2 Things I LOVE

1. JORDAN

He has been working so hard at the academy and I am so proud of him! There is only 2 weeks left and we both could not be more excited for him to officially have his badge. He still has a lot more training, but all of that will be with the Sheriff's Office. He takes his certification test Feb 29 in Tampa which we are hoping to make a tiny mini vacation (1-2 days) out of the trip to explore other parts of Florida. 

2. Cupcakes

I just made red velvet cupcakes with a vanilla cream cheese frosting. They were fun to make because Valentine's day is coming up and it's your typical romantic valentine's cupcake. :)  I actually made homemade butter and homemade buttermilk out of whipping cream and used my delicious European Dutch Cocoa and Florida Crystals Sugar. I was very pleased with how they turned out. I'm also excited that my spiral cupcake holder worked. Jordan and I came across this in the clearance section at Kirkland's and paid only $5 for it. It's originally used to hold condiment glasses with little spoons, but we just took them out.

Cupcake tips

I got these pretty babies a couple of days ago.

Left: Old tip. Right: New tip

They are huge and I LOVE IT! I'm so excited!!! I have been wanting these for months!

Happy Cupcake Time

Since Jordan has started the academy he has lost some weight. (I guess you can blame it on the 3 hour workouts they have). He is trying to eat as much as possible to not loose anymore, but can't seem to get enough food in. So one night I decided to help and made cupcakes. :)

Since being in a different altitude and missing my gas oven, I have struggled a little in my baking, but this batch was the first batch yet to turn out like normal. It's a sugar cookie cupcake with an orange buttercream frosting. In honor of Halloween I added a hint of orange food coloring to the frosting to enhance the brightness of the orange. 

Sugar cookie cupcake:


Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups sour cream (or 1 1/2 cups buttermilk)

Directions:

1. Preheat 350 degrees

2 .Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

3. Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time.

4. Add the vanilla.

5. Add flour mixture to creamed mixture alternately with sour cream/buttermilk (batter will be thick if using sour cream).

6. Bake  25-30 min

For the frosting I really just made it up on the spot so I don't have exact measurements. I know I used unsalted butter, orange zest, orange juice, vanilla extract and powdered sugar.

HAPPY BAKING!! 

Busy Weekend

I am please to announce the newest graduate in our family....

Congratulations Jordan!! He received his Bachelor's degree in Public Relations.

What are we going to do now? I'll be working full time at my job while we wait to hear back from the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Florida. Jordan this last week passed his board interview (HURRAY) and now they will begin his background check. Hopefully we'll hear back in a month or so. Things are looking great so far.

On top of the graduation celebration, we all celebrated my niece's first birthday. I had the privileged in making her cake and cupcake.  

She absolutely loves dogs. I'm an amateur when it comes to doing actual cakes, but this first experience turned out great. I made a vanilla cake with a creamy vanilla custard filling. To top it off there was whipped vanilla and dutch chocolate frosting. 

I was so happy when she pointed and said, "Dog-Dog" 

On Easter Sunday I made Key Lime Cupcakes.

These are very time consuming, but very well worth it. It's a graham cracker crust, graham cracker cupcake, key lime filling, with key lime buttercream. Thankfully Jordan was able to squeeze all 40 key limes...that's the worst part.

successful sundays

If I'm able to sew and bake then my day has been successful :) Today I decided to sew a bib for my niece's first birthday which we'll be celebrating this coming Friday. I've been pretty good at teaching myself to sew, but I've recently been taking sewing lessons and boy have they helped me bunches. I'm much more confident in my abilities and I feel like I sort of know what I'm doing. I'm still a beginner so I still have lots to learn. Here's how it turned out. Hopefully it'll be covered with cake and frosting on Friday.

As for my baking....I made Peanut Butter Patty cupcakes. I had a box of the girl scout cookies and I went to town. It's an original recipe created by ME!! That's right, I didn't look at anybody else's recipe, but created my own. They turned out delicious. It's a shortbread cupcake, creamy peanut butter filling, and a whipped chocolate ganache. I decided to incorporate the cookies by crushing them up and putting some in the filling and some on top of the frosting. 

Slowly but surely I'm building up my own recipes...I love successful Sundays.

the cupcake challenge

My mother-in-law was in town around St. Patrick's Day and brought a box of Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints) and challenged me to make a cupcake with them. My reply, "No problem!" Here are the results.

I chose to do a chocolate thin mint cupcake with chocolate ganache and mint buttercream frosting. Let's just say I'm always up for a challenge. I've gotten good at critiquing other recipes I have found and putting my own touch to them, but now I'm in the process of creating my very own recipes. It's a big challenge, but it's fun. One I'm currently working on is what I'll call the Quadruple Vanilla Bean Cupcake. Pictures to come :)

Cupcake a day

I asked Jordan's mom if she would sponsor my cupcake a day while she was in town. Basically she bought the ingredients and I made 6 different cupcakes...one for each day they were here! I made, everyone ate, we all benefited.

Day 1: Strawberry Shortcake

(They literally taste like the real thing...by far my favorite)

Day 2: Red Velvet w/ White Chocolate Peppermint Cream Cheese Frosting

(My favorite Red Velvet because it has chocolate chips in the cake)

Day 3: Snickerdoodle

(It had a marshmallow like frosting, but I think I'm going to try something different next time.)

Day 4: Caramel Apple

(Really nice change from the ordinary cupcake)

Day 5: Vanilla Bean, Chocolate filled w/ Vanilla Bean Buttercream Frosting

(I actually took real Vanilla Beans, dried them out, made Vanilla Paste, then put it all in the cupcake and frosting. A lot of work, but still fun.)

Day 6: Root Beer Float

(I was so excited because I made up an ice cream frosting that really tastes like vanilla ice cream)

Thanks so much Heidi for sponsoring my cupcake a day. Hopefully I can do this again.

Projects

This last week has been full of fun stuff. For Thanksgiving I made Turkey cupcakes.

They turned out so cute. The leaves around the turkey are cornflakes covered in green frosting, the turkey is made out of caramel with a mound of frosting underneath to plump it up, the drumsticks are wheat sticks with caramel, and the stuffing is just grape nuts. Very fun!

On Black Friday Jordan went out and bought me my Christmas present which I'm already using....a new camera. I'm in love :) I got the Canon PowerShot SD1400IS

The week was also full of fun sewing projects and putting up Christmas decorations.

I made this to go over the couch arm to store our remotes.

I sewed my very first table runner...very easy and it looks great!

I made a pillow to add some red to our green house.

Our tree LOL! Thanks mom. I made little presents to go around.

This is our picture frame in which I fill with different things depending on the season.

Some more holiday decorations. This advent calendar has legos in each drawer...Jordan's going to love this.

I was also able to finish Jordan's mission board. I took things from his mission and put them together to display. Here's the other side.

It was a busy week, but I enjoyed being with family and being creative.

There back

It's October and the temperature is just right. I can feel the crisp air outside and our home is getting cold. This means it's cupcake time!! It's nice to bake because our oven warms up our house. The only problem I'm currently running into is buying ingredients. I don't think I'll be able to afford buying stuff to make them every week. It might have to be a once a month or once every other week thing. I decided instead of focusing on the taste of the cupcakes, I would focus on decorating them this time around.

So to get into the spirit of Halloween I made black cat cupcakes. The black cats are made out of chocolate with black sugar on top, and the cupcake was a french vanilla with a classic vanilla frosting. Jordan told me they tasted like doughnuts.

Tonight I made a silly attempt at making ghost sugar cookies. I tried out this marshmallow fondant recipe I had and it turned out pretty tasty for fondant.

Goodbye Cupcakes....

Goodbye cupcakes.... until winter. Utah has finally decided to bring us summer which means 100 degrees of wonderful heat. Because Jordan and I don't have air conditioning and only one tiny fan that circulates hot air, baking cupcakes is out of the question. I thought I would be able to bake in the evening when it's cooler, but that theory didn't pan out too well. It still became unbearable. So yesterday was my last day until the fall or winter.

Jordan and I now are trying to avoid the oven turning on all together. We are going to try to cook in the crock pot, which we can put in the laundry room and shut the door, and grill all our food. Hopefully this change will keep our house cooler than outside!

My Life

Instead of homework, and track, my days are now spent working, reading, baking, cooking, scrapbooking, and soon sewing. I started cake decorating classes last Thursday. I have them once a week for two hours for a month. I'm taking the basic course and love it! My first class was full of tips and tricks on how to bake a great cake to decorate. I left the class wanting way more baking supplies then I would have liked. Everything individually isn't that expensive, but when you want everything it all adds up quick. I'm excited to soon try out what I am learning.

In the cupcake department I am still baking over a dozen of cupcakes every Sunday. Jordan takes the majority to work to share, but makes sure there is enough left at home for him to enjoy too. Here is just a sample of some of the ones I have made:

Coca-Cola

Peanut Butter Cup (I wish I got a picture of the inside - they had whole peanut butter cups)

Cookies'n'Cream
I am going to post the recipe for this cupcake when I blog next because I feel everyone needs to try them. :)

My other projects have been making cards for my coaches at school. Thanks to my cricut machine they turned out great. I wanted to say thanks for all they have done to help me achieve my goals. I have posted two of the cards....one is for my track coach and the other is for my strength coach.

Cupcakes again

Last Sunday I didn't blog about my cupcakes. I made Creamsicle cupcakes that had an orange slice on top. They tasted more like a sweet muffin than a cupcake, but were still delicious.


Yesterday I got home from my track meet and went straight to work making cupcakes. It may sound funny, but I love baking them. It's kind of relaxing. This week was Smores. They had a gramcracker crust, chocolate cupcake, with a marshmallow topping. The marshmallows topping believe it or not was not made out of marshmallows, but had the exact texture and pretty close in taste.

Every week Jordan makes an overall judgement and continues to tell me his favorite. So far his favorite has been the Boston Cream Cupcakes, but this week the Smores came into first place. He really liked the taste, but what he liked even more was toasting the marshmallow topping with a blow torch. I guess there's something about boys and fire that I will never fully understand.

Boston Cream Cupcakes

Well I made Boston Cream Cupcakes yesterday. It was a fun adventure. Let me elaborate.

I started by getting all my ingredients and measuring utensils ready. We have 2 sets of measuring cups, but only one set of measuring spoons. It just so happens that the labeling on the spoons wore off and I was left to guess which was the 1/4, 1/2, and 1tsp. Sounds easy right? Well, apparently it wasn't for me. I labeled them 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 tsp.

So the recipe called for 1/2 tsp baking powder and salt. I put in 1 tsp of both with my lovely labeling system. The recipe called for 2 tsp of vanilla, I thought i put in 2, but apparently it was 4. It was when I was mixing the dry and wet ingredients together that I realized the 1/2 tsp looked kind of big :)

At this point there was no turning back. I decided that the cupcakes were going to be even more delicious because of my mistakes. After all was said and done, I finished the cupcakes and they turned out great and were delicious. They tasted like sweet shortbread and had a vanilla pudding filling with a chocolate glaze frosting. After refrigeration over night they were even better. Oh man, I think I fell in love with these cupcakes, they tasted so good. Who knew messing up would turn into such a sweet tasting reward.



I found this picture online, but it looks almost identical to what mine looked like.

Cupcakes

I have started a new hobby as of today and it's baking cupcakes. I'm not really that good at it, but it's fun! For this week I made brownie cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. They tasted delicious. I figure every Sunday I will try a new cupcake recipe and have fun decorating them. I got some different icing tips to try and see if I can make the cupcakes look good. :)





Next week: Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes