Cupcakes & Driving

First, I have another confession to make.  I love Pinterest.  I've been browsing and searching and wondering "should I pin this?" for days now and I can't help myself.  The upside of my obsession is that people pin all kinds of awesome foods and their other culinary projects.  One of them that has caught my eye and kept my attention is these amazing little cupcakes.

[caption id="attachment_250" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Photo courtesy of Pinterest"][/caption]

They're so delicate and pretty and (like most cupcakes) look almost too good to eat.    But I think I'm obsessed with them because the one time I tried to make roses out of icing they looked a lot more like the doodles you draw with your eyes closed while using your non-dominant hand.

I've been looking for tutorials, instructional videos, anything on how to make them but everything I've found seems to be pretty lacking.  Almost without fail they have three steps.  1 - make the center a tight spiral on a rose pin, 2 - make the petals outside the center spiral overlapping and progressively large, 3 - slide the rose off the pin.

Am I wrong to ask for more than that?  Should I just be continually trying my hand at it instead of looking for more detailed directions?

Please tell me that someone out there has something I can use to learn this skill.  Otherwise, my husband is going to be appalled at the amount of buttercream I can cover the kitchen in while trying to be skillful.

In other news, I love my new Jeep and I hate driving in this country.

Anti-Resolution Recipes

Happy New Year, everyone!  I’ve got a list of resolutions about a mile long and, just like everyone else, one of them is to eat better in order to drop a little weight.  One of my other resolutions is to write more… keeping up with this thing has got to become a priority.  While going through photos to see what I wanted to post I found this (see delicious photo above).  It’s a Lemon Chiffon cake with fresh Whipped Cream-Coconut Icing that I made months ago.  And now I want to make one again… and eat the whole thing and throw resolutions out the window.  

Out of the Box

I could give you the requisite, "Sorry for the delay I've been really busy"  but instead I'll jump into tell you about the most recent goings-on of my kitchen, and try to do better next time. 

Halloween has come and gone and so has the Chocolate Spider cake that I made for our neighborhood’s Halloween party.  One of the ladies commented on how “clever” it was to dye the white cake orange but her son couldn’t eat it because he’s allergic to dyes.  Luckily, I hadn’t used any dye.