friday pin | buffalo chicken cupcakes

yes, i pin. in fact i pin a lot. i thought i'd designate fridays as my "i pinned this and actually made/did/created" it day. i actually have a few of these things already under my belt. most pertain to the boy and consist of crafts and activities i've found to help occupy his short attention span. i've quickly discovered the attention span of a toddler is equivalent to that of a gnat. i have found a few things that will get him to sit for a minute or two.

anyways, i'm quickly getting off track. this is not the first food recipe i've gotten via pinterest. (see spicy goodness.) but it is the first one i've shared with people outside my household. (yes, my family has become human guinea pigs as far as pinterest recipes go. some have been great and others...not so much.)

for my first venture i chose to do something insane. super bowl party = chicken wings + crazy = cupcake topped with a chicken wing! this is what i pinned. and below is the end result. although it looks weird it tastes great! somehow the flavor combinations just work. i only made ten for the party but could have easily made more. i'll definitely make them again next year.

quick side note: little man saw these (sans chicken wing) on the counter and asked for one. i told him they were spicy but he insisted. i gave him a bite and he quickly told me it was spicy, then took another bite, then started crying and again told me it was spicy, then took another bite. it was just too funny cause he couldn't stop eating it cause it was that good but it just had that kick to it that made it a bit too much for him!

spicy goodness

if you ask my husband he'll tell you i rarely venture into the realm of cooking. our meals usually consist of something out of a box. (either the at-home kind or the to-go kind.) now with the little one i've been trying to make more of an effort. and with recipes literally at your fingertips it's making it a lot easier. tonight i made spicy thai noodles. a friend posted the recipe on pinterest and as soon as i saw it i knew we would be trying it. and i must say it's the first time i was VERY happy with the end result. and it's also the first time my husband has ever uttered the words, "this could be served in a restaurant."

conveniently being of asian descent i had most of the the ingredients in-house. i did modify the recipe by adding cooked chicken during the tossing of the noodles phase. we also ate it warm which we both preferred. i'm saving the left over sauce and i'm hoping i can cook up some noodles tomorrow and have a ready made lunch.

on my make-shift star scale i would have to give this recipe a 5 out of 5.

ginger kids

if you couldn't tell, one of my resolutions is to keep up with the blog. to at least post a few times a week, if not every day. one of the main things i want to post about is crafting. what's on the agenda, what's in progress, what's completed. i'm hoping it'll motivate me to keep things in motion.

this year my family came to visit for christmas and it's always nice to have activities for everyone to do. and if it's crafty in nature, it's even better. one thing we did was decorate gingerbread houses and cookies. while out shopping before christmas, i found a gingerbread house kit that contained 5 houses. i thought this would be perfect - everyone would get their own house to decorate. little did i know the houses were pretty much the same size as the images on the box. they were TINY. the roofs were the biggest surface to decorate and they were about the size of a credit card. i'm a stickler for detail and it was a challenge to do anything on these houses. i think we're done with kits, next christmas we'll do everything from scratch. that is if i can get my act together in time.

we had better success with decorating the cookies. i found a cookie cutter that's shaped like a house so that made up for the tiny house fiasco. here are a few of my creations. as you can see, my cookies tend to be somewhat non-traditional in nature.

everything is coming up poppy

one of my first crafting projects in a long time: baby bedding for my friend, greyson. she's expecting her first, a little girl, in a few weeks and i volunteered to make the bedding for her as a shower gift.

she picked the fabrics and i did the rest. this was the first time i've made either a baby bumper or a crib skirt. i crossed my fingers and prayed the end result would be somewhat recognizable. i ended up using the directions from amy butler's little stitches for little ones book. the directions were fairly simple. but i'm not sure if i'm out-of-practice because i did find myself reading and re-reading each step. what am i saying? i've always had a hard time reading patterns. it's like it's written in some kinda sewing code or for the dyslexic.

in the end, i was happy with the outcome as was greyson. the nursery is absolutely adorable. almost makes me want to have a girl for our next. almost.

another crafty project i did for her shower: poppy cupcakes. brett and grey are 90% sure they are gonna name her "poppy" so as one of her gifts i got her this. which inspired me to to makes these for the shower.

they are homemade peach cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. i used prepackaged fondant to make the flowers, didn't trust myself to make my own. unfortunately i could not find black edible candy balls in boone, so i used yellow instead. they still turned out great and actually matched the cake at the shower, at least the coloring (ha, ha. if you saw the cake you would understand why this is funny). nothing like a baby to inspire some craftiness. tomorrow i'll post my ghetto-rigged teeth guard i put on little mans crib yesterday.

"blueberry sorbet...the kind you find..."

last week one of aaron's patients brought him a huge box of blueberries. i'm talking HUGE! we love fresh fruit but we both knew there was no way we were gonna be able to finish them off before spoilage. so i went to my handy-dandy phone and looked up a recipe using the epicurious application. (if you have a smart phone, i highly recommend this free app.) unfortunately aaron's not a big cheesecake fan and i'm not a big pie fan so that nixed about 75% of the recipes. i was able to find a sorbet recipe that used six cups of blueberries, which is about half of what we have. i actually had all of the ingredients in house. score.

i got everything ready and we opened up the ice cream maker. (yes, we actually own an ice cream maker, it's the only thing aaron put on our wedding registry.)

me: i have to put an egg white in there about 3 minutes before it's done so that it can emulsify.
awes: what's emulsify?
me: i'm not sure, i know they do it on "top chef" all the time so it must be some fancy cooking term.
awes: eww, nice

emulsify: combining two liquids together which normally don't mix easily.

30 minutes later we were dining on some fresh sorbet. aaron laughed when i put them our martini glasses and made it look all fancy. i didn't strain the blueberries mixture so it has a bit of a pulpy taste. but it's good otherwise.