Gourmet Lemon Cupcakes

I have had this cupcake book for a couple of years but haven't made a single recipe out of it... until now. I decided to start out with some lemon cupcakes. I looked over the ingredients... cream cheese? Sour cream? Lemon Drop candy? These had to be good!




First of all... I got two things ready to try and keep my kitchen from quickly becoming a disaster area. I got a big bowl to keep on the counter for garbage (think I got this tip years ago from a Rachel Ray show), and I filled the sink with hot soapy water for dirty measuring cups & spoons which is something I learned from my grandma whose kitchen is always clean!






I knew I was going to need my microplane tool for zesting the lemon... if you haven't used one before and spend any time at all zesting... get one! You will not regret it.












I put 1/4 cup of batter in each cup, baked for about 16 minutes and WaLaaaa... Beautiful, delicious smelling cupcakes. Cooled them on a wire rack per the instructions and topped them with lemon-flavored whipped cream and crushed lemon drop candy bits. My kids & husband said they were yummy. My husband gave them a 7 out of 10. I think next time I'm going to try and fill them with some type of lemon filling and top them with lemon buttercream frosting and see if I can get a 10!

Cake Eggs & All Bran Nests

You've probably seen the cake pops that seem to be everywhere lately... bake a cake, crumble it up with frosting, roll it into small balls or other shapes, stick a sucker stick in them, refrigerate, dip in candy coating & decorate. Well, I wanted to try these but decided to just make eggs to put into some sort of edible nests for the kids to take around to their friends. The kids and I had a good time and made both chocolate and vanilla flavored eggs, decorated in all sorts of fun ways. The candy coating dried faster than expected sometimes... we had a few eggs fall apart (too much frosting in the chocolate ones)... we realized we should have stuck the sticks in (for dipping) before refrigerating (the demo I first saw had them doing that afterward). But all in all, I'd say this was a success. We'll probably do something with cake pops again.

We made the nests out of all-bran cereal & marshmallows- basically rice crispy treats with all-bran... Not sure if they tasted that great, but they did the job :)

Time for me???

A few weeks ago I decided to focus on spending 100 days improving my health. Not just my physical health, but my emotional, mental, spiritual health too. I listed 10 things I wanted to work on doing each day and one of the things was to spend ten minutes a day doing something I enjoyed. TEN. Who knew that this would be one of the most difficult things for me to actually accomplish. I've been so focused on cleaning, changing diapers, fixing meals, helping with homework, getting kids in bed etc........ I haven't spent time doing things that I enjoy for a very, very long time. So... where to start? I love photography and haven't done much with it in a few years, so I have spent a little time working on that. I enjoy baking... which might not seem like something that would help me if I'm trying to focus on health... right? Well, I've found that for me at least, I can bake stuff and enjoy the process without feeling jipped for not getting to taste the end results right now. I know I'll be able to enjoy tasting the best of the best later and in moderation ;) So I'm going to document what I'm doing to have fun, be creative and spend a little time filling my cup so that I can do a better job keeping everybody else's full too :)