Happy Thanksgiving!

I realize we're a day late, but no one was reading blogs yesterday anyway, right? We had a great early Thanksgiving dinner at our house with friends before Chris headed to work and then Pumpkin and I stopped by cousins Brad and Linda's for seconds. Pumpkin can't wait until next year when she can eat some turkey! Hope you all had a wonderful day!

Winner, winner. Chicken dinner.

Many of you interested in the results of our baby pool probably went and checked, oh, about 10 weeks ago to find out that our cousin Kristy is the winner. Congratulations, Kristy! Finally this weekend I had a few extra minutes to make the prize. I decided to go with onesie and football cookies. I still need some practice with the icing, but they tasted pretty good! They're on their way to Illinios now - hope you enjoy them!

Pumpkin decided to dress on Sunday to match the cookies. Silly girl.

Birthday Cupcake Cookies

I have been reading the Bake at 350 blog for some time now and got it in my head that I needed to make some pretty cookies. Since I received some cupcake-shaped cookie cutters as a gift, I decided Na's birthday was the perfect excuse to try them out. I used this recipe for the cookies, and followed these and these tips for decorating, however I cheated and bought a royal icing mix at a local baking supply shop. All I had to do was add water and extract (I chose almond) - easy peasy.

The hard part was the decorating. I definitely need more patience and practice outlining the cookies, but I thought flooding would have been much harder than it was.

The best part was, they were delicious! And they tasted good throughout the whole week.

Na planned a girls night for her birthday, so I brought cookies to share with everyone. We first went out to dinner, and then to the Eldorado to see Illuminaire. The show was really cool - it was amazing what the performers could do and I would definitely go see it again. (Shout out to Tyler who hooked us up with great tickets!)

Here is the birthday girl with a couple of the performers following the show.

And, all of the girls :-)

Happy Birthday, Na!

Easter

Did everyone have a lovely Easter? Chris, Scoop and I headed over to Erin & Sandor's for Easter brunch with friends. (This is the first Easter Chris and I have spent together since we've been married because of baseball, so that was a treat).

After seeing them online somewhere, I made Cadbury Creme Egg Cupcakes for the occasion. Pretty easy - mini Cadbury eggs + yellow cake batter. They tasted pretty good, I thought.

There was quite the spread of yummy food - egg strata and coffee cake and fruit and muffins and all kinds of deliciousness. The dogs all got to come, too, so Scoop had fun playing with six of her best buddies.

I neglected to take any pictures of people. Whoopsie. We had a fun time eating and visiting. I hope you had a nice Easter, too!

Frosting can fix anything

Tuesday was Erin's birthday, and I wanted to make her a Rainbow Cake, which I had seen on many a blog and thought it looked pretty. She threw a barbecue on Sunday for pretty much everyone she knows who has an April birthday, so I made the cake for the occasion.

Because I thought it might be a little time intensive (especially since I only have two round cake pans) I decided to go with a boxed lemon cake mix instead of from scratch (one less layer to color!) I mixed one box, measured it to a little more than four cups and decided to use one cup per layer, making cupcakes with the remaining batter from the second box.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple batter.

The yellow layer was the first one I tried to take out of the pan, and this is what happened. I was a little worried, but a little frosting and all was right again. (I did a much better job getting the other layers out of the pan.)

Cooling cake

Frosting, frosting, frosting

Done!

And, the reveal!

Pretty and yummy!

Happy Birthday, Erin!

Miguel's Meat Cake!

Guest blog brought to you by Tammy's sister Marina:

I love to bake. As you can tell by Tammy's posts, it's somewhat of a family trait. But the problem is Miguel has more of a savory tooth than a sweet tooth. So this year for his birthday I thought I would try to make something that he would enjoy eating as much as I would enjoy baking it. A friend of mine had the solution - a meat cake! It was perfect, I found a good recipe online, and got started.

6 lbs of meet, prepped and ready to bake

cooked and cooling, tops cut off

filled with gravy made from the drippings

(the recipe called for ketchup glaze but I thought gravy would look and taste better)

some boxed mashed potatoes and a little food coloring...

and ta-da - it's a cake!

Happy Birthday Miguel!

Guess what!? It's meat!

I knew it was a smashing success when Miguel tasted it and said, "this is the best cake I've ever eaten."

Layover

Here's how well my family knows me: On the long plane ride from Tokyo to L.A., I told Andrea that maybe I should have specified that I'd want a burger when we grabbed a bite to eat during my long layover before my flight to Reno. Not only did they choose a burger place without my having to request it, but they picked a place that lets you build your own.

Gruyere Cheese, roasted red peppers, grilled onions and garlic aioli? Yes, please!
As a bonus, some people outside the restaurant were working on an Elvis sand sculpture.
Dre and her friend Kim joined me, Dad, Deb and Mena (who happened to be visiting from D.C.!) for lunch, and then headed home to Oxnard.
And the four of us headed over to Jen's, where we joined Juliette for a tea party. Uncle George and Jim came by, too.
Even though I was tired from traveling, it was so nice to see everyone, even just for a short time!

Thanksgiving

I really blew it on the Thanksgiving pictures. These four pictures are the only four I took. My excuse is that I was in charge of the bird, so I really should have put someone else in charge of the camera.

Our friends Erin and Sandor left for Atlanta for the holiday, and since Na was watching their dogs we commandeered their house for Thanksgiving dinner, seeing how they have a bigger dining room table and double ovens. (When I say commandeered, I'm actually pretty sure it was Erin's idea in the first place ... she even set the dining room table for us! It was very nice of her.)

So, we invited a few others over - Chris and I, Na, friends John, Julie and Dionne from work, and Will from my cohort at school. Here's Na, making the mashed potatoes ...

In addition to turkey and stuffing, I made a couple things that are starting to become a Thanksgiving tradition for us - my Nannie's cranberry loaf cake ...

And, some mulled wine ...

Julie made an apple crisp, Dionne brought a sweet potato pie (I'd never had one before and OMG it was delicious!), Na made a pumpkin pie and Will brought green beans. Everything was so yummy and it was nice to have such good company! We ate early, about 1:30 in the afternoon, so everyone who had to work could get there on time. Scoop and I spent the rest of the afternoon napping and trying to catch up on some Project Runway. I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!

Our new plan ...

Given how busy we've been lately, what with prep football in full swing and me starting school, we came up with this idea: Instead of realizing at 5 p.m. that we have nothing planned for dinner and nobody took anything out of the freezer, maybe we could save time and money and still eat some good meals if we would plan out our week of meals on Sundays, do all our shopping in one day, and then the rest of the week would be smooth sailing. We figured, given how much leftovers we usually have because it's just the two of us, three or four meals a week would be perfect. I also thought it would be a good idea to try to incorporate at least one new recipe each week. It went pretty good the first week (last week) but then our weekend was pretty busy (more on that in the next post!) so we never came up with a plan for this week ... hopefully this will become more of a trend. Last week's plan included two new recipes - Rosemary Chicken and Salmon with Brown Sugar and Bourbon Glaze. The third recipe was an oldie but goodie - pizza, easy to throw together for Chris one day when I had an evening function (and yes, we also eat salad).
I realize that this type of planning is common in many households, but it's new to us! Anyone have better plans or suggestions for making sure we stick to it?

The new date night

Chris, Tammy and a home-cooked meal. In the RGJ break room ... for the third time in the past week or so. We are busy people these days.

Our first Blogaversary!

In honor of our blog being one year old today, and Thursday being National Cheesecake Day, and my receiving the new Martha Stewart Cupcake book for my birthday, I decided to whip up these little treats last night. I wish I could have all of our lovely readers over for dessert, but since I can't I will share with you the recipe. Fun fact - this is our 158th post! It really has been fun writing this blog and we wouldn't enjoy it as much if we didn't have anyone to share it with :) Now, on to the recipe ...

Martha Stewart's Cookies and Cream Cheesecakes

Ingredients:

42 cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, such as Oreos, 30 left whole and 12 coarsely chopped

2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

4 large eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten

1 cup sour cream

pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 275 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Place 1 whole cookie in the bottom of each lined cup.

2. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.

3. Drizzle in eggs, a bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in sour cream and salt. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.

4. Divide batter evenly among cookie-filled cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until filling is set, about 22 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate (in tins) at least 4 hours (or up to overnight). Remove from tins just before serving.

(Note: I cut the recipe in half and it made 17 cupcakes. Also, keep an eye on them near the end - 22 minutes was too long for mine.)

A Honey of a Day

The most obvious thing to do with overripe bananas is to make banana bread. But I like to try new recipes, so last time our bananas turned brown I made some banana chocolate chip cookies, and they were delicious. I was getting set to revert back to banana bread this weekend, when I stumbled upon this blog with a recipe for honey banana cupcakes - and we all know how I feel about cupcakes. (Not to mention, I've been a little honey obsessed ever since reading The Secret Life of Bees.') I made a vanilla frosting to go with them (I had to substitute soy milk for milk, but it still turned out great). I thought about adding cinammon to the frosting, but wasn't sure if I'd like it, so sprinkled it over half of them instead. They're slightly chewy, but really yummy, and a great compliment to the honey mustard chicken we had for dinner. (Chris even drank a honey brown beer!)


Also, on Saturday I got these little pumpkins to use as a centerpiece on our dining room table, but I feel like something is not quite right about it ... is it the bowl? I'm not sure. I mentioned this to Andrea yesterday, and she suggested I blog about it and take a poll, so ... what do you think?