Father / Son - Daughter Cake Baking Contest - 2012

Wow, has it been a year already since the last Blue and Gold dinner? Well, it’s that time again.

The Blue and Gold dinner in our ward is always fun and this year was no exception, but someone forgot to bring ketchup for the hotdogs! Oh well, it was fun anyway. Ian got several awards (including his basketball belt loop and some silver arrows he didn’t get several months ago) and basically had a good time.

Of course, we can’t forget the annual “Father / Son Cake Baking Contest”. Below are some photos of the kids making their cakes. To be fair the kids did most everything themselves, at least the decorating anyway. Their Nanna baked the cakes.

Ian’s was a chocolate cake decorated with a fishing rod and fish, and Cami’s was a yellow cake decorated with a husky in the mountains.

Just to make you hungry we made our own butter crème icing. No store bought junk for us.

On a sad note no one but ourselves took a single piece of either cake while other kids’ cakes were devoured. Hmm…They really were yummy so I don’t know why people gave our cakes a pass.

On an even sadder note this will be Ian’s last Blue and Gold dinner because he will be 11 years old before next February and will be in Boy Scouts.

Oh, before I forget Ian won the “Best Sports Themed” award and Cami won the “Most Peaceful Husky” award.

Ian Earning His Bear and His Religious Knot Award

Ian has put in a lot of effort this year earning his Cub Scout Bear and his Religious Knot award. In fact, he put in so much work that he also earned 1 gold arrow point and 4 silver arrow points. He was recognized at last night's Pack Night. Here he is getting his awards from the Cubmaster.

Now that he has earned his Bear, and has turned 10 years old, he is a Webelos. Only one year left and he becomes a Boy Scout. It makes Daddy cry just thinking about it. Time is really flying.

Cub Scout Fishing - 2011

It’s that time of year again when we take the Cub Scouts fishing. Thankfully there is a pond close by that we take the boys to. It’s only about 5 minutes from our church building, and it has a lot of hungry fish in it.

Thankfully every boy (and girl) that went along caught a fish, except I think for one boy that did not, but he caught a bunch last year so he wasn’t too bummed.

Ian caught two fish (a crappie and a bass) and Cami caught one fish (a bass I think). It was a lot of fun!

Cub Scout Go Carts

Last night the boys finished their go carts that they started a couple of weeks ago. They had a blast pushing each other around in the church parking lot. This little snippet of video shows Ian, in the background under the post light, taking a major dive when the kid he was pushing did a weird zig zag manouver. Ian wasn't hurt, at least not seriously, and it was funny not so much because he fell but because of all the other mishaps that had occurred up to that point. The adult leaders were getting sort of giggly.

Scouts is a lot of fun because of this very thing. By the way, sorry about the quality of video but it was very dark out. I'm surprised that my camera caught as much as it did.

Father & Son (and Daughter) Cake Bake

Last night was the 2010 Cub Scouts Blue and Gold dinner. This year marks the 100th anniversary of scouting in the United States. That was the theme for the Father & Son cake baking contest. Below is a series of pictures of the cakes that I and my kids made.

Stage 1: Use some black gel icing to draw the outline of our scouting character. This gel never did solidy, so we had to be very careful we didn't smear the black around as we filled in our other colors.

Stage 2: Start to fill in our spaces with other colors of icing.

Stage 3: We've finished filling our spaces, now on to spreading the icing around our image.

The completed cake! Ian won the "Most Artistic" award. They did not have a "Best" award last night, but I choose to believe that Ian's Most Artistic award means the best.

Here is Cami's cake. We used the same technique of using the black gel icing to draw out the earth figure.

After that we filled in the spaces with icing to make the ocean and the continents. Cami made up her own globe by not bothering to try and make actual earth continents (like North America and Africa). After that she wrote "Daisy Troop 663" on it.

Her completed cake! She won the "Most International" award last night.

It was a great dinner and everything went well. The boys' skit was really fun. They "baked" a cub scout by putting all sorts of boyish items into a trash can and stirring with a big paddle. At the end a real cub scout pops out. Ian was the one to pop out of the can. He had a really hard job of hunkering down in the can while everyone dropped things on him.

Ian was also excited that he was awarded his Bobcat award last night. We have a tradition of turning the boys upside down while the Bobcat award is pinned on. He can then turn it right-side up once he does a "good turn".

We had a great time and it was one of our better pack nights.