Reunited.

And it feels so good.

I can't believe it's actually been almost an entire year since I've last been on here! I feel terrible. The truth is, my last blog was written at the beginning of my very last semester of college, so my life got pretty crazy there for awhile. Since then, I've had college graduation, an intense few months of completing teaching certification courses and all the required work that went along with it, a move to a new city, a new nephew aaand a bunch of other crazy life things in between.

So this time, I have a legit exuse. Well, mostly. Anyways, all that matters now is I'm back, trying to revive my sad blog. I don't really have anything cool to post about today, I haven't been in the kitchen for a little while. But I did recently buy cotton candy extract and I'm dyyying to find the perfect time to make sweet, pink, cotton candy cupcakes!

I also attempted to make carrot cake cupcakes from scratch and they turned out alright. I skimped on the carrots big time because I'm not a huge fan, so I don't really know if they counted as carrot cake...but the spice batter I made tasted fantastic! They didn't get much further than the baking though, since a new house means a new oven which means my bragging about not having to use a timer when I bake because I can just "feel" when they're ready is basically useless at this point. I didn't burn them. I just baked them long enough to pass the cupcake stage and start flirting dangerously with the "is this a muffin?!" stage. And no one likes a cupcake that feels like a muffin, no matter how cute the wrappers are. So needless to say, they sat in the freezer for a good month before I threw them out. I didn't have the heart to dump them sooner.

Then there was the batch of good intentions Oreo cupcakes. I basically nailed it last time (I should work on my modesty), with the exception of putting the cookie in before the batter, which caused it to stick to the paper. And what people hate more than cupcake-muffins is eating the cupcake wrapper. Trust me. No worries this time though, since the cupcakes were never even started. I prepped the cookies and separated the bags, blah blah blah...a few weeks later, the cookies were gone and so were the dreams of my cupcakes.

On that negative note about my baking procrastination lately, I'll distract you with some things I actually have done since my last post.

Here's a picture of the pink, pink cake I made for my niece on her 3rd birthday. Which happens to be on Christmas Eve. I wanted the cake as far away from anything Christmas as possible, so I thought this would work. At the time, I only had regular sized cake platters, so her 6 inch cake looks even smaller than it actually was. Luckily, she's 3 and doesn't care. In fact, on my most recent visit to her (July), she was still talking about her "pink Jessie cake, with the blue "3" candle". So all in all, I count it a success.

Since the cake was mainly hers, I made Toy Story cupcakes for everyone else. These really aren't anything fancy, but that's how kids roll.

And while I'm on the topic of her birthday party, I thought I'd throw in a picture of one of her centerpieces I made. For some strange reason, the only party decorations that came out at the time of Toy Story 3 were Buzz & the aliens. And my sweet girl specifically asked for a "Jessie" party...so after a million trips to any and every party store I could think of, I finally just made the table decorations...out of a Toy Story calendar, styrofoam, streamers and a bunch of random stuff I dug out of my art closet. Turns out, making a kid's birthday party from scratch is kind of fun...and by "kind of", I mean really.

That's it for now. If I can find the pictures of my Easter egg hunt cupcakes, I'll be sure to post them.

Don't you love it?

Ohhhh boy. So it's been a million years since I've posted on here! But the truth is, it's been forever since I've actually had a chance to bake. It's a tragedy. Just the other day, I ate dinner with Boyfriend and for dessert I brought a giant chocolate cupcake. Which I bought. From. A. Store. I know, I know I felt awful about the whole thing. And it was actually quite delish, which made me feel even worse! I just didn't have the time to make anything from scratch. The dinner was a frozen meal too, so it's not like I was cheating on baking with cooking or anything. (If you actually know me well, you know I hardly ever cook anyways, so you'll be less forgiving about the store bought cupcake. But for those who don't know, well...let's just leave it alone for now).


Anyways, I did bake some chocolate cupcakes a few weeks ago and they were sooo adorable, I'm going to post about them. There's absolutely nothing special about these, they were chocolate with chocolate icing. BUT they were wearing very cute little wrappers! Like these:
The blues & greens are paisley printed, the purples are polka dotted! So much fun! And trust me, the people who ate these LOVED every bite. True, these people are about six years old...but kids can be mean. Everyone knows that. And these kids were asking for seconds. Even the ones who told me they couldn't eat too many snacks (this was BEFORE they knew what snack was, of course).


Here they are again, chillaxin' in the fridge before it was time to go. (That's right, I'm hip). Thanks to the lovely, humid Texan summers, icing won't stay in place too long if the cupcakes are left out.


What I'm most excited about these cupcakes is they were my first ever freezing experiment. I made a big batch of chocolate cupcakes earlier this summer and couldn't use them all, so I wrapped them tightly and tucked them away in the freezer. I really thought I'd end up throwing them out, buuuut when I took these out & thawed them, they tasted like I had just made them. Awesome? I think so.


On that note, here's a picture of the half of the batch that wasn't frozen, but turned into Oreo Cupcakes. I took pictures & planned to blog about it, but honestly, the pictures looked really gross. They tasted great, but definitely did not look great. Boo. But, I wanted to show off my adorable little leopard print wrappers! Who can resist a cupcake wearing animal print?! No one. Trust me.



So this is probably my last post for a little while, I don't forsee any baking for at least the rest of September. But with the holidays coming up, I'll definitely be baking again.


Have a fun rest of the month, don't bake anything fun without me!
--amanda.

Make a wish, I'll make one too.

Okay. So I've been trying to figure out why the picture & "this is me" won't connect to the first post when you click on it, but I've given up for now and decided to blog instead.

I feel bad that I made all kinds of cupcake promises in the beginning and I haven't blogged about cupcakes yet! I would fix that by blogging about them in this post, buuut I've decided to talk about cakes. Mostly because they scare me, but also because I happen to have an available picture (I'm still waiting on good cupcake pictures).

As I mentioned above, cakes scare me. I just recently found out that large cakes are held together with sticks and straws and all sorts of other items used by the three little pigs, which I had never realized. I probably should have but that's not the point.

In my entire life I've made one cake. That's right. ONE. (Remember, the fear) Only one, from scratch, all by myself, bonafide cake. And it was fantastic. I don't say this with pride, I say this with awe and wonder because I, myself, still can't believe it came out so well on my first try. I owe it all to Bakerella and her amazing yellow cake recipe. The woman can work miracles with sugar and flour, no lie. If you haven't seen her blog yet, you should. Seriously. Minimize this screen and come back later. I'll wait.

Anyways, long story short here's what I ended up with:

I was pretty happy with my little tiny cake. I failed to mention, when I decided to face my cake fears, I was only armed with a 6 inch cake pan. It just seemed more manageable that way, I'm only comfortable with cupcakes. Cakes broken down into teeny little pieces! Plus, those small cake pans are cuuuuute.

All in all, the cake was delish. It wasn't dry or hard and the icing wasn't crazy sweet. I've thought of attempting larger cakes but I always forget...or I get distracted by cupcake liners. I mean, are there 600 different, fantastic prints of cake liners in the baking aisle? No.

I'm planning on making cupcakes tomorrow (cross your fingers) and I'll post about them when I do! I have a feeling they're going to be wearing leopard print liners and I'm pretty excited about that.

--Amanda.

Sugar, sugar.

So I should probably actually post something in this blog...it's been long enough.

Let's talk cookies. Primarily, I'm on a cupcake high, but this week I've been working on sugar cookies for the first time in months and I was excited to blog about it.

Up until this past December, I had officially given up on sugar cookies. While they're extremely common and claim to be the most basic kind of cookie, I instead found them infuriating. I tried recipe after recipe and always came out with un-bakeable goop. The gooey stuff tasted pretty good but refused to turn into dough that I could cut and bake. Actually, I managed to get shapes out of ONE recipe, but they grew enormous once they were in the oven. And by enormous, I mean baked into one another and over the pan to form one huge cookie. It was awful.

Anyways, I finally found one I looove and I also discovered that when a recipe says "chill overnight", it literally means chill overnight. No jokes.

So now I have a lovely recipe which not only works for looks, but tastes quite fantastic! Add that to my awesome piping and flooding skills and you have one very, very happy girl. (Okay, so the "skills" is a little braggy, I still need more practice, but it's quite fun).

A very, very happy girl makes sweet cookies that look something this:



These are obviously from the holidays and were actually my very first sugar cookies that I piped & flooded with royal icing. These cute little stockings followed:



From there, I basically went sugar cookie happy. We all saw it coming. Since the holidays were over almost right after I learned how to do this, I had to channel my energy somewhere. Luckily, Boyfriend was around, so I made him these:



I probably ate at least half of them before he got to my house. You can justify eating anything if it spells out your name. Everyone knows that. For example, this cookie was a result of me playing around while I made cookies with Boyfriend (he's quite handy in the kitchen, he has mad focusing skills). Anyways, upon seeing the icing "j", my dog (whose name also happens to start with a J) got the notion this was HIS cookie. Anyways, long story short, right after this picture I dropped the cookie and my dog inhaled it. He's not supposed to eat human food, but again, the name/initial rule came in to play here. Big time.

Last but not least, I have one more sugar cookie picture (for now, I just got new cookie cutters I'm dying to use). This is a picture of me trying my hand at what I called "bridal shower cookies". Because who doesn't love sweet cookies? I mean sweet as in sentimental, not in taste. But luckily, these were both. The cakes actually look a little boring, so next time I'm going to try adding more detail to them. Also, I had a major cookie fiasco with the first batch so by the time I got to the flooding, my icing had started to harden, which is why the icing looks a little bumpy. I didn't realize this until they had dried.

Again, the lumpy icing isn't working for me, but at least I know how to fix that for the next round.



Thanks for reading, I'll be posting new pictures soon! I hope to work on some cupcakes this week, so I'll have a post about the outcomes of that as well.


Happy, happy Wednesday.
--Amanda.

Let's get this party started.

I love all things cupcake (and sometimes cookies).
And by "love", I mean I'm walking a thin line between love and obsession. Which I'm completely comfortable with.

This is me.

I'm a college senior in my twenty-somethings discovering that the best things in life aren't learned without experiencing them for yourself. Especially in the kitchen.

I'm not a professional baker, nor do I pretend to be. What I know about baking I've learned through other bakers, random cookbooks, tips from my mom and many, many experiments of my own. Some which have turned out fantastically (and will show up in this blog) and others that have failed miserably (which I've tasted and wished I hadn't).

When it comes to baking, I'm over the top, emotionally attached. I don't just crank out something I think is "okay" and call it a day. I bake when I feel creative, when I feel nervous, when I'm excited and when I'm mad. And because I've been unable to separate 'passion' from 'baking', I'm either found in my kitchen singing and dancing (yes, I've danced) when I've done it juuust right or crying while scraping things from cupcake tins and tossing them over the fence in the backyard (true story).

I love colorful cupcake liners.
I love making everything just so I can say "from scratch!"
I love piping & flooding sugar cookies.
I love making people's faces look like this:

That's all I have for now, I'll be posting more successes (and failures, if they're funny enough), so don't stay away too long!

--Amanda.