Orange You Glad... Birthday Gift

I made this little gift to give away... I've seen tons of variations on Pinterest. I had to mail this gift so I opted for less chocolate and more mailable items.

Super easy and versatile gift that can be made to fit any person. Basically you just have to collect "orange" colored items.

Here's some orange suggestions:

• Orange notebook 
• Orange pen
• Orange tube of Mini M&M's
• Trident gum (Tropical Flavor- with an orange package)
• Orange Crystal Light
• Burt Bees Chapstick
• Orange Nail Polish
• Orange Slices Candy
• Reese's Peanut Butter Cups or Reese's Pieces
• Kit Kat Candy
• Soda/Drinks (Orange Crush)
• Orange Tic Tacs
• Goldfish
• Cheetos
• An actual real orange
• Orange cup
• Orange Ribbon
• Orange Stickers
• Anything Orange! Walk around and see what Orange things you find.

Then you add a little tag and it's done! Ta dah!

Here's a free printable of the orange tag for a Birthday gift.

And another tag for other gifts... Teacher Gift, Visiting Teacher gift, neighbor gift, just because gift! You can make the gift big or small depending on how much stuff you put into the collection.

 Right click on the image that you want and save it to your computer, then you can print out, cut out and attach it to your gift.

Here's another idea...

It's a plastic mason jar straw cup with a lid (and it even has an orange on the glass itself). I filled it up with a bunch of Orange candy, gum, Tic Tac's & Burt Bee's chapstick. I bought the cup at Wal-mart and after filling it with the orange treasures, I wrapped a ribbon and attached the tag.

Edible Image on Cake

For my Grandpa's 80th Birthday we decided to celebrate with a birthday party. It's not every day that you turn 80. I was making a cake for the party and wanted to do something different. I had a picture of my Grandpa when he was younger and serving in the air force. He also worked his career and retired from Disney Studios. I took the picture, scanned it into Photoshop, added some balloons, a Mickey Mouse & some words. I took the picture to our local grocery store, Harmons and in their bakery section they printed the picture out on their edible printer (someday I want to get me one of these). On the left side you see the picture and the frosting edible image on the right. It is an 8x10 image.

You can tell the edible image is not as vivid as the printed picture and it ended up a bit smaller than the 8.5x11 inch image that was printed. 

However it is a great duplication... and went onto the cake nicely. (Check local grocery stores or bakeries for the option to have your image printed cause it makes for a super easy & personalized cake!)

Here is the cake right after I finished decorating. I made a simple chocolate layered cake, covered in a basic white buttercream (had to be a light color so the image would show up). Before I added the blue star border I peeled the image off the backer paper and applied it onto the white background. So easy! Peel & Stick! The edges were super noticeable at first but with time the image blended into the frosting more and more. I didn't really know what I was doing, but it turned out. When they printed the image, there was an ink blur at the bottom and it transferred as well... I should have cut that off. I could have trimmed around the image as well since the cake was bigger than the image and I didn't put the border next to the edge of the image.

I used a large wide open star in blue tinted buttercream for the border.

Grandpa (and Grandma) loved the cake! And that's all that matters. I had bought some camouflage material to use as a tablecloth for our party. The cake cut up nicely when it was time to eat it. I made sure I got a piece with the edible image and it tasted like sugar.

Happy Birthday Grandpa!