Oh my gosh, I need this.

Well... will need it. When the time comes, of course :-)

Cookies and Cream Cupcakes!

Tonight I used this recipe from my favorite food blog, Beantown Baker. I used yellow cake instead of white because I already had some in the house.

I thought this was such a cute idea, to put the oreos in the bottom!

It's so cool when they come out and the oreo is baked into the cupcake :-)

And the best news of all is, my frosting doesn't look like poops! WIN!! I used a jar of frosting rather than making my own. I did mix it with some crumbled oreos though.

I haven't yet eaten a whole one of these. I have eaten the bits and pieces together though, and it was verra yummy! I used the cone method that Jen from Beantown Baker uses, so I ate some of the bits I cut out with the leftover frosting. I'm confident they will be excellent in full cupcake form.

Update: I had one at lunch. They were very good. I'm glad I made them a bit small, because the cookie being hard at the bottom made them a bit hard to eat. If they had been bigger I wouldn't have been able to get cookie, cupcake, and frosting all in one bite. And we all know that would have been a terrible crime! Overall, I approve, and will make them again!

"Office" update!

Last week J finally finished sanding the ceiling, and after that it just flew! He quickly primed and painted the ceiling and walls. I am so totally in love with this color. It is exactly what I wanted - not grey, not brown, just somewhere in the middle.

Please ignore the afwul faux wood closet door. We are still trying to decide how to handle that right now. We don't want to spend a ton of money on new doors for it, but we need to do something to get rid of that eyesore.

View from the other side.

The view into the kitchen - I love looking into this room from the kitchen/living room, and vice versa. The colors all work perfectly together - the dark grey/brown really picks up the sable glaze on our cabinets, and it compliments the blue walls so nicely. I think my favorite view is from the living room sofa, looking at the blue walls in the living room, to the grey brown walls in the office, and finally to the tan walls in the hallway. I need to get a good shot of those three colors together.

Here's a shot of the ceiling. I think J did an awesome job for his first time ever! There are a few flaws, but they are hardly noticable.

Friday night after J finished painting, we headed to Home Depot to grab a light. We found this one randomly in a clearance section, on the very top of the racks. You know how tall those racks are at Home Depot - it was high up! I have no idea how we spotted it, but I'm so glad we did! It is so unique, and exactly what we didn't know we were looking for. And it was half off! I can't get a good picture of it with the light on unfortunately.

Oh and also ignore how the crown moldings are half hanging off the wall - J is in the middle of putting those back up haha. I'll be sure to post pics of the final product once we have things put back into the room and hung up. For anyone curious, the color is Ben Moore 994 - Fallen Timber. We got their Aura paint so that we didn't need to get tinted primer.

I need to AW for a minute - because we got the drywall for free from his parents (they happened to have 3 sheets leftover from their recent project, which was exactly how many we needed in there!), we so far have only paid for the paint and the light in this room! Woot!

AND... Bonus! My dad came over last week and fiiiinally put the glass racks under the uppers in our 'china cabinet' area! So I was finally able to hang all of our glasses there. I'm psyched! Hopefully next he will put the extra supports in the two top right shelves so that I can put the rest of the china up haha. Right now they are too wide to support that much weight.

Sadly, no update.

I was really really hoping that the office would be close to done today. J is still working on sanding the mud on the ceiling. GRRRR. Maybe next week? It has to be done two weeks from now, because that is when our house guests are coming. Time to light a fire under his ass, methinks!

Speaking of those house guests - Jenny and her husband are coming to visit!!! WOOHOO!!! In two weeks they will be flying in and six days of fun will begin :-D I can't wait! It will be both of their first trips to Mass, so we'll be doing all the fun touristy things in Boston, plus taking them to Maine. Did I mention I can't wait? Because I can't :-)

Vacationland.

We spent the weekend in Maine again. It was glorious! The weather was amazing - 80s and 90s all weekend. I am finally close to getting rid of those awful tan lines I aquired back on the Fourth of July...

I know you're jealous. But they are pretty much gone now! Woot!

Normally my brother invites half his school up there every weekend, but for once it was just J and I, Mom and Dad, and J&K. It was so nice to hang out just the six of us. We all get along really well. I really and truly hope that K is FSIL, because I lub her. At this point I can't imagine she won't be. They are moving in together in a couple of weeks (they graduate this weekend), and have lots of plans for the future that they don't hide from anyone.

And can we take a minute to acknowledge that my brother is graduating college this weekend!!!!! Holy. Crap. It makes me feel old, and not in the sense that most people usually say that. More in the sense that J and I used to go visit him at school a bunch, so after I graduated we still had that connection to the college lifestyle through my brother. Now that he is graduating, it's like the final connection is being severed, and we are all officially adults now. Yikes!

That probably sounds really dumb from the person who is planning on having a baby soon, but oh well haha.

Speaking of that baby thing... we may have used our last condom last week! Not too sure still. J came close to skipping it then, but then changed his mind and said he wanted to wait until September so that I wasn't due too close to BFF's wedding (April). I am still convinced that we won't get KU on the first try, but he now thinks we will, so wants to be careful about timing. I guess I can't blame him.

But I ovulated last week, so I know it will be September by the next time I ovulate. So hopefully the condoms will be put away for a while! J doesn't know when I ovulated - that is the latest rule we made. I won't tell him, and he can't ask (although he already broke the rule and asked once, but I refused to tell him haha). Either way, I will be sure to update our babymaking status on here, of course :-P

Finally, I leave you today with one more photo of my scrumptious ice cream cupcakes! I had one at lunch, and it's official - I'm addicted. I will totally be making these again, and soon!

Eating Ice Cream Cupcakes = Great Success!!

Apparently looks are not everything, after all. These cupcakes were friggin delicious! No one minded a bit that the frosting looked like poops. Everyone had two, because one just wasn't enough. I will definitely be making these again. Hopefully with a bit of practice I will perfect the frosting so that it is a wee bit more appetizing!

And if you still don't believe that these babies were good, check out how much this baby loved them...

If that doesn't sell you, well.. I'm afraid you are beyond help. Please vacate the premises immediately, surrendering all cupcakes on the way out.

Mmm excellent, more for me!

Ice Cream Cupcakes!

Today is J's 27th birthday! My old man. And I don't mean because he is turning 27, I mean because he has to ask me weekly how old he is. ::sigh::

As you may know, I am huuuuge on birthdays. J is not. But he has learned by now that it is just too bad, because I will make a big deal out of his anyway! Since he is not a huge fan of cake, I was trying to think of something creative to make him this year for his birthday dessert. I came across this recipe from one of my favorite food blogs, Beantown Baker.

I let J pick whatever flavors he wanted, and he was torn between strawberry and coffee ice cream. I decided why not make them both!

I am a total cheater and I used a boxed cake mix, as well as frosting from a jar. Sue me. The cake is devil's food, and the frosting is chocolate cream cheese. We had a little leftover plain cream cheese frosting so I used that for a few as well. I ended up actually buying four different kinds of ice cream, which was dumb but oh well. They were buy one get one, and there were some really tempting flavors! So we have coffee, strawberry, mint oreo, and chocolate peanut butter cup.

Jen from Beantown Baker said that she filled the cupcakes a little less than half full. I think this looks about right, no?

Apparently not. They came out baked all the way to the top of the cups! I ended up having to cut the tops of them off. For the second tray, I used less, and they still baked up really high.

::snort:: Baked up.. really high..

Anyway, it was okay because I was supposed to use a couple of the cupcakes to mix with the ice cream anyway, so I just used the cut out bits instead. However, after making 18 cupcakes (I only have a tray for 12 and a half tray for 6.. I need to get on that) I still had about half of the batter left, and I realized that was going to make a lot of cupcakes. Instead I used the last of it to make a 9" round cake.

So the cupcakes are done, and I am supposed to mix the cut outs with a bit of ice cream, spread that on, then spread just ice cream on the top. Well I still hadn't made the cake part small enough, because after adding just the slightest bit of cake/ice cream mixture, they were reaching the top of the cups! I stopped after three and cut more cake out of the rest, but I was starting to be afraid they would not have enough cake after all was said and done!

At this point they were becoming a bit of a melty mess, and I forgot to take a picture of this stage. I popped them in the freezer and we went to my parents' house to hang out with them and J&K. Played a little Scattergories, good times.

Got back a couple hours later and they were fully frozen - sweet! Time to attempt frosting them. I decided to pipe the frosting on like Jen did, but rather than get out my piping bag, I decided to just use plastic baggies with the corners cut off.

Bad idea.

My frosting looks like poops. Also please notice the top right cupcake where the plastic baggie burst and a big ol plop of frosting fell on top... so that is how it stayed.

And can we talk about the fact that as I was doing it the ice cream started to melt again, and for some reason ice cream apparently defies gravity and rather than melting over the sides of the cups, it started moving up through the freshly piped poop, I mean frosting???

Ya that really helped... not! I am headed straight for Cake Wrecks, I'm telling you!

Somehow, a few of them turned out semi-decent looking. I particularly like this coffee one, as well as the strawberry one that I showed at the beginning of the post. (Did you like how I showed the appetizing one first, to make you keep reading? How do you like that bit of trickery?)

Here they are sitting in the freezer, waiting to be eaten tonight. I will post again after we eat them to let you know how they turned out.

So about that 9 inch round. I figured I would use this to decorate and draw attention to the fact that it is J's birthday we are celebrating. Yeah, I should have just called it a day. If the cupcakes don't get me into Cake Wrecks, this certainly will!!

But at least my cake stand is pretty! I have to take a minute to AW this stand. I luurrve it. I found it at Home Goods recently and have been dying to use it. So I guess not all was a loss!

Stay tuned for a recap of the most important part of the cupcakes - eating them.

Our latest project, and why I've been a bad blogger..

The office/future foyer. This room used to be the third bedroom, which we used as an office. When we did our kitchen reno last summer/fall, we closed off the hallway and put a door into this room, in effect making it the new hallway. Eventually, the windows will come out and a front door will go in, so that our living room no longer hosts the current front door.

While it was the third bedroom/office, I got a little experimental with paint. Yes, I painted one wall orange, the others white, with black trim. It was fun for a room that no one really sees, but I wouldn't do it again, especially not in a main living space. I figure I am allowed one bad paint choice out of every ten :-) Now that this room is open to the rest of the house, it needed to be painted again.

We also had awful tiled ceiling in there that needed to come down. J ripped it out a couple of weeks ago, and last week put up the drywall for a new ceiling. He is currently doing the mud on the ceiling, as well as the wall where it needed to be fixed anyway. This first picture is the view looking from the end of the hallway where the other two bedrooms are, into the future foyer. The doorway on the right leads to the living room/kitchen.

In this next picture you can see the paint colors. The top left one, the brown one, is the one we chose. Once it is not next to two other grey samples and the trim and ceiling are all white, it should look like a greyish brown. Hopefully I calculated correctly haha.

Now, all of the things that were in this room are currently residing in the guest bedroom - aka, my dressing room. My closet is in the guest bedroom because it is the biggest closet in the house (not that that's saying much). I am going crazy having two rooms worth of furniture in an already small room, trying to maneuver around everything just to get dressed every day! Hopefully I will be posting this time next week with the after pictures, but we'll see if I get that lucky.

So this, coupled with listening to the Outlander series, has kept me away from the computer. I promise to start updating the blog more frequently again!

Surprise Sox Game!

Last Tuesday my Dad's friend had two extra tickets so my Dad took me with them. It was Jim Rice Day at Fenway - they were retiring his number. The ceremony was really neat to see. Here are some pictures from the ceremony/game!

#14 in the field..

..and up with the other numbers!

Jim Rice holding his own replica of the number.

Papelbon pitching. Right before he blew the game. GRRR. Oh well, it's still always fun to be at Fenway, win or lose :-)