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.