No particular reason for cupcakes this week, so I made some for fun! Actually, I got a new cupcake courier and that seemed as good a reason as any. (My new camera is scheduled to arrive today, so these pictures are from my camera phone...again, I apologize for the poor quality.)


New cupcake courier filled with treats

Veering a bit from my Martha Stewart Cupcakes book, I chose to make Sweet Vanilla cupcakes, a personal recipe of our very own Marianne. Let me just tell you, her cupcakes are as sweet as she is! They were dense, moist and very, very delicious. One of my favorites so far! I doubled the recipe and got 21 cupcakes. I suspect if I'd filled the liners just a bit less I'd have gotten the standard 24, but no matter...I wasn't making them for an occasion, so amount wasn't important. I frosted them with Almond Buttercream, a recipe from one of my Southern Living cookbooks.


Frostings ready to pipe

My tendency is to ice everything blue if I'm given a choice, so I branched out a bit and did teal (to match my courier!), yellow and pink. They're so cute and bubbly and summery!


Sweet Vanilla with Almond Buttercream


Last week, I realized that I'd never posted pictures of our Fourth of July cupcakes, so here are a few shots of those. Recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes. I added strawberries to the batter and the whipped cream to make them "patriotic." (pix from my regular camera before she died...I realize they're no better than my camera pix! :-/)

Fourth of July Blueberries and Cream Cupcake with whipped cream and strawberries

And finally, the little cupcake that's making a face:

Cupcake says, "Thanks for stopping by Lynna's blog!"

Summer has been lots of fun lately! Admittedly, I was a little cranky last week when I couldn't swim several days because of rain, but really, we needed it.

There wasn't much menu planning that week, although I did sort of have some things in mind. Mostly, though, I was saving all my cooking for the weekend when my son and his girlfriend arrived for three days! This was BIG for us...we'd met her before, but she's the first college girlfriend that he's brought home to meet us. His reason for the visit was to have us dogsit his dog, Rawlins until he moves into a new place...although his current roommates said they don't mind, they complain a lot about the dog hair and won't let Rawlins in the house unless Cam is home and since he works a lot in the summertime, he's not home much.

I cooked a lot for them/us. They were out with friends Saturday night, but Clover had two friends over, so I made pasta pomodoro, salad, garlic bread and pan-fried chicken breasts. I made pesto and grilled burgers with a panzanella salad Sunday night with a peach crisp. We had chicken/tomato panini for lunch Sunday and I made fruit salad too. I'd made cupcakes for a baby shower Saturday, so we had a few of those leftover. I just served homemade granola Sunday morning...they slept in quite late Sunday and Monday! We went to the Fort Worth Zoo Monday, so we met my husband in town (he works there) and had lunch at deli before we went to the zoo. On the way home, Cam requested my Jose's Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas, so we had those and this rice (I used brown this time) and smashed pinto beans leftover from another meal. I made some spinach enchiladas because I had enchilada sauce and Clover prefers them. That meal was a smash hit.

They left mid-morning on Tuesday, so I got up and made them Cinnamon Griddle Cakes, baked bacon and fruit. One of the things I *love* about Megan is that she doesn't eat like a girl. She enjoyed her food and even went back for seconds on the enchiladas! Clover eats so little meat that she seems pretty picky to me and Cam...well, I can't figure out where he got his horrible eating habits.


My camera died a horrible death by dropping last Thursday, so I had to use my camera phone to take photos of my baby shower cupcakes and the Bastille Day cupcakes I made yesterday. I'm ready for a new camera! Hopefully we'll get one soon. In the meantime, I apologize for the poor quality of these.


Baby Shower cupcakes...I was pleased with how well the icing matched the invitation. I made marble cupcakes from my Martha Stewart book and used her fluffy vanilla icing. The hostess had a quarter-sheet cake made with the "Howdy" and the little cowboy from the invitation and our colors matched perfectly. Since the cake was marble cake, I made marble cupcakes. The invitation also had little white dots around the border, so I used white sphere sprinkles. I was pleased with how they turned out. The only disappointment was the cupcake liners. I bought some natural brown ones, hoping they'd look like the cupcakes were wrapped in craft paper when they were done...I thought that would match the invitation well. They just looked sort of clear when they baked up. I made some cupcake wrappers from scrap paper for some of them...those were cute and were the colors of the invitation.

Yesterday, for Clover and her buddies to "celebrate" Bastille Day, I made Brown Sugar Pound Cake Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Cream Cheese frosting and decorated them with blue, white and red Jelly Bellies to represent the French flag. Clover took AP European History and studied the French Revolution in her academic decathlon class, so she was immersed in French history last year and really enjoyed it. She made a 5 (highest score possible) on her Euro test! Anyway, these were from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes book as well, which makes FIVE different cupcakes I've made from the book so far.


Bastille Day Cupcakes

I was going to post my menu for next week and something I accomplished whilst shopping today, but this is already really long, so I'll save that for another blog. Until then, Libert, Egalit and Fraternit! That's French for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity! I told Clover I thought "Let them eat cake!" was a better quote for our particular Bastille Day celebration, but she reminded me that Marie Antoinette never actually said that.

For fun...some of the things I've made lately that weren't a part of my menu.

My third cupcake from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes...not really a cupcake...more of a muffin...which the book calls a tea cake. Hey, in my mind, a cupcake's a cupcake! These are pistachio and raspberry and they were incredibly dense and sweet and we ate them like they were going out of style. The recipe only made 15, so I didn't give any away.


Adding raspberries...


And the finished product!


I have talked before about my love of weird, non-breakfasty foods for breakfast. My latest is turkey sliders. Yup..this weekend I made up a bunch of sliders with shallots, mushrooms and teriyaki sauce and topped them with good old American cheese. BK ate them for lunch this weekend and the rest are for my breakfast. I think they're delicious and so simple to make!


Topped with cheese!


Adorable little turkey sliders!

I bought Texas peaches and Georgia peaches on Friday and used the Texas peaches for a salsa for catfish. I decided to make one of BK's favorites with the Georgia peaches, peach crisp. I have these little ramekins that I've never used, so I made individual crisps this time. They were cute, but not that practical...you have to let the ramekins cool down quite a bit before you can eat the crisp. This stuff is so good, especially topped with cream.


Lovely Georgia peaches


Even lovelier peach crisp!

Busy week, man!!! :D

Clover had a great time at her college orientation. She's going to St. Edward's University, which is a small school in Austin. They call UT, where my son attends, the "big cattle ranch up the road." I must say, this orientation was very different than the one we attended when Cam started UT four years ago. Very small, very, very, almost to the point of ridiculous, thorough. I know more things about St. Edward's than my own alma mater! It's nice to be back home though and cooking again. We had some nice meals out and I even ventured out on my own at lunch one day and totally enjoyed the solitary dining experience. Austin is a fun, fun town to visit and I always enjoy a trip that way...

When I got home Saturday, my first order of business was grocery shopping, then I made my second recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes, Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Frosting for my dad, my father-in-law and for my kids' dad, BK! BK told everyone all weekend that they were really rich, so much so that he could "only eat two at a time." *shakes head* He's a nut. This recipe was much more time-consuming than the first ones I made...the cupcakes themselves weren't too difficult, but the frosting took a ton of work. I had to chop a POUND of semi-sweet chocolate, melt it *AND* make a cocoa powder mixture to add to the butter/sugar frosting. It was a PITA, to be honest, probably because I don't really like chocolate that much. I was totally sick of it by the time I finished the frosting! I decorated them very simply and added a few sprinkles. There were plenty from this recipe to take a bunch to both dads and we still have a bunch left here...including some cute little minis.


Mixing cupcakes

Filling cups

Chocolate frosting I

Chopping chocolate

Chocolate frosting II


Father's Day dinner for BK was Mango Salsa Chicken...he really loves it, so I made it again not long after we just had it. Roasted some asparagus and made a big green salad and it was yummy! On Saturday, I made Grilled Spiced Rubbed Chicken with Alabama Barbeque Sauce. It didn't have a picture, so now it does! This was really, really good and I made Pioneer Woman's Crash Potatoes to go with it, along with the obiquitous green salad...we do love our salads, especially in the summertime!


Yummy grilled chicken


My agenda for cooking this week isn't very experimental...sort of the same old favs. We're definitely taking it easy for a few days. I worked this morning in my classroom and am going to make Jay's Signature Crust in a bit and then get into the pool to catch some rays this afternoon. We'll just have a cheese and basil pizza for supper. No stress at all.

I made this dip today for lunch. Not that healthy, but man, it's yummy. I'll just workout a bit longer to keep all the fat from the cheese from settling in to stay!

For the rest of the week, I've got Chicken in Caper Cream Sauce planned one night and turkey burgers with mushrooms another night. That pretty much gets us through Wednesday and I'll worry about the rest after that...I really am being lazy!

Here are a few more pictures of my adventures in cupcaking:


Cupcakes I

Cupcakes II

Mini!

This is how I packaged up the cupcakes I gave away last week:



Next up in cupcaking: Blueberries-and-Cream Cupcakes with raspberries added for the 4th of July! Should be awesome!!

This weekend I made my first batch of cupcakes from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes: Chocolate Malted Cupcakes with Fluffy Vanilla Frosting. BK ate FIVE before the day was over, so I'd call them a success!


FIVE CUPCAKES! And the man is still skinny as a rail...I don't know how he does it!

My goal with these was two-fold. First, make a cupcake from scratch that tastes really, really good. Successful on that end, even though I thought they didn't taste very malty, BK and Clover did. Second, I wanted to use a recipe with frosting so I could practice my totally amateurish decorating skills. I didn't feel like messing with the Marshmallow Fondant yet, so this was a good starting point.


It was easy enough to get started and can I just say, all my years of baking with a hand-held electric mixer were wasted moments. A Kitchen Aid mixer makes this stuff so much more fun and much more simple.


I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but even I found this stuff pretty tempting!


I decided to make the frosting blue...thought it looked pretty with the dark brown cupcake. I gave Clover a taste and she said, "mmmm...fluffy!" She didn't know it, but the frosting *is* called fluffy vanilla frosting!


I made a cupcake wrapper with some scrapbook paper...I don't scrapbook, but I love looking at the papers in craft stores, so I'm glad to find a reason to buy some!


Experiments with icing and tips. I need work, but all in all, I had a really good time with this project! I can't wait to make more...next up: Raspberry Pistachio Cupcakes.

I don't really know how it happened, but I am crazy about cupcakes. Yup...cupcakes. It's odd, I'm not really at all a sweets kind of person and these days I can't even eat many of them or my blood sugar goes out the roof. But...Clover wanted cupcakes instead of cake for her birthday in April. That's not unusual, she's asked for cupcakes before...so I decided that I'd do something with fondant since I had some unused white in the pantry that I couldn't remember why I'd purchased. I started surfing and found some cupcakes topped with birds and owls that were just *precious.* Clover was good with them, but wanted different colors, so I let her pick those out and got going.
The colors she decided on...dark blue, forest green, copper (looks peach to me) and brown. So her...so totally, totally her. I decided to use the blue for the backgrounds and the other colors for the animals. I drew my own patterns and cut out a tagboard template and then started rolling out fondant and cutting them with my xacto knife. I used a straw to make the little dots and just cut the twigs freehand. BK says the owls look like cats, but Clover approved!!
Cat heads (owls) and birds ready to top the cakes.
Clover shows off the finished product. She really enjoyed them. I also made the cupcakes themselves from scratch...my first time not to use a box mix for cake. I wasn't that impressed and went back to a mix for my next cupcakes.
So, flush with the success of those cupcakes, I began looking around for ideas for her graduation party...figured I might as well do cupcakes for that too! In the end, I just made lemon pudding cupcakes and lemon cream cheese icing and topped them with purple and yellow (gold) sprinkles for her school colors. I found some adorable cupcake wrappers online and bought those to finish them off.
These tasted a ZILLION times better than the scratch cupcakes and they looked really cute.
So, now the obsession was setting in...I have done basic cake decorating in the past for family and friends, but now I really was feeling the urge to do cupcakes. I found a website called cakecentral.com that has hundreds of cupcake photos and spent about three hours one night looking at them. I bookmarked several and then started trying to think of *REASONS* to make cupcakes. I have a recipe for homemade fondant that decorators swear by and bought a Martha Stewart book called, appropriately enough, Cupcakes the other day and after I go to the store this weekend, I'm making some for the hell of it. I just have to decide which ones and what for. Maybe Ginger and Molasses cupcakes topped with whipped cream? Or Brownie Cupcakes with Lavendar icing? Or maybe lemon with buttercream and big dot sprinkles?
I'd like to pull a Julie/Julia and make every single kind of cupcake in this book...they all look that amazing!
And now, to switch gears, a few photos of the recent grad, her brother and her new bike.
With her bff Brianna right after the ceremony.
With Cam before we left for the ceremony. I have a picture just like this when it was Cam's graduation day four years ago.
The ceremony, boring, boring, boring! You can't tell from this, but there are 390-something kids in her graduating class.
Her only means of transportation for college...lmao.

# The last episode of Glee until next APRIL is tonight. I'm excited to see what happens and totally saddened that we can't see it again until APRIL!!! Clover said the DVDs of what's already aired are coming out very soon...so I suppose I'll buy them. If I don't, I'm watching them all again online at the very least. I am just about as crazy about this show as I was Queer as Folk, which I never expected to happen again! Haven't given a thought to fandom or fanfic though, that's definitely only a QaF phenomenon!

# It's SUPER cold for Texas today...it was pretty cold last week, but it only got up to 35 here today and it's supposed to be even colder tonight. I've been walking anyway for most of that time (I just bundle up), but there's no way I'm walking tomorrow if it doesn't get at least into the low 40s. Ugh...which means I'll have to go to the gym. I hate the gym. So much...

# I am so ready for the music program for 2nd-3rd grade at my school to be OVER. I'm not the music teacher, but I am the assistant for programs, which means we've been practicing with them for two weeks and haven't had art at all for that time. I've missed FOUR weeks of art with 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade so far this year because of other activities...makes it really hard to get things finished!

# We're in full holiday mode around here right now...got all the outside lights up last weekend *and* the tree is decorated. I've done most of my shopping, mostly online and probably will finish that up in the next day or two. I can't decide if I want to make my "famous" sugar cookies this year. It feels weird to be diabetic and make dozens of SUGAR cookies, but I probably will anyway. People will get upset if I don't...I'm not even that great a cook, but people say they wait all year for my cookies. Go figure...