Something Old, Something New

First, we'll start with a picture of my adorable children! It has been ages since I wrote anything here and everything is outdated. So a quick "here's us now".

Zachary is 3, Rachel just turned 1 - that was fun! I will tell you all about that soon, and Chelsea is 6. Life is crazy, as I'm sure everyone can say. For some very specific (but not going to be discussed here) reasons Dave and I have separated. Temporarily for now and we'll see how life goes. So the kids and I are living in Wisconsin! In a quiet little town not too far from where I grew up where there are millions of trees and the sun shines... sometimes. But the birds are always singing and are kind enough to frequent the bird feeder out back and let us gawk at them from the kitchen window while we eat our breakfast each morning.The neighbors are friendly and don't play mariachi music until one o'stinkin'o'clock in the morning. One of them even has a couple little boys and our kids love playing together. The air is clean and I am running outside again when it's not drizzling or trying to snow. All in all, Wisconsin is pretty great. I think the only I really miss right now is a good old-fashioned, Wisconsin-style thunderstorm.You know, the ones that rattle the windows and you can hear the rain and thunder inside a very noisy Walmart. The storms that make the birds run for cover and then rumble away so the birds can sing again about their freshly washed homes and the goodness of a quiet life. I need the smell of good, clean, wet dirt. I think it may be time to go play in the garden again...

I'm starting a new chapter in my life. There are so many changes being made right now and I'm excited for some of the things coming up. For starters, Chelsea is big enough to play tee ball! When did that happen? She has had one practice already and has her first game tomorrow. She thinks it's pretty great and she is excited, but that may just be because I bought her a cute new pair of jogging sweats to wear. And her team is named the Royals. That all by itself makes the game worth playing. I certainly have a girly girl and we love (almost) every minute of it! It's adorable and fun to watch her out on the field trying to play with all of her girly, 6 year old awkwardness.

The other super exciting development is that, after 10 years and 2 failed attempts, I signed up for summer school at the local university (as a special student since I'm not actually in yet) and applied for the fall semester! Since things are so up in the air right now, I don't know if I will actually be able to attend - gosh, doesn't that sound familiar - but I figure if I am still here I want to have that option and I'm getting a jump start in June with 2 classes. YAY! I'm finally a college student! A very old college student, but whatever.

I think most people would not be thrilled with the classes I'm taking - Comm 101 and early US history - but I am. I may have bitten off way more than I can chew - Hello! Why did nobody warn me or tell me to stop and think about how intense two 3 credit classes over the very small space of only 3 weeks would be? - but I'm excited for them. I struggle with face to face conversation and I am terrified of speaking in front of people. I would much rather sit here and type because it always comes out so much better and if I don't like it there is always the lovely backspace button to erase whatever nonsense came out of my fingertips. So hopefully an oral comm class will help with that.

Also, I keep realizing just how dismal my high school education was. I'm guessing that's mostly due to a lack of interest (and effort) on my part. Whatever the reason, I don't know so many things. With the current political climate being the mess that it is, I wish that I knew more about the founding fathers and what our country is supposed to look like. I want to know if there was a specific time period, event, or person to blame for the fact the Constitution is well on its way to being null and void. I want to know the stories behind and of the wars. Preferably the real stories, but I recognize there is no such thing as unbiased history and I'll take whatever information the class has to offer with a grain of salt and be glad to be further ahead of where I am now.

Drive-In Movie Theater

I recently was reminded that I have not written on my blog for a very long time. Something I have been meaning to remedy, but never seen to find the time to do. But tonight I pulled up the last entry. Easter. 2011. Wow.
So here I am to tell you all about the fabulous night we had Friday! :)
Friday afternoon, I took my family to Winco to raid their bulk bins for candies that could be put on a string. We came home with marshmallows, a few different gummy candies, and bite sized licorice. At home we strung them on necklaces for Daddy, Mommy, and Chelsea. I was rather surprised I didn't have to explain why we didn't make one for Zach.... But I digress.

Stringing our Candy Necklaces

After the necklaces, we made hamburgers for me and Dave and a corn dog for Chelsea and some sweet potato fries. While those were cooking, we grabbed a box from our recent-ish move. Yes. I still have a few boxes that have not been unpacked. A work in progress that will probably continue for a while still. But we grabbed a box and folded all the flaps in, attached some styrofoam plates as wheels and started coloring.

Coloring the Car

When the food finished, Chelsea climbed into her car and "drove" it into the kitchen to order her food. We told her she was at the restaurant and she should order some food from the drive-thru. Before she even knew the options, she ordered a corn dog and soda. Good thing I know my child well! :)

Ordering at the Drive-Thru

She pulled forward and waited for me to hand her the food and then scooted on over to the living room, where a fabulous new movie (from Redbox) was waiting for her: Barbie Princess and the Popstar! She was very excited.

Settled in and Ready for the Movie

She settled in her car and ate her food and drank her soda and wore her candy necklace - She didn't actually eat it though. ??? - and watched her movie. When it was done, we carted her off to bed without any fussing and she went right to sleep. What a wonderful night!

Happy Easter!

Growing up, every Easter we would do an Easter hunt on Sunday morning with clues from the Easter Bunny and plenty of candy for everyone. It was a very fun tradition - one I have decided I want to continue with my family.

So last night I printed pictures of places in the house - the washing machine, the computer, the bathtub - and I colored them and wrote a bit of the Easter story on the back. It was rather cheesy and I'm pretty sure it was over Chelsea's head, but it was good. She listened to us read a bit about Christ and Easter and put her eggs in her basket and then we looked at the picture for the next place to find a bit of the story and more eggs.

She had a good time with it. I think I made the hunt a little long. We had 5 spots to find eggs and she was ready to be done after 3. But she made it! And when the hunt was done we scattered the rest of the eggs across the living room floor and she got to do yet another egg hunt! (We did 1 that the apartment management put on, 1 with the ward, and then all the festivities at home. I think we have little plastic eggs coming out our ears!)

Before she went to the hunt at the apartment we PRACTICED finding the eggs and putting them in the basket. Yes. I'm one of those moms. I thought she may need to know what she was supposed to do before all the big kids got all the eggs and she didn't get any. So I grabbed a couple eggs I had ready for today and tossed them in the corners of the living room and helped her "find" them. And then she would dump them out and we would do it again. She did very well at the hunts, but now she thinks that when you have collected your eggs you are supposed to dump them out and do it again! It's the never ending Easter egg hunt! :)

We had a good time this weekend and in spite of the large quantities of candy in the house - that I am NOT going to eat by myself and it will NOT be gone in the next week - I think the Spirit at home is good. Having the Easter story in the middle of the hunt was definitely a good idea.

I hope everyone else is having a wonderful holiday and enjoying being with family.

Valentine's Day Cake: Part 2

So last week I posted all about this fabulous cake that I was going to make. Only problem was that I hadn't made it... therefore, no pictures. Today we have pictures! :)

Ok. So just to refresh everyone's memory (and not to have a post purely of pictures) here are the instructions again with the pictures.

Bake 2 two-layer cakes and freeze them. Bake a red velvet cake and crumble it and mix in 1/2 half of a can of cream cheese frosting.

Use toothpicks to draw a circle on the top of each cake. (Hold center toothpick and rotate outer one.) This makes a guide for the next bit.

Grab a metal heart shaped cookie cutter and make a line on the side of the cutter right in the middle to make sure you don't go too deep or shallow.

On the first cake, cut out the bottom half of the heart, following the circle guide.

On the second cake, cut out the top. Cutting out the heart is a little bit difficult since the cake is frozen, but it is important to be frozen so there are fewer crumbs and the cake holds together better. Also, because it's frozen, it's important to use a metal cutter. Plastic will break.

Remove the part you just cut out.

Fill the cake with red velvet cake and frosting mixture. Press it down so it fills the heart shape.

Frost one of the cakes. I chose to only frost the white part of the cake so there wouldn't be a white line through the heart, but you can do either way.

Put the cake with the top part of the heart on top of the other and frost the outside of the cake.

And viola! You have a heart in every slice! :)

In the end, this is what our Valentine's Dinner looked like and we had the cake for dessert. Everything turned out just like I hoped - even the silly pink milk! I decided to get that just because it made me laugh and I hoped having pink drinks would make Dave laugh too... turns out he LOVES the stuff and was very excited! Dave got me those gorgeous flowers and I made dinner with his favorite food and mine (my spinach lasagna and asparagus) and we watched a silly old movie called Love Potion #9. A wonderful evening.

Valentine's Day Cake

So there's this tv show (Studio 5) that I like to watch in the mornings, when life permits, and I caught an excellent recipe the other day! I'm so excited to make it. It's a cake that on the outside looks rather boring. Just a plain old white cake. But when you cut into it there is a HEART! in every slice! A pretty, red, scrumptious heart. In the middle of your piece of cake. I just can't get over it.

Now, I don't usually get all into Valentine's Day. I typically think of it as just another stupid commercial "holiday" that gives people the excuse to feel that they deserve to be pampered and spoiled in increasingly ridiculous ways and then get mad when the boy doesn't realize he's are obligated to encourage such silly notions. Or as many of my single friends called it: "Single-Awareness Day." However. This cake may have changed my mind just a little bit.

So the plan is to make lasagna - Dave's favorite dinner - and have this cake for dessert. It'll be fun to see his reaction when he sees the inside.

So how is it done you ask? Well for anyone else that wants to make this fun surprise cake for their honey, here's the to do list. And really it is quite simple. :) All you need is 2 white cake mixes, 1 red velvet cake, 2 toothpicks, a bit of string, and some frosting.

Using the 2 white cake mixes, make 2 two-layer cakes (frosted inbetween but not on the outside) and freeze them. 8 or 9 inch I believe they should be. Then place a toothpick in the middle of the first cake poking out most of the way and place another toothpick about 1/2-1 inch from the edge of the cake. Tie the toothpicks together using floss or string or whatever and hold the middle toothpick in place while drawing a circle all the way around the edge of your cake. It's basically a protractor drawing a circle guide on the top of your cake. Repeat on the other cake.

Now you have 2 two-layer cakes with a circle on top. Grab a METAL heart shaped cookie cutter and draw a line on the side of the cutter with a sharpie about in the middle. On your first cake, use the cutter, buried up to the line on the side, to gouge out the bottom of the heart shape all the way around the cake, using the guide to make sure it's straight. Flip the cutter over and do the top half on the other cake. When you place the second cake upside-down on top of the first cake it makes a heart shaped hole in the middle.

Then you take your red velvet cake - already cooked and crumbled - and you mix in frosting like you would to make a cake pop. Which they suggested you do with the leftovers. Then you shove the red velvet crumbles into the heart shaped hole you made, put the 2 cakes together, frost, and voila! You have a surprise heart cake!

A New Hobby

Not too long ago I was looking for a new hobby or two, and I have decided to experiment with baking cakes. And not just any cakes, but fondant cakes. So far I have made 3 full blown cakes and, most recently, some cupcakes. Sadly, I didn't get pictures of the cupcakes since I was over on my deadline. (They were for a girls' night and were all devoured before I got any pictures.) Apparently cutting out 20 little pink and green flip flops freehand takes, well, a while. So you'll just have to imagine cupcakes with flip flops and take my word that they were cute. One thing I particularly liked about them was that I wanted a flip flop in the sand so I rolled out some plain old white fondant and, once it was the right thickness, I sprinkled yellow sugar crystals over it and ran the rolling pin over once or twice more to push them all in and it made wonderful sand!

One thing that I love about making these cakes is that every time I do I learn something new!For example, Cake #1 taught me thata tiny tiny bit of water brushed on the fondant instantly makes it sticky - very useful when adhering flat shapes on to the basic covering. However. Too much water makes the whole piece one sticky, shiny, and unfortunately slightly slimy mess. But it still looked good so I was happy.

With Cake #2 I learned something extremely important. ALWAYS cover a multi-tiered cake individually. Fondant is supposed to be pliable and moldable, right? So make a big enough piece, you should be able to cover both tiers at once, right? The answer to that is a resounding NO. Fortunately, there was a bit of extra fondant so I could mostly fix that mistake and it too turned out pretty well. Thank goodness - that was Chelsea's birthday cake!

Cake #3 was a bit more involved. About this time I decided I really wanted to try a fondant cake. The first too had been so easy! ...or something like that. So I bought a Wilton Signature Wedding Cakes book. I'm absolutely positive I had sniffed a little too much powdered sugar at that point, because I was sure I could make it exactly like the picture in the book. 2 cakes? That practically makes one an expert! And so I got to work.

I picked the simplest cake in the book - straight up white, reduce it to 2 tiers, square, covered in fondant with a ribbon around each and some little icing dots on top of the ribbon. Oh yes. And a gumpaste bow the size of my face on the top. Soon I realized this was a much larger project than I anticipated.

Day 1: Make the dots. Dry.

Day 2: Make the fondant. Refridgerate.

Day 3: Make the cakes.Freeze.

Day 4: Make loops for bow. Dry overnight.

Day 5: Make buttercream frosting and assemble!

In the end, I could only see one or two things that would significantly improve my cake. The first is pretty obvious, but I didn't have enough buttercream and I was hoping it would be ok anyway, but here it is: if you don't have enough frosting to fill the sides and make them flat (since my cakes didn't have perfectly straight sides) you will end up with a cake that does not have nice straight sides. Duh. But like I said. Not enough frosting.

The second thing I learned was to use a template. And don't be afraid to thin the frosting. The little frosting dots all needed to be a specific size and all perfectly round and smooth. Once I thinned my royal icing and made a template (a bunch of circles printed on a paper - underneath the wax paper I was piping onto) it was easy-peasy. :) Cake #3 turned out to be a bigger project than I expected - 4 days may be a little excessive - but I had fun and it was only a week later that I started having a hankering to make another one. (That's where the cupcakes came in.)

So that is my new adventure/hobby of late. And so far I am still enjoying every bit of it. I'm hoping to take a Wilton class at JoAnn's and maybe even volunteer/work in a bakery to learn a little more since everything I know is from the internet and trial and error. A fun process, to be sure, but maybe someday I can decorate cakes for other people if I can figure out how to do it well. But for having done only 3 cakes, I'm thinking it's going well! :)

Getting Back In The Swing Of Things

Since becoming a new mommy life has been oh so different! *duh* 99% of the time it is a wonderful thing, however, it has taken some time to get used to things and figure out how to take care of my adorable baby and still have a little time for my hubby and myself. So today Chelsea is 3 months old and I think I may have gotten it down.

She sleeps through the night sometimes now, which helps immensely. I no longer need to sleep when she does or (and) until 10:30 every morning. Now when she sleeps I get to READ! COOK! and occasionally SHOP!!!!! I have developed a love of my library. Rits has always told me, but they really do have everything. This week I checked out a photography book, a novel, a kitchen remodeling book, and a Weight Watchers cookbook. Don't get to excited for me about that cookbook. Last week it was a cupcake cookbook.

Which brings me to the subject of today's ramblings. I checked out that cupcake cookbook and found a couple recipes that I liked and did something that I thought was quite cool - I combined and altered 2 recipes to make my very own cupcake yumminess! And surprisingly it only took 2 tries to get it right!

White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake Cupcakes Say that 5 times! :)

1 white cake mix

2 eggs

1 3/4 - 2 cups milk

1tsp vanilla

2c white chocolate chips

4oz cream cheese

1/2c sugar

4oz whipped topping

cream cheese frosting

raspberries

Mix cake mix, eggs, milk, and vanilla together. Melt chocolate in a double boiler and blend into cake mix.

Spray cupcake liners with cooking spray. Fill liners with cake mix 1/2 - 3/4 full. Bake at 350 for 15-18 minutes until lightly golden on top. When done cooking, allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Mix cream cheese, sugar, and whipped topping together until smooth.

When cupcakes are cool, remove wrappers, frost lightly, then cut almost completely in half. You want to leave a little hinge or the tops tend to slide a bit. Spoon filling into middle, close, and top with a raspberry or 2.

I want to keep playing with the recipe. I'm having dreams of raspberry extract mixed into the filling. However. Since I have now made this recipe twice and pushed them on my poor unsuspecting family and neighbors, I should probably wait a while to do this one again. I'm out of peoples to give cupcakes. ...Better find something else to experiment on! :)

Until then, I hope that anyone who is actually going to take the time to make these cupcakes will do 2 things.

1.) Tell me that you tried the recipe and how it turned out. I'm very curious to know if the success can be reproduced or if there is further tweaking needed.

2.) ENJOY! :D