Let them Eat Cupcakes!

Tomorrow is one of my best friend's baby shower. It's the first friend of mine to have a baby, which kind of explains why I've spent a few paychecks on the kid already. I just can't help it!

Baby Linden is having an animal themed baby shower tomorrow (as if she'll really know) and her chosen animal is a fox, so I decided to browse Pinterest for some ideas for sweets that fit the theme.

I found two images of owl and fox cupcakes, but neither of the links had recipes attached, so I decided to wing it and create my own. They turned out pretty well if I must say!

Owl Cupcakes

Cross eyed? Perhaps.

You will need:

1 box cake mix (I used yellow)

1 bag double stuff Oreos

1 can white icing

1 bag Reese's Pieces

Pink food coloring

Cupcake liners

To assemble:

1. Bake cupcakes as directed.

2. While cupcakes are baking, mix red food coloring into the white icing. Mix until desired "pinkness" is achieved.

3. Carefully twist your Oreos apart. If you do this correctly, you'll have approximately 30 Oreo halves with frosting and 30 without. You can discard the ones without frosting, eat them, save them for another recipe whatever. The frosting halves will have some Oreo remnants on them, so take a knife and carefully take off the top layer. Don't apply too much pressure to the sides of the Oreos or they will break!

4. Separate your Reese's Pieces. You'll need 2 brown ones for each set of eyes and 1 orange one for each nose. You can eat the yellows like I did or save them for another recipe.








5. To make the eyes, apply a tiny amount of icing to the back of the brown Reese's Pieces. Press firmly onto the Oreo half wherever you'd like the eye. My owls seem to be a bit cross eyed, but I think they're cute.

6. When cupcakes are completely cooled you can begin to ice them. Apply a fairly generous amount of your pink icing to each cupcake and while the icing is still fresh press two of your eyes into the cupcakes. I found that placing the eyes about half way down the cupcake seemed to work fairly well.

7. Place the orange Reese's Pieces directly beneath the set of eyes so that it's vertical to the cupcake. Don't want a flat nose!

Ta-da!

You could easily change the color of the owl itself-- I opted for pink as it's for a baby girl's shower, but they could easily be any color under the sun!

Almost too cute to eat

Fox Cupcakes

 You will need:          

1 box cake mix (I used chocolate)

1 packet Caramel Frosting Creations

1 can Duncan Hines Frosting Creations icing base

Chocolate covered raisins or coffee beans 

1 small tube black icing

Can of white icing

1. Prepare cupcakes as directed.

2. To make the fox coloring, mix in the frosting creations packet into the icing base. Both of these were new products to me, but it made getting the fox color right pretty easy-- if these aren't available at your super market I did see a few grey color options in the icing department.

I thought I'd need two packets to get the coloring dark enough, but only needed one.

Pretty sure you could use any white icing with the packet?

3. When the cupcakes are completely cooled, begin by icing the white portion of the fox face. To do this, simply draw two half moons on either side of the cupcake using the icing tube or a knife. The brown icing will cover any white, so if you wanted to cover the entire cupcake with white you could, but the half moons were easy to create and made the perfect lines for putting in the brown icing!

4. After your white half moons are complete, take a knife and carefully fill in the brown icing at the top of the cupcake and down the center of the fox face.

5. To create "ears" take the tip of your knife and swirl it in the icing jar. The ears are tricky and none of mine look THAT awesome, but essentially just plop a bit on the cupcake and mess with it until you're happy. **If you had a pastry bag I'm assuming this would be a lot easier and prettier.**

6. Push a chocolate covered raisin or coffee bean between your two white half moons to create the nose and carefully create the eyes using your black icing.

Ta-da!

I will definitely make the owls again-- and the foxes as well, if I get a cheap pastry bag to make the icing a lot easier. All in all, these took about 3 hours to make (including bake time) so not a significant investment of time for a fun addition to the shower tomorrow.

Hopefully little baby Linden and her Mamma get a kick out of these!

                                                            

Back at it

Christmas was great-- full post to come once I find my camera cord (side note: I think one day I'll find a pile of 20 camera cords that I've lost)-- but with all the good food I've been consuming it was time to get back to the gym today.

I'm trying to get faster (keep in mind that's a relative term for me) so I've been using interval workouts to try to get my stubby legs to turn over a bit quicker.

This is what I threw together for this morning-- half mile intervals with rest inbetween. I'd wanted to do two more intervals at 7.7 and 7.9 but didn't wake up early enough and was out of time!

Next time I will definitely increase the interval speed or do additional intervals. I hate feeling like I have gas left in the tank after a workout and today was one of those days!

Now, off to find a leftover Christmas cookie....

War of the Leashes

If you couldn't tell by now, my parents have two pups that I absolutely adore. PJ is a slightly neurotic English setter and Hunter is our "walk up beagle" as my Dad would say- meaning he just sort of walked up to our house a few years ago and just kind of stuck around.

When I'm home, one of my favorite things to do is go on long walks with the puppies. It's usually something the girls do together so we can gossip and catch up, but lately Hunter has proven to be quite the pain when trying to go on a jaunt.

On Christmas day Hunter lasted about a mile before he sat in the middle of the road and refused to go any further. No amount of cajoling would get him to budge, so we ended up trading turns carrying him (22 solid pounds!) back home.

So this morning when I woke up wanting to take a walk I decided to not take Hunter. This would not do, and he cried and cried until I finally leashed him up as well, telling my sister I'd call her when he inevitably refused to continue.

Guess how far he made it? Two steps from home.

This is where things got pretty humorous-- as I was walking back toward the house to put Hunter back up, PJ decided to sit down. He didn't want to give up his walk!


What a mess!

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Baby it's Cold....Inside?

It may have been hovering around the 60 degree mark today in SC (you know, a few degrees more, probably not less), but there's something that's a given at Christmas in my household:


No shame in turning up the AC so that everyone can enjoy the crackling flames of a nice fire now is there? Part of my Dad died a little the day he accepted a gas grill as a gift, but I know he'd have a heart attack on the spot if someone suggested we move to gas logs.

There's just something about a fire that makes Christmas complete- it's perfect for a lazy afternoon of napping and watching "A Christmas Story" on repeat.

So what if I sweated a bit as I grabbed a few logs from outside to restock? Perfect weather for snuggling on the inside. And since I don't generally leave the house on Christmas, that's a-ok with me.


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Remember that Time you Wet your Pants?

Um, yeah, but I try to forget it since it's pretty embarrassing. It's something my parents bring up every time we decorate the Christmas tree each year.

Decorating the tree is a big family tradition- when we were little we'd pick a Saturday night, bake slice and bake cookies, make a fire, crank up the Christmas tunes and go to town on the tree.



My parents have decided that decorating the tree signifies that Christmas can begin, so we don't decorate now until every child is home. This year that meant decorating the tree on the 23rd, but if I ever came home and found it decorated I'm sure I'd be crestfallen.

Each year my Dad gives us a brand new ornament to hang-- he's even started sending them to our respective apartments now that we're older-- and they always signify something about the past year or something that reminds him of each one of us.

We hear stories about the older ornaments-- "I got this in third grade for perfect attendance!" or "your grandparents brought this back from Mexcio!" and all take a turn getting on the ladder to hang the ornaments we can't quite reach.

The finished product? Gorgeous.



Wetting my pants? Oh yeah...apparently when the twin and I were three we thought it was the most wonderful thing ever. While we were napping my parents strung the lights on our Christmas tree that year, and when we came downstairs they turned off the lights so we could see how pretty it was.

They won't say who kicked it off (I'm betting on Allie, couldn't have been me) but one of us got so giddy at seeing the tree that we wet our pants. And when you have twins, things happen in double.

Don't worry- no accidents this year!



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Homeward Bound!

Just waiting on one last reindeer (the twin's take a bus down from NYC) and then Santa (my brother) can head out with his sleigh (his car) to take all of us kiddos home for the holidays.

Last Christmas? Hello dark hair.

Corny? Absolutely. But at Christmas I wouldn't have it any other way. I am so excited to see these two that I can barely stand it:

Hopefully they'll be more excited to see me this time.

And pretty excited to see these folks. Yeah, it's not from home, but it's the only picture I could find. I do expect to be drinking a lot of wine and sweating a bunch while at home, so it works.

What I love most about Christmas is that my family does the same thing, without fail, every single year. Over 50+ years of traditions still going strong.

SC or bust!

Miles to go before I sleep

Moving sucks. No other way to say it-- I once moved apartments that were half a mile away from each other and it was still an experience I'd like to forget. I'm a big packrat and somehow my stuff seems to multiply each time I move. Add to that that I don't have the patience to delicately wrap each glass, plate and frame -- means you usually find a pretty grumpy Elliott during the weeks leading up to a move.

But moving to the other side of the world has thrown in a few more things "to do" than simply shove things in a couple of boxes. I'm not sure I know all of things that I need to do before saying goodbye to Uncle Sam (and the fiscal cliff) for a year, but in Type A fashion I started a list of things that I could start with:

• Cancel gym membership - DONE! Must easier than I thought- although it will take a month to cancel, I was totally expecting some sort of sales pitch for why I should keep it active

• Add Mom and Dad to bank account- after a rather unpleasant experience trying to transfer money from my US account to an Aussie account, my bank told me it'd probably be easier to add the parentals to my account so they could do things on my behalf. A bit weird? Yes. But feel free to slip any spare change in the account anytime you want M and D!

• Figure out Verizon account- my brother, sister and I share a family plan right now so I don't want them stuck with  a higher bill all of a sudden, but I guess I have been paying 1/3 of a bill that I haven't used for awhile now. We used a grand total of 149 minutes (between the three of us) last month, so perhaps they should drop down to paying per minute or something. I'm sure this will be a battle

• Forward my mail - DONE! Thanks M and D

• Get rid of Comast! - I am the most excited about this- the bill has crept up each cycle by a few dollars to the point where I feel like I'm paying a small fortune for the ability to watch Bravo, HGTV and TLC. Sayonara, you've been terrible!

• Find movers- DONE! I was browsing LivingSocial's website today and came across a moving deal- in the end it's only about $65 off, but a penny is a penny, right?

• Find a storage unit- DONE! Surprisingly easy, and they also had a deal for half off if you purchased by today and moved stuff in by end of next week. Score!

• Figure out what to take and what to leave - Umm, hard. I want everything with me, but I know I only need about 1/8 of it. I know I want to take my duvet cover and two little Etsy prints that I love for my new room, but I'm trying to restrain myself with everything else. Really telling myself that no, I don't need those sparkly heels or the rainboots with whales on them. Maybe.

• Actually pack. This will probably happen the morning of the 5th in a frantic manner.

What am I missing? Surely there's something big I gotta do that I'll find out about a few months in and be SOL?

Back in America

I've been back in the good 'ol USA for about a week now, and have used the "cold" weather (low 50's, I'm a wimp) as an excuse to watch a lot of daytime TV and to eat a lot of really great food. Along the way I've made some pretty astute observations about some great and some not so great things about being back for the holidays.

1. Whole Foods really is the greatest thing on earth. This is my version of heaven:

Not my picture- from a WP article

Seriously, I've eaten here three times since coming back and had an embarrassing amount of "salad" crammed into my box each time. I have salad in quotes because I rarely get lettuce at Whole Foods-- it's way more about the different types of tofu (I have never figured out how they make it taste awesome and I make it taste terrible), random quinoa salads and mac and cheese. Sydney could really use a Whole Foods-- the whole lure of being healthy and then finding out you can eat like an organic pig is pretty fantastic.

2. Clothing is cheap. Like ridiculously so. I guess that's why my closet still looks like it's full when I've got 50 lbs of stuff in suitcases to show that it should be empty. Girl's gotta have variety but coming back and seeing that I can get a pair of pants at Loft for $15 or a sweater for $20 is making me realize two things: 1. I need to donate a lot of stuff before moving and 2. Too bad the summer stuff isn't at stores right now, or I'd stock up so I wouldn't have to buy things in Sydney.

3. I've turned into a coffee snob. If you recall, I had a terrible time letting go of the Starbucks addiction, but I'd really come to love my skim cappuccinos  It turns out that for some reason America doesn't add the chocolate shavings to the top of a cappuccino  At first I thought it was just an oversight by the tired barista at the green giant one day, but I also stopped at Misha's in Alexandria one day and got the same experience.

Um, that's a bold statement.

I guess Wikipedia does say that cappuccinos MAY contain chocolate, but still-- the chocolate is the best part!

 4. American TV = I die. Gotta be a reason we're all fatties over here, right? After plowing through all of the back episodes of The New Girl, The Mindy Project (get on that Sydney, stat), Glee and everything HGTV (again Sydney, how bout a little House Hunters?) I'm surprised I don't have bedsores. So many options, so little time! I'm not sure who does the Sydney lineups, but the options usually are repeats of the same show over and over again. 

The only ironic thing here is that Homeland is not on a premium channel in Sydney. I don't have Showtime here in the states so I'll have to go back to Sydney to watch the season finale!

I wonder what other differences I'll notice after a year of being away?

Annnnnnd....we're back!

So that other blog? Yeah, over it.

Kidding. We'll just call it a mysterious case of the suddenly disappearing blog and leave it at that.

Round two, shall we? Up next: short adventures in America before heading back to explore Sydney a bit more!