 4-1/4".  The green base was embossed using the Cuttlebug.
• The sentiment was printed from the computer using Microsoft font Exotic Island BTN at 18 point.  I hand-cut the little banner.

I also wanted to share a couple of fun birthday wraps from a recent birthday party for siblings.

This one is for a boy who is very obsessed with Dominoes right now.  He builds Domino rallies and requested more so this is  filled with hundreds of the black wood kind of dominoes.  I got a fast lesson in which dominoes are used for this type of application and found a great source for black, wood, double-six, "building dominoes" in bulk at EAI.  Click here for a link to their dominoes.  I used Birthday Bash for the letters and the Cuttlebug Dominoes folder to emboss dominoes on them.  I used a white acrylic paint and a dry brush to paint over the  raised areas to accentuate the pattern.

This is for his sister--one of my daughter's little friends from school.  I used their pirate pool party theme as a guide and the Imagine cart Buccaneer for the parrot, banner, and "Happy Birthday Matey" above the banner.  The child's name was cut using Cricut Blackletter.  I folded the banner according to the way it was printed and popped up the center 1/2".
Thanks for checking out my post today.   We are in the midst of a very hot, dry summer here in Kentucky!  I hope that you are keeping cool wherever you are!