2011 in a Nutshell

2011 had many great moments. I am just going to put the highlights of this year : Baked Potato Soup, Starry Night cupcakes, Pizza and the Tea Party I catered. Last year was a lot of fun and I learned a lot I also started taking cake decorating classes and hope to show everyone how to do these things as I figure them out and I hope to be better at this blogging so I can share my new knowledge and recipes!

Baked Potato Soup
I found an amazing baked potato soup recipe.... I was short on funds so I tried to use all the food I already have at home, so one day  I was really hungry and wanting Chili's baked potato soup.  My boss pointed me in the direction of Cooks.com and I found a few recipes that I took home, well yesterday she said I should look for the actual "Chili's" recipe. So I Google searched it and found one from www.topsecretrecipes.com, the only issue I had with their recipe (besides lacking some of the ingredients) was that it had boxed mashed potatoes in it.... I'm sorry but they don't taste the same, they do not have the right texture...... just blech!!

Baked Potato Soup...mm

.....anyways I digress...

I stumbled across this other recipe and I happened to have all but one ingredient. So I went to the store and that one ingredient was on sale 2 for $4, so I bought two and some lunch meat, and I went to the bakery and there was a bag of rolls discounted down to 1.79.. So I spent a total of $13 or so dollars, if I were just counting the ingredients $5.79... that is amazing!! It took about 1 hour or so all together prep and cook time. And I have to say for my first time not bad... I did add a few things that it didn't call for spice wise but I do that sometimes :) Even my two year old loved it.

Needless to say...I was pretty dang impressed with myself that night and soon this year I will be posting my adjusted recipe.




Starry Night Cupcakes

Last year in February we made Starry Night Cupcakes for the taste of art auction, they were the talk of the dessert table! We had a birthday party the night before so we didnt get started mixing colors and decorating until midnight. We were finally done at around 5:15 am. The most time consuming part was actually mixing the colors, we had 3 shades of blue, 3 shades of yellow, brown, and 4 shades of green.

First we start with cupcakes.

Then we put them in a frame and used some chocolate cookies to bridge any gaps, and frosted them with chocolate frosting.




Next we outlined the painting on the chocolate frosting and start to outline

Then we started to fill in the outline with the appropriate colors

We actually did end up making another green, to stand out a bit more, our browns and greens were  blending too much. After we filled it we actually took a bobby pin(we didnt have any tooth picks... yes it was clean!) and started to mix the colors. And this was our end result.

I think we did an amazing job,  unfortunately it only raised $22.00 for the FCA. One of my friends saw a picture of it and said she would have paid $100.00 for it!

Pizza 
A while back I had made an excess amount of spaghetti sauce so I decided to make pizza. Well the night I was going to make it I realized I had no recipe for the crust so I went to my one cookbook that tells me how to do EVERYTHING(Betty Crocker Cook book, it is surely a book everyone should have!) this was the result :)

Tea Party

In April I catered my best friends birthday tea party, it was a lot of work but really fun! From a watermelon shark to chocolate covered strawberries it was a flavorful and a night to remember. We all dressed up "vintage-like" and had a blast.