It's been a year!

It has already been a full year since I had my daughter, and I can't believe the amazing things I have learned and witnessed being a mom. It is truly the most amazing thing I have done, so far.
As you may have noticed my blog has not been updated for just as long as I've been a mom. My life hasn't left much room for blogging, and I'm fine with that. I don't really have the same free time that I once had.

This is the set for Sasha's "Cake Smash" photos that I put together for the day of her birthday.

For her 1 year birthday I found so many wonderful inspirational images to theme the party for "under the sea" Go ahead search the theme for birthday parties, and you will see gorgeous parties with every detail adorably mermaidy and sparkely goodness that any girl would give her long flowy red hair to go to! So I thought I would post some of my creations based off the inspiration for others to see.
Sometimes its nice to see them in non staged, non photoshoped or without fancy editing to the images.


Here is the cover of the invites that I made, they were so much fun, but time consuming!

This was the way the party looked before everyone got here.

The sign on our front door.

The front entrance, I reused the circle banner I made for Sasha's cake smash photos.

The backyard party area, we have a pool so it was the perfect entertainment with little effort

This net holding the balloons was an adorable idea (thank you pinterest)

Beverage Station

 

I made pork carnitas tacos and all the fix'ns

  

Gold Fish crackers in this plastic fish bowl with scoop were a great snack!

These were the party favors for all the kiddos to take home, new beach buckets!

Mr. B and I both L-O-V-E shortbread iced cookies, so I had to make some, in starfish and shells

The cupcakes were topped with chocolate seashells

I hope to find time to blog about other wonderful things, we shall see...

Macaron success!

Yeah you heard me, after last nights (see below) Epic fail, I have succeeded!
Okay I can't really take the credit because I had a very awesome friend come over and pretty much show me how to make them and I watched. I did help out with piping them out though.
Basically I think I can rock these little cookies now. She showed me that there are 4 important things to baking French Macarons. They may seem like obvious points, but they are really important to these particular cookies.

1.) A good recipe base. (which I now have! )
2.) The right ingredients
3.) Sifting and Folding are key!
4.) Temperature changes before & during baking

And look! Our macarons have "feet", yay. That's the little spongy base at the bottom of the cookie. Besides looking great, they were also delicious. These are Allspice macarons with chocolate ganache filling. They are Thanksgiving in a cookie.

Epic fail.

I was hoping to post some great photos of my first macaron baking experience, but alas, I failed.
I did not bake delicious light crispy coated chewy centered French Macarons, but dense very almondy chewy almond paste cookies. (it could have been due to my cockiness as a baker, and I felt I could substitute almond flour with almond paste, big mistake)

Ahhhhh, failure, you are not something I experience often, but I don't hate you as much as I once did. I handled tonight's mishap with a little advice from the kitchen of my mother. When something doesn't look as pretty as it should, or taste as you want it to, dip it in chocolate!
So that's what I did, well I drizzled my chewy almond cookies in dark chocolate and they are really yummy & cute, just not, I repeat NOT French macarons.

Macaron mania!

I have been wanting to attempt French Macarons for sometime now. They are amazingly delicious, as well visually appealing. This cookie is versatile and ideal to change with the seasonal fruits and nuts available to us here "on the farm".
Look at all the pretty colors!



If you know me at all, you know that I don't just jump into anything without a ton of research. This includes building a piece of furniture, upholstering a chair, or cooking anyhing. Its what I like to call my OCD of perfection.

So the same goes with baking French Macarons. I have looked up multiple recipes, asked friends that have baked them, I've done some recent field taste tests, and even watched videos.
I know, I know, I'm nuts!

~Speaking of nuts, what has sparked the need to bake these cookies is our overload of home grown Pistachios. We have about 5 female trees that were loaded. After picking, peeling, drying and shelling quite a few of them, I crave a different outlet with pistachios then salting them and eating them as a snack. I want a dessert! Or three!

So in my search for the most epic macaron recipe I found this this absolutely adorable video of a young woman (I think I read that she is from Brazil) being delightfully chipper & entertaining while baking macarons with tons of great tips.

Her blog is Dulce Delight
Although I don't plan on using her exact recipe, I am going to be making Pistachio flavored cookies so I can certainly use some of her techniques.



So stay tuned for my actual macarons, let's hope I succeed!

Cupcake for a cause

A friend of ours is helping organize an event tomorrow night to help raise money to build a hospital in Haiti.
She asked me to bake some cupcakes for a bake sale at the charity. Hopefully these bring in some money for the cause.

I made Coconut rum cupcakes with Vanilla Frosting. I topped them with fondant hearts in the colors of the Haitian flag.


I also made Chocolate cupcakes made extra dark with coffee in the batter, and Cinnamon Frosting. Yum!


About 63 in the Coconut.


And about 66 in the Chocolate. So just about 130 mini cupcakes total.



I baked a few large cupcakes when I ran out of mini papers and had extra batter. These guys will have to stay home for lucky Mr. B :)

Passion for baking

You might be wondering what those wrinkly purple things are. If you aren't familiar with this fruit, it is the yummy result of the beautiful Passion Flower.
This photo of a passion fruit flower was taken by Mr. B's Dad, he has a passion fruit vine that as taken over the front half of his home. You can see here how much the bees love it, and the fruits are very much appreciated by us humans.


I cut about a dozen of them in half, scooped out the juicy seeds and strained them. I then made a passion fruit curd, similar to lemon curd just subbed out the lemon juice for the passion.
Then I whipped the passion fruit curd into a whipped cream frosting.


I baked a two 8" round coconut butter cakes.



Cut the tops off then cut each in half horizontally.


Here is my Coconut Butter cake with Passion Fruit Curd filling and Whipped Cream Passion Fruit Frosting.


I layered the first cake with the passion fruit whipped cream, then a layer of the passion fruit curd, and the final layer with more frosting. I had just enough frosting to cover the whole cake.

Tonight's looking blue

Well that's a good thing around here actually.
I just got a knock on the door from Mr. UPS and here is my new floor mat for our laundry hall.
I love it of course, and if it doesn't look familiar to you the zig zag blue is something I am making into a theme, here and here are two examples of why I just had to have it.

Zig Zag Jaipuri from Calypso St. Barth





Blueberries whats better? Blueberry muffins are according to Mr. B.
So with the beautiful blueberries that were on sale at our local organic mart I whipped up 6 fresh blueberry muffins that he and I are enjoying tonight.





Its cold and gray out there lately, not too many blue skies these days so lets hope for more blue tomorrow and maybe even a little sun?

Been Busy

The last couple days have been a nonstop crafting fest over here.
Today I whipped up this really cute milk bottle cookie mix thanks to Bakerella's recipe.
They are called "Cowgirl Cookies" and I'm giving them to a friend of mine for her bridal shower gift. She is a total cowgirl, and I just couldn't resist pairing this cute mix with her other baking oriented gift from her registry.
It's layers consist of flour with baking soda and power and salt, oats, pink and purple m&m's, chocolate chips, brown sugar, and chopped pecans. Yum!



I used a milk bottle, well because I have a bunch of them and although you are supposed to use a Ball jar I thought this little cow was just too cute not to use.



Yesterday I finished this very black and very red cake for a casino themed birthday party.


And tonight I just finished coating all these eggs (71 according to Rory) with paint for an Easter decor project I hope to be posting tomorrow.



What have you been up to?

Christmas cookies

It's the night before Christmas Eve, & I've been cooking most of the day and will be cooking all day tomorrow. In preparation of our traditional overnight cinnamon rolls I have 4 unused egg whites. I made a huge batch of "white cookies" which usually consist of egg whites, lemon zest, sugar and mini chocolate chips. This time I piped them into Christmas tree shapes after I tinted them green for a holiday theme. We sprinkled them with red, white and silver dragee balls as little ornaments.
Here they are in the oven slowly cooling, they'll stay here till tomorrow until they harden up all the way.



Oh, I got my Manger! Rory built it right after work, and I just finished up a Shepherd and a little fluffy sheep.
And a felted star above the manger leading the 3 wise men to the baby Jesus.