December, A Review.

Hello person reading my blog! How are you? I forgot to tell you, I decided to take a month off from my blogging to rejuvenate. I've spent the majority of my time planning out my creative goals for this blog. I have lists, Venn diagrams, bar graphs, and even a few laminated signs. 2011 is guaranteed to blow your mind, so stick around!

Not really though. I've just been epically lazy.

But I'm back!

It's sad that I haven't posted because I discovered a lot of new things in December. While searching for Christmas presents on Amazon, I discovered a quilting book, which led to a quilting blog, which led to a colorful quilt that I love, which led to me jumping head first into a quilting project. Look at all the fabric I have! Ack!


Then I went to the lake house where I got to see my baby cousins Chandler and Dylon. I think 11 months old is officially my favorite age.


I did some baking which is no suprise. I made some Christmas themed cake balls for peoples at work! I also baked cookies for 2 of my coworkers' birthdays. It involved cookies spelling their names but I didn't take any pictures because baking and decorating cookies is effort enough.



I had also been working on a knitting project for a long while. I had absolutely no time to work on it, but was finally able finish it on Christmas Eve. So glad I got it done before Christmas - I made it for Stephanie; hope she likes it.



oh! oh! I also discovered dog parks. Okay... I've known about dog parks for a long time now, but I've never taken my dogs to one. But Toast absolutely loves the dog park. She was jumping in the ponds, running as fast as she could, barking at swans, running under people doing push-ups, and just, in general, drawing a crowd of admirers. People are fascinated by really small dogs. Teddy sticks pretty close to me when we go but he enjoys running about as well.


So that's about it for my December. How about you, dear blog reader?

Woah!

I went to visit Grandmommy and the rest of the family last weekend. I’m working the day after Thanksgiving so I knew I wouldn’t be able to make up there for a while. I brought Grandmommy a present in the form of a world map puzzle! How cool is that? The oceans are regular puzzle pieces, but the rest of the pieces are the actual shape of the countries! (I think I may have been way more excited about it than anyone else.)

Saturday morning, while Grandmommy slept and Jane took a road trip with Melissa to Austin, I took a nice long run down the bayou near Jane’s house then I baked the always delicious chocolate covered cheesecake. I sent a few pieces home to Grandmommy the first time I made it, and she had been asking me when I was going to bring her more. Grandmommy and I then worked on the puzzle and discussed knitting patterns. She let me borrow this really cool knitting and crochet book that has all kinds of different patterns that I want to try out. I haven’t yet ventured far from the comfortable knit and purl. We visited Melissa that evening and I got to see Carter’s baby room. Melissa is huge! After dinner I watched A&M beat Nebraska (Whoop!) with Thomas, then stayed up late chatting with Jane and Grandmommy. Perfect Saturday, no?


On Sunday, Jane and I drove over to Shannon’s house to witness Dylon’s first haircut. His Mimi had to, of course, take pictures of the monumental occasion. Dylon was a star, sitting nicely for his trim as his parents tried to keep his attention so he wouldn’t move. Afterwards there was a little bubble photoshoot in their front yard. Look how cool they look!


We ended the weekend by making cake balls! My work had a potluck lunch on Monday, and I signed up to bring a dessert. I may have got a tad stressed and been overly critical of Jane's ball rolling, but we finished it up and she let me borrow a pretty basket to display them in! (She's a great assistant by the way, I would highly recommend her if you are looking for free help.) Everyone at work seemed to like them. I saw a couple of people grab 3 or 4 bags!

Baby Shower Baking

My friend Casey's sister (follow me?) had a baby shower last Saturday. About a month ago her mom asked me to make cupcakes for the shower. My gut response was "oh no, no, no." I mean, I like baking for fun; I can mess up and no one would care. But this would be like... real baking. I eventually warmed up to the request (I usually need to sleep on an idea. I think it's an introvert thing.) and started asking about themes and colors and what they wanted. I learned that the theme was "baby" and the color scheme was "pink." Apparently they weren't picky.


So I set out on Friday to make 24 cupcakes, which was all that was asked of me. I wanted to go with a pink and brown theme since I was told those were the colors of the nursery. I made chocolate cupcakes and homemade buttercream icing. There were 5 different cupcake decorations:

1. My favorite, pink icing with white pearl sprinkles
2. A simple frosted cupcake rolled in chocolate sprinkles
3. Pink frosting with chocolate chips - didn't turn out as cute as I imagined
4. White frosting with candy melt shavings
5. White frosting with a candy melt pacifier


I had never worked with candy melts before, but I've wanted to try something with them for a while. I bought the "baby" candy mold and made pink pacifiers one at a time. It was pretty simple to do, though the candies turned out to be rather thick. If I did it again I wouldn't fill the mold all the way.


Then I was on a baking roll. While I was waiting for the cupcakes to bake I decided to whip up some cake balls. Cake balls are delicious and really easy to make. Just bake a cake, crumble it up, add a tub of frosting, roll them into balls, then dip them in melted chocolate. Viola, cake balls. I made the cake pink, but I don't think I made it pink enough. I wish they had been as pink as my "fourth of July" cake balls. Oh well. I don't think anyone cared.



I also converted a box I had in my room into a cute, pink cake ball holder.


Then I realized I had cookie dough left over from when I made my mom's birthday cake. I got that out and it made a surprisingly large number of onesies cookies. I decorated each one a little differently, and even made some baby stroller cookies with the baby-to-be's name.




I started baking the cupcakes at about 8:00 PM Friday night. I finished baking at about 7:00 AM Saturday morning. I didn't plan to stay up all night, nor did I need to. I know they would have been perfectly happy with just cupcakes. But I kept making stuff and just never went to bed. I think all the sugar kept me up. (Taste testing is important!) By the time I delivered all the goodies (around 9:00 AM) I had the shakes. Casey's family probably thought I was crazy; coming in with too many sweets, all hyped up on sugar. It all turned out well in the end, Casey emailed me later and said that everyone loved everything.

Want to know the best part of all? I slept for 8 hours straight on Saturday, woke up and read for a few hours, then got to jump back in bed for another 8 hours. Sleep is wonderful; I think I'm going to go have some. Good night!


p.s. I apologize for the quality of the pictures. I wasn't too happy with any of them. I had been up for more than 24 hours and I just didn't care.

Pink, White, & Blue?

I've been reading a bunch of baking blogs lately. I've also been feeling rather ambitious. I decided to make some cake balls tonight after seeing them at Bakerella. She dipped her red velvet cake in chocolate, but I had to do some improvising. I was trying to go for red, white, and blue since the 4th of July is right around the corner, but that didn't quite work out.



More like pink, white and baby blue. I also used vanilla instead of chocolate since we already had it. Even so, they were delicious! I had 4 in one sitting and now my stomach kind of hurts. :(







I didn't realize how quickly the vanilla dries. I need to work on my covering technique as I had big globs of vanilla at the bases, which were hard to break off. I'm sure I'll have more practice because they were pretty fun and easy to make. I packed these up and told my mom to take them to work. Hopefully she'll find some willing stomachs there!