Cupcake Craving

I've been wanting to make cupcakes for a few weeks now. I had a great excuse this week because yesterday was a church dance and I was asked to bring refreshments! Cupcakes, here we come.

I wanted to try a new basic yellow cake recipe I found on allrecipes.com. It worked like a charm. Fluffy, moist and sweet. I like homemade cake much better than boxed cake mix. The frosting was a modification of the frosting in this recipe, but I left out some stuff and added grenadine so there was a slight cherry flavor and pink tint.

I used a big star frosting tip for the first time. It made frosting these a cinch! It was super fast and looked better than frosting with a knife. Then I added something that made them look even prettier.

Cherries!

p.s. For future reference, someday I want to order cupcake wrappers from here. The solid color wrappers stay opaque when you bake them, not like the above example of nearly transparent wrappers.

Quintessential Chocolate Cake

I taught my sister-in-law some cake making techniques with this recipe I found on allrecipes. It's a really good basic chocolate cake recipe and the frosting has a delicious sour cream tang.

I stole this photo from my sister-in-law's blog.

It was fun to make the cake together with her little girl helping. I'm excited to experiment and add different flavors and ingredients. One of my grandma's most beloved desserts was chocolate cake with cherries mixed into the batter. I would love to develop my own version of her cake.

I feel like a rock star!

A rock star of puppet-making, that is.

I feel like I've found a new calling in life, and it is making puppets. I can not believe how satisfying this is! It's so exciting to discover an ability, such as visualizing 2-dimensional patterns for 3-dimensional puppets, that I never knew I had. I feel like I could make anything!
I made another Lucky, just to make sure I could duplicate my pattern. I could. I changed his eyes a little to try something new. So much fun!
Meet Bruno. First puppet variation of the original pattern. He came together like clockwork. Not a glitch in sight. It made me so happy.
This is Luke (the Babe named him). He was inspired by a comment from Trent. When he mentioned that his son went around making elephant noises I thought, "If I could make an elephant puppet, I could make anything." Voila! Ok, so he isn't perfect, he looks a little like Gonzo, but he is recognizable as an elephant, right?
This is Susan's best friend, Sally. This is the only photo I have of her and she wasn't quite finished here. She is now living with her new family and is receiving lots of lovin'.

Hurray for puppets! I will be returning the borrowed sewing machine in a few days, so I don't know how many more puppets will be posted any time soon. Sad, I know. I sure have enjoyed it!

To know God

"Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar his face is to us."

~Henry B. Eyring quoting Ezra Taft Benson

What do these things have in common?

Cranberries

Orange and chocolate

They both make delicious additions to sweet scones. I'm starting to learn that I could probably like any food if it's fresh and prepared well. Before I made these I believed that scones, just like biscotti and sugar cookies, were clumps of dry, dense dough that I had to choke down out of politeness. I've made two batches of scones in two days and they were WAY above my expectations. The first batch were no-sugar cranberry cream scones. I substituted honey for sugar and the recipe called for cream instead of milk. I was wary, but they were really good.

My second batch were these delectable Mandarin Chocolate Chip Scones.

With orange zest in the batter and a sweet orange glaze, these had a refreshingly citrus zing with yummy bittersweet chocolate.

In my Christmas cookbook it emphasizes the importance of technique, technique, technique. A new technique I learned for these that I will probably carry over to all pastries is this: whenever you need to cut butter into flour, grate the cold butter first with a cheese grater. It worked like a charm!