My sweet baby girl turned 3 last week. She is all smiles and sunshine. She is sweet and spirited. She is my first child that has always had a stay-at-home mom. She is my sidekick most days. She never ventures far from where I am...and I love that! I am so thankful for the blessing God bestowed upon me the day she was born. I am thankful God healed her and allowed her to endure the NICU unscathed.
E LOVES owls! She giggles anytime she sees them and so for her birthday I planned an owl cake.Inspired by this cake I found on pinterest I set out to make a cake that was friendly to our dietary needs. While they aren't as strict as many families we can have NO artificial dyes. I also limit preservatives as much as possible to keep a happy, healthy house! This means that I now make all of our birthday cakes from scratch because all boxed mixes have preservatives and it's nearly impossible to come by dye free frosting.
So, after a year of experimentation I have finally successfully made pink and purple frosting!!!!! I also made a light yellow but it is really hard to tell in the pictures. Freeze dried fruit is the best thing EVER!!!!
To make the pink frosting I used this recipe except I used milk instead of heavy cream. To make the purple icing I used freeze dried blueberries instead of strawberries. I also made light yellow icing from freeze dried mangoes and used that as the eyes (with a chocolate chip stuck in the middle). The beak is a piece of freeze dried mango and the wings are all natural chocolate cookies! (Here's my shout out to Trader Joe's...if we ever live far from Trader Joe's I will be a sad mama). The cupcakes looked good but they tasted amazing too!
Making cupcakes from scratch without artificial ingredients is a reminder to me that all things are possible if we are committed to it! Now I just have to figure out how to make blue and green icing!
To end this post: some pics of my birthday girl and her siblings!
Last night a song was played at the end of church by "We As Human". One of the lines of the chorus stated., "We're comfortably miserable." This has been rattling around in my brain for the last 24 hours. I don't want to be comfortably miserable.
What I mean is this...Am I so comfortable in my misery that I am looking for ways to BE miserable. If God answered each of my prayers and took away the things that made me miserable would I still find something to be miserable about?
God is good! His WORD proves it. He answers prayers! His WORD proves it! And yet I wallow in my misery some days. I think, "if only...". And yet His goodness doesn't change. Psalm 68:10 states, "in your goodness, O God, you provided for the needy." Hebrews 6:5 talks of tasting the goodness of God. He IS inherently good! And yet...
Why am I so content to be comfortably miserable? What is comfortable about misery? I believe the answer lies in my inconsistency of seeking the holiness of God. Seeking His face and plan for my life. In misery we get to identify with the world. Yet we are called to be separate from the world. In being separate we have to choose to be content and not miserable. We have to rest in HIS abundant goodness. I am so very thankful that God's goodness isn't dependent on me. If I could remember that maybe I would break out of the tendency to be miserable.
