Cupcakes!

When I made my cake pops, I had to buy a few decorating tips. I had not previously used decorating tips, so I really didn't know how it would go. Well, since then, I've been itching to use them again, mainly to decorate cupcakes or a cake. Well, this weekend was going to be the time! I made cupcathe cupcakes friday (with my new mini cupcake pan), bought a couple more tips at Michaels (since I had previousy been on the search for ones that would make tiny decorations for the cake pops and now I needed bigger ones), and got to work Saturday!

I wasn't sure how different it would be using homemade icing versus store bought icing, so I decided to try both. Both worked pretty well, though I had a little trouble with the homemade frosting keeping its shape or structure. I kept having to putting it in the fridge to make it workable. Whereas, the store bought was a bit easier too work with. I ended up with nice cupcakes from both though. Upon tasting, both were great! I've had multiple tasters/cupcake eaters confirm the good taste as well.

I made a batch of pink homemade frosting and then used food coloring to make the white store bought yellow. Then, disaster hit (ok, that could be some *slight* exageration). I had about 8 cupcakes left and no more frosting. I was curious to see how much frosting I would use since I had grand ideas for icing my cupcakes, and I used quite a bit ;) For the last few, I figured I would just make one more batch (or actually half batch, which is what i did before) of homemade frosting and color it blue. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, only that something did. It ended up grainy looking and not holding shape well at all-even after it spent a few minutes in the freezer. I'm guessing I either didn't get the butter soft enough before making the frosting or my husband's finger swipe of butter before I added the other ingredients messed up (he thought it was frosting and it wasn't until after he ate a fingerful of butter that he asked what it was! oops!). Anyways, I learned a lesson and it wasn't a big deal. I just have a few sad little blue cupcakes that had icing spilling all over the edges since it wouldnt hold when I tried to build the icing up.

A few pictures to make you hungry :)

Painted Kitchen!

To be honest, we painted out kitchen a couple months ago, but that was pre-blog days and so I thought I'd share about it anyways.
When I met my husband and was at his house the first time ever, probably over 2 1/2 years ago now (long before we were dating), it was for a pumpkin carving party. We (those of us who were there) got the tour of the house. I remember noticing then the wallpaper in the kitchen and how I didn't like it.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take pre-paint pictures, but I have some in progress that let you see what the wallpaper was like. There was a border around the top of the room as well.

So here we are, 2 1/2 years later and I'm married to the guy, moved into his/our house, and could finally get rid of the wallpaper! Yay!
After looking through an entire book of paint chips and choosing 3 samples, we picked a color.
We probably finished the project sometime in May/June, but it was in  early July I think that I was able to go back through and do all the touch-up work that I wanted. Unfortunately, these pictures are not that great and don't do the new paint job justice at all :( Pre-painting the kitchen also had mini aluminum blinds which neither of us really liked. We added nice new, white, faux wood blinds as well. In the 2nd picture you can also see the nice, big curtain in front of our patio door that we recently put up. It is a much needed and much liked replacement for the vertical slats that used to cover the patio door!
Here's my new kitchen!