If you follow my Tweets, you’ll notice that I like to bake. Not just anything- but cupcakes in particular.
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Cupcakes. Oh, cupcakes. Who doesn’t love cupcakes? Has anyone ever looked at a plate of cupcakes and groaned, “Oh no. Someone brought cupcakes.” I mean after eating a whole plate of cupcakes I think I could understand that comment, but otherwise I think cupcakes are one of those universally loved objects- like puppies.
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Cupcakes: As lovable as puppies. (BTW, Lili is on the left!)
I never grew up baking. In fact, some of you may or may not know but I had a pretty strange childhood. I will have to blog about that at some point, but essentially I grew up in a traveling closet. It practically had an Easy Bake Oven as an entire kitchen.


I was a picky child when it came to eating and after years of trying to get me to try various foods, my mother, God bless her, simply gave up. Don’t get me wrong- she made me eat things that were good for me (which most of the time I now ironically prefer eating). But I think she figured it would be silly to teach me cooking or baking since I didn’t like to eat anything anyway.
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Definitely NOT a born baker. Or blonde. Shh! At least I was knowledgable of hip sunglasses.
My first memory of baking came from my middle school home ec’ class with a six foot tall teacher with frizzy hair the color of merlot whom everyone referred to as Big Bird. It was hard to take her seriously. Especially because she also taught the eternally awkward sex education class. In fact, I can’t remember cooking or baking any one thing in particular- just general cooking. Pasta, I guess? Maybe a cake? Hmm.


But then, after moving out on my own (one of the many times) I started experimenting with cooking simple things like chicken and making box cake (Funfetti!).
 

I discovered eBay at age 18 which led me to the discovery of cute little homemade aprons- which truly made any form of cooking or baking automatically a masterpiece because at least I looked the part.
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Love Holly's style!
I think I used to watch too much Girls Next Door circa the Holly Madison era. That girl dressed up in costume to do everything- including all those house-wifely activities like baking. I think she made it look cute.  


Enter Charleston, South Carolina a few years later.  


Charleston was like a city of dreams to me. There were so many things to try and discover. I had already begun liking different types of food before coming to Charleston, but Charleston is known for its food. And for good reason.
 

But one of the things I remember most about Charleston was this amazing little shop simply called Cupcake.
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I love Cupcake- the food & the shop!
Cupcake is the simplest idea for a store ever. It’s not a restaurant. It’s not an elaborate, pretentious bakery. There are no orders of fries on the side. There are no fancy wedding cakes (but they do make giant cupcakes!). Nothing but wonderful, yummy cupcakes.


Cupcake has a variety of flavors of cupcakes, and they bake 9 flavors daily. The cupcakes themselves are just beautiful, with huge mounds of pretty-colored frosting smothering the tops, enough to make a poor lactose intolerant person like me suck it up and pop lactase pills like a maniac just to gobble down. Cupcake also had cute merchandise- aprons (of course), mugs (I bought one! Love it!), and adorable little tees.
 

One of the things I loved about Cupcake is that they had a few little tables inside so you could meet up with a girlfriend and have a cupcake. I think they even rent the shop out for Cupcake parties.
 

They even had little wooden Cupcake voucher coins you could purchase and give to a friend- their version of a giftcard but for exactly the cost of one cupcake each.

 
I loved the whole concept behind Cupcake. That darling store still appears in my dreams and makes me think about owning my own little cupcake store one day. A cute little shop where girlfriends would meet and have cupcakes and some light drinks. I just love the idea.


(If you live near or visit Charleston, SC you MUST check out one of the Cupcake shoppes! Their website is www.freshcupcakes.com. If you can't make it there- check out the Cupcake blog at http://charlestoncupcakes.blogspot.com/.)
 

But until we live somewhere long enough so that I can settle down and realize my latest dream of owning my own cupcake bakery, I will continue my obsession with cupcake baking and apron purchasing in my own home.
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My fabulous apron & this picture are from http://www.etsy.com/shop/sassyapron
I just bought my third cupcake cookbook and my 7th apron- my first actual apron with cupcakes all over it (with matching headband). It will be dedicated solely to baking cupcakes. (From an awesome apron shop on Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/sassyapron) I'm already planning my next adorable Etsy cupcake purchase. I've become obsessed with an adorable pair of hand-stamped cupcake stud earrings (from http://www.etsy.com/shop/CatherineMarissa).
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Obsessed with these! From: http://www.etsy.com/shop/CatherineMarissa
I spent some time experimenting with various cupcake recipes this summer. Which was unfortunate since Nick wasn’t here, so it was just me in the house, baking for nobody in particular.


I would bake batches of 12-24 cupcakes then give away most of them to our neighbors. I thought, at least it will hopefully change their minds from calling me “the crazy neighbor who talks to her dog” to “the nice neighbor who bakes things and gives them to us.” (Ah, the joys of being a military wife when your husband is on deployment.)
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White cupcakes with homemade vanilla buttercream frosting
I’ve baked peanut butter cupcakes and chocolate cupcakes, yellow cupcakes and white cupcakes. The latter had homemade vanilla buttercream icing which I received some compliments for. I made macadamia nut maple cupcakes with maple cream cheese icing. Last week for Thanksgiving I really wanted to bake pumpkin cupcakes since I wasn’t really doing any traditional Thanksgiving food otherwise. Unfortunately everyone at the store the weekend before Thanksgiving wanted to make pumpkin pie, go figure, so of course there was no pumpkin puree or pumpkin spice.


Instead I stuck with the non-traditional “Holidays in Hawaii” theme and made pineapple cupcakes with citrus buttercream frosting. Yum! 
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Cup-A-Cake holders- stupid yet somewhat ingenious.
I also recently discovered Cup-A-Cake individual cupcake holders. I only recently learned that cupcakes could be frozen and eaten at a later date. If only I had known about that this summer, also known as “The Summer of Cupcakes.”
 

Anyway, now that I have my nifty cupcake holders, next time I bake  I plan to freeze a few cupcakes and stick them in the freezer for emergencies.


Sometimes, you have a cupcake emergency. It happens.


Basically this blog was a tiny rant on how much I love cupcakes and why you should too. (And puppies!)
Also, I wanted to tell you about this awesome new cupcake book I ordered, which isn’t so much about cupcake recipes as are my other two cupcake books, but more about fun, creative ways to decorate cupcakes. And it has fun pictures. And it’s cheap on Amazon. Check it out and look at the pretty pictures! It’s called What’s New, Cupcake?  
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Highly recommend!
(By the way, if you haven't noticed by now, I am an Amazon.com addict. Just a side note, but they are one of the very few companies that actually have a free shipping deal- $25 or more of qualifying items- that is still applicable to Hawaii. Most companies, even with a "free shipping" option, often still add a surcharge to ship here. Cough-cough-Victoria's Secret-Cough. Also, Amazon tends to be cheaper than a lot of companies- I only go through them for mp3's too. In other words, I link to the items I talk about almost exclusively to Amazon because, frankly, Amazon rocks.)
 

And because I’ve possibly made you hungry and craving small round cakes inside pretty paper wrappers, here’s my Hawaii for the Holidays cupcake recipe from my first cupcake cookbook, Easy Cupcakes.
 

Tropical Pineapple Cupcakes with Citrus Cream Frosting
Makes 12
(Sarah’s note: Unless I used the wrong kind of flour, I found this barely filled 9 cups and didn’t rise much. Came out delicious but you may want to double the recipe!
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The perfect Hawaiian cupcake.
Ingredients:
2 slices of canned pineapple in natural juice
6 tbsp butter, softened
Generous 3/8 cup superfine sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
Scant 5/8 cup self rising flour
1 tbsp juice from the canned pineapple

For the frosting
2 tbsp butter, softened
Generous 3/8 cup soft cream cheese
Grated rind of 1 lemon or lime (I loved the lime!)
Scant 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp lemon juice or lime juice

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put 12 paper cases in a muffin pan or put 12 double-layer paper cases on a baking sheet.

Finely chop the pineapple slices. Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat together until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the egg. Add the flour and, using a large metal spoon, fold into the mixture. Fold in the chopped pineapple and the pineapple juice. Spoon the batter into the paper cases.

Bake the cupcakes in the preheated over for 20 minutes, or until well risen and golden brown. Transfer to wire rack and let cool.

To make frosting, put the butter and cream cheese in a large bowl and, using an electric handheld mixer, beat together until smooth. Add the rind from the lemon or lime. Sift the confectioners’ sugar into the mixture, then beat together until well mixed. Gradually beat in the juice from the lemon or lime, adding enough to form a spreading consistency. (Sarah’s note: I actually found I needed to add a little more confectioners’ sugar to thicken the mix.)

When the cupcakes are cold, spread the frosting on top of each cake, or fill a pastry bag fitted with a little star tip and pipe the frosting on top. Store the cupcakes in the refrigerator until ready to serve.
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Thanksgiving day!
Then serve, and pretend you are in Hawaii enjoying the 80-something degree weather out on the beach with a Mai Tai in your hand. Enjoy! ;)
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It's been an amazing week. I've neglected blogging because frankly I've been enjoying spending time doing really stupid stuff with Nick.

He drove in Wednesday and got in about 11pm. Thursday was Thanksgiving. While pretty much everyone but me at the Rusty Scupper had to work, I got to have Nick spend the first holiday with my family. (Christmas day I'm flying to St Louis to spend Christmas with his family).
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My sis, niece, & me on Thanksgiving
We were totally lazy Thanksgiving- aren't you supposed to be? While everyone else was toasting to sparkling cider, I brought two bottles of champagne and had a good time with Nick. I fell asleep (passed out?) on him during the Dallas game (couldn't care less) and woke up to watch Four Christmases with Nick, my sister and brother and law and my brother in law's ex son in law (got that?).
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Bacon Menagerie & Beer-Mosa at Hightopps
Friday morning my favorite Baltimore radio station 98Rock put on an event called Bacon and Beer/Purple and Black Friday at Hightopps in Timonium, MD to celebrate the upcoming Baltimore Ravens vs. Pittsburgh Steelers game. The event was basically a Kegs and Eggs event- it started at 6am (which is legally when you can serve alcohol in Baltimore County) and had drink specials. 98Rock broadcasted live. It was a blast. I wish Nick had been a bit more into it...he was still feeling the effects of the champagne, the 6 pack of IPA, and a Captain and birch beer (a surprisingly good combo!) from Thanksgiving night. We did get some awesome breakfast food, a load of bacon, and I had two amazing beer-mosas. (Yup, that's right- beer-mosas.)  A really fun morning.

We came back to my parents house and slept a few hours, got up and ate and fell asleep on the couch again. We basically spent all of Friday in comfy clothes and catching up on episodes of Fringe from the last month. Oh, and eating pizza. Awesome day.
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Bacon & Beer!!
Nick left this morning though. I'm pretty psyched to see him again this weekend in New York City. My sister and I try to go every once in a while when someone from her work charters a bus for a day trip to NYC. She booked it again like three months ago for this upcoming Saturday, December 5th. Nick's birthday is Wednesday so I had the idea that maybe I could just change the bus ticket into a one way to NYC for Saturday and come back Sunday night instead. I've never spent the night in New York City before. It worked out well- My sister Tina and I are going to hang out all day Saturday. Nick is going to drive in and take the subway the rest if the way in on Saturday (since Groton, CT is only 2 hours away) and meet up with me for dinner when Tina takes the bus back that night at 6:15. We're going to see Shrek on Broadway (yay! our fist Broadway show!), stay at a military hotel which was a third of the cost of every other motel there and I can go back Sunday night.

It will be a nice way to celebrate his birthday and spend some time together. I still already miss him like crazy. It's sad to see all his stuff from this weekend gone when I came home from work today. Ugh.....two months from this Friday until Hawaii. It needs to come faster- it's way too cold here.
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Murphy 11/01/2009
 
The ironic thing is I finally sat down to update my blog yesterday after a few CRAZY long days in a row of moving and I entitled the blog Murphy. It was supposed to be about how Murphy's Law really took effect with our move. Twenty five minutes into typing my computer shut down to update and kicked me out of Firefox causing me to lose everything I'd just typed....Murphy's Law?

So last week was crazy. On top of the movers coming and everything being hectic with having them there packing, trying to separate everything we need for the next three months before we move to Hawaii, I also worked pretty full days on Monday, Tuesday, and even Wednesday, the day we actually left Charleston.

I ended up not having any problems with the movers only taking certain stuff. In fact, as I look for things I am realizing I forgot to put aside some things I really wanted to...like that pair of snow boots I bought last year that I have only worn twice and was looking forward to wearing here over the next three months. I'm sure they'll get tons of use in Hawaii. On an island. Haha.

Back to moving day. Wednesday we slept on the floor on a sleeping bag in the living room. At 4am I woke up because I heard Maggie making gulping noises. Sure enough I got up and turned the light on in time to see her vomiting on the carpet. I managed to get her over to the hardwood floor before she went again. Then she calmed down a little bit. At 4:45 and 5;15 she started getting sick again.

We already had our alarms set to go off at 5am. I never went back to sleep when Maggie started getting sick. On top of that, I woke up at 1am earlier and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour. So I basically got up at 3am that day. And went like 26 hours without sleep. Sooooo fun.

Maggie kept getting sick all day. I wasn't planning on feeding her or giving her water anyway to help keep her from getting sick in the car. Throughout the day Nick barricaded poor Maggie in the kitchen (on a clean-upable hard wood floor as opposed to the carpet which we were steam vacuuming so it could be inspected that day).

We left at 5:30ish pm to get on our way to Baltimore. I thought it was going to be more dramatic driving over the bridge one last time and seeing everything a last time- instead I was too distracted worrying about Maggie. She got sick again not even two minutes into the drive. Thank goodness I put down a shower curtain, her seat cover, and three towels on top of that JUST to make sure. Thank goodness.

Basically it was a pretty miserable and long trip. Maggie was just miserable. Even with Benadryl to calm her down. The last two hours I had the light on in the car watching her and she was gulping down trying not to be sick and almost falling over nodding off.

We got into Baltimore and arrived at my mom's house at 4:30am and didn't get to sleep until 5:30/6am. Maggie was sooo happy when I let her into the yard. Immediately her tail and ears went up. After being sick for 24 hours she wasn't sick anymore.

Today's Sunday so I've been in Baltimore since essentially Thursday morning. I got to have dinner and do pumpkin carving (my first time!) with my sister and her family and with Nick on Thursday night- after basically sleeping until 5pm. Friday we had dinner with my parents. Saturday for Halloween we dressed up as Bill and Sookie from True Blood and went downtown to Fells Point to see all the costumes. This morning Nick left for Connecticut.

Definitely a lot harder to say goodbye to him today after a year of living together than it ever was last year when he was stationed in Panama City and I didn't see him for nearly 3 months. I can't even imagine what April will be like when gets deployed for 6 months.

The nice thing is I will definitely see Nick for Thanksgiving weekend. Since it's only about a 5 hour trip (hopefully with not too much traffic) he will be coming down for that weekend to spend it with my family. We had such an awesome Thanksgiving together last year. Neither of us went home so we did our own little Thanksgiving with turkey, biscuits, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc. I made everything and we just hung out in sweat pants and made cocktails, ate, and watched 80's movies all day- I specifically remember Little Monsters with Fred Savage and Ben Savage. It sucks not to be able to have our own Thanksgiving again this year, but then again it will be awesome to have him here for our family Thanksgiving since he won't be here for Christmas.

I digress.

As of right now I am unemployed and freaking out a teeny bit.

I started Craigslisting tonight and am going to get up earlyish tomorrow to Craigslist some more, make some lists of local restaurants, and hit as many as possible to apply. Hopefully I won't have to resort to a restaurant that's too far away from home. I'm just crossing my fingers that I can find something quickly. I guess if I don't find something by the end of this week I'll just go to the downtown Hooters and try to work there again. Guess we'll see.

The nice thing will be not having a schedule this week- I'll get to meet up with some people I haven't seen in a while. So excited to see my best friend Erin tomorrow night for the first time in six months! And hopefully a bunch more people soon too.

Alright- up early tomorrow to job hunt....and try to figure out which clothes I have and which ones I forgot and actually somewhat organize the room I'm staying in at my parents. Ahhh, crossing fingers for that job.
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