April's Keepers Meeting

Last night we attended our Keepers At Home meeting. Our Keepers club meets once a month on Monday nights from 6:30-8:30. The younger girls do an activity that helps them to earn a Keepers pin, and the older girls (girls who are about 11 and older and have been participating in Keepers for several years, and have earned just about all of the pins) meet in a separate room and visit and work on some sort of craft or handwork. Of course, my girls crochet!

The younger girls were taught simple cake decorating last night. The mother leading the activity had baked little 3 inch cakes for the girls to decorate. She also had made the most delicious, fluffy icing. I asked her the secret to making it so white and so fluffy--I don't know the exact recipe, but it includes white Crisco, powdered sugar, water, clear vanilla and clear butter flavoring. It was the butter flavoring that made it taste so good!

She showed the girls how to tint the icing different colors, and then how to use different tips for different decorating purposes. Before adding decorations, the girls iced their cakes with the white icing. She instructed them to let the cakes "sit" for about 10 minutes to let the white icing set. Then she passed out Viva brand paper towels for the girl to cover their cakes with and smooth the icing out. I learned so much!

Our instructor taught the girls a few simple decorating tricks, but my favorite was making dots. She used a small circle cookie cutter or the open end of a tip to barely mark the outline of the dots on the cake. Then the girls used a #3 tip to pipe colored icing into the circle. They then used a small spatula to smooth each circle out.

Leah, busy working on her cake

making the dots

posing with Avery

the finished product!

When we arrived home, Leah carefully cut her cake into 7 pieces and shared with the whole family.