Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today was my day off. So, I cleaned and baked. I love having a clean house with the aroma of freshed baked cookies in the air!

Dinner Tonight

I made Chicken Florentine, fried redskin potatoes, and lemon asparagus. Yummm.

Elmo & Cookie Monster Cupcakes

My sister-in-law asked me to make some cupcakes for the son of a friend of hers. She wanted Elmo and Cookie Monster cupcakes for his first birthday. When she told me, I was nervous and excited. Usually I just copy ideas from two cupcake books I have, but this time I had to come up with the idea on my own. I looked on line a bit at other peoples creations, and mixed their ideas with ideas of my own, and this is what I came up with!

Step 1: Prepare all of the embellishments. Use orange jelly beans for Elmo's nose. Remove the cream from Oreo cookies, and split them in half for the mouths. The hard part is the eyes! Lay out a sheet of wax paper on a cookie sheet. Then, melt some white chocolate and spread it on the wax paper, with a spoon, in a small circle. (about the size of a quarter) Place the circles in the freezer for a few minutes to harden. After the white chocolate circles are ready, melt some semi sweet chocolate chips. Use a toothpick to spread the chocolate on the flat side of the white chocolate circles in a small circle for the pupils. (Spread the chocolate in the center for Elmo's eyes and off to the side for Cookie Monster to give him that crazy look)

Step 2: Dye your frosting using food coloring. *Note: I only had regular food coloring which is why my Elmo looks more pink than red. I think a more expensive gel food coloring would produce a more red frosting.

Step 3: Put your frosting in a piping bag with a star tip to give the cupcakes a "fuzzy" appearance. Cover half the cupcakes with red, and half with blue.

Step 4: Assemble your cupcakes so they look like Elmo and Cookie and your done!

Bubbles!!!

We got bubbles as wedding favors at Jenny and Zane's wedding, and Joe came up with the brilliant idea to blow them in front of the cats. As I would have expected from how different Luke and Leia's personalities are, they reacted to them quite differently.

Leia absolutely loved them. She was standing on her back paws to pop them. Luke, on the other hand, ran away in fear whenever they would pop on them. Love my babies.

August Birthdays

Yesterday Joe and I went over to my parents house for a celebration for all the family with birthdays in August. It was lots of fun. My mom made chile verde for dinner so we brought a layered bean dip. It turned out pretty good. I should have taken a picture of it...not sure why I didn't.

Alaina made a delicious cake with cream cheese frosting and raspberry filling. I helped her arrange the raspberries on top. It looks beautiful, and tasted even better!

Here are some pics of the family, and Alaina's cake. Happy Birthday Christopher, Jennie, Alaina, and Leslie! Love you all!

My Quilt

So,it has been almost two years since I started working on this quilt, and I'm finally making some progress on it! I just need to set a goal for how many blocks to do a day.

After I finish all of the squares, I need to decide how I want the border for the rest of the front to look. Then comes the hard part... I want to hand quilt smaller squares inside of each block... It's going to take FOREVER!!!

Duck Cupcakes

These are the super cute cupcakes I made for Jenny's last day at work before she leaves me to move to Colorado. :( I followed directions from "What's New Cupcake" I put them in my carrying case to take to work, but the lid was a little too low so it took off some of the frosting on the tops of their heads. Joe said I scalped them... not on purpose though!

A word of advice, don't make these too far in advance! I made them the night before, and when I took them out of the fridge the next morning. The beaks were melting and falling off, and the eyes were dripping down their faces. Something with this much detail definately needs to be made right before they are to be served.