More baking and a belt test

This weekend was pretty busy - with a furlough on friday I had lots of time to bake for two separate orders and then saturday was my first martial arts test...all I can say about that is UGH.
Mixed in with all that - Doug and I had dinner with his friend Steve on thursday night and then dinner with all the cousins and Jan and Bill on friday night. Of course we took no pictures - oops.

Yellow belt test! There were 11 white belts testing for yellow belts this weekend, and 5 of us have all become friends in the last year or so...through sparring and kickboxing class, and now Mixed Martial Arts. We bought these wrist bands to wipe our sweat with...the gi we wear for Martial Arts are sooooo hot so we knew we'd need them. We've been calling ourselves the wonder quints...lol.

This was all of us before the test - with our white belts. And then after...we all survived the 3 hours of random cardio exercises and test of our techniques and forms and all that...it was exhausting! And I'm so sore today...just 6 or 7 more tests until our black belts (white, yellow, orange, purple, blue, green, brown, brown with a stripe, black) - check back in 4-5 years to see if any or all of us are still doing this.



This picture has been rotated in my file, not sure why it won't sit up right here....but anyway - that's me with my belt promotion certificate.

After each belt test, we throw the old belts into the air in the parking lot - just cuz we do.

A few of us went to dinner later that night (after my cookie delivery), then all of us, plus all the black belts and our other dojo friends went out for drinks and dancing...we weren't sore yet. We're sore now!

Now for the baked goods...

I made a hello kitty cake for my friend's daughter's 6th birthday party. She really wanted to help me decorate, so she put the polka dots on the bottom tier...very meticulously...she did a great job.


It came out pretty well for my first real fondant cake. I hope the cutting went well too - I left the mom with instructions.

I also made all these bunches of grapes and wine bottles for a co-workers wine club dinner. She reported back that they were a big hit. The wine bottles all ended up with custom logos written on with food writer pens. It actually worked really well. And the grapes came out better than I anticipated.