April Ice Storms Bring May...Flowers?

The school buses here in Simcoe County were cancelled for the past two days due to our (spring) winter weather. This winter has seemed never-ending, and with two "snow days" in April it is hard to believe spring will ever actually show itself! I'm Canadian so I like to forget certain things about our climate, like the fact that it sometimes snows on May 24th weekend (shh...don't talk about it!). Last year we were spoiled with summer-like temperatures in March, so this year has been cruel by comparison.

Ice storms in April aren't all bad, the icicles actually make everything look quite pretty.  With my boots on (boo!) I went walking around and documented this April event.

 

How is the weather where you are?

Getting Fancy With My First Wilton Decorating Tip

It's my brother's birthday today and the family is getting together tomorrow for a Mom-made turkey dinner to celebrate. I was tasked with dessert and at first I was going to make a cake, but then it turned into cupcakes, and now it's fancy cupcakes. I have been reading a tonne of new blogs lately and have been feeling really inspired to try new recipes and new techniques. Birthdays are a great excuse to learn some new baking skills.

After researching how fancy cupcakes are decorated at Wilton, I made a list and headed to the Bulk Barn so I could add some cake decorating tools to my collection.

I love Bulk barn when I'm trying something new. You can buy as much or as little as you want, which means you don't have spend a lot to try something out. I spent around $5 today and bought the bare minimum to decorate my cupcakes. I got one decorating tip, the 1M star shape, which the internet says is great for cupcakes. I also picked up a "large tip" coupler, which helps secure the decorating tip to the icing bag. Lastly I bought two disposable icing bags, which were sold in bulk. I loved that I was able to buy bulk icing bags! They also carried a box of 12 bags, but this is my first time fancy decorating, maybe I will hate doing it! Then I would have 11 useless bags lying around. I went with the safe option of 2/$0.99 (they are the faint triangles in the photo).

My cupcakes are already baked, but I'm holding off icing them until tomorrow. I hope it is fun!

Do you use cake decorating tips? What is the most fun or elaborate thing you have decorated?

I Love Leftovers - Especially Turkey!

Everything we ate for dinner tonight was entirely John's fault! :)

It's the first of the month, which is often when I think about going for more walks and exercising a little more portion control at meal time. I had to put those thoughts on hold though, as we had turkey leftovers in the house and John excitedly announced that we should make awesome club sandwiches. How could I disagree?

This is only one sandwich, you guys!

So we had triple-decker club sandwiches full of turkey, bacon, cheese, and mayo. Apparently others put lettuce and tomato in theirs, but we forgot about vegetables! Whoops! We fried up some mashed potatoes and had some leftover sweet potatoes, so our meal wasn't completely vegetable free, right?

We followed that up with some cake John's grandma made.

It was a yellow cake but she told us: "It's a chocolate cake, I just didn't add the cocoa". Adorable.

I am very full and very happy right now. Hope you are too!

Anniversary Card - 1 Year Smoke Free

A friend of mine is marking one year free of cigarettes today and is having a get together to celebrate. According to her count, over the past year she did not smoke 9500 cigarettes! That is amazing! I bet her lungs feel great!

A congratulatory card was needed to commemorate her achievement. Over the past few months I have gotten out of the habit of making my own cards, but I've been socializing with quite a few card making bloggers recently and it has inspired me to get back into it.

For this card I did a spin on the saying 'quitters never win', changing it up to 'quitters always win", as they always do when they quit smoking!

When I first looked at the finished card I thought the design looked like a quilting square. I quickly read over the words and it looked like it said 'quilters always win'.  It is true that quilters always win. The way the card turned out may mean that I'm subconsciously into quilters, but I accept that.

So a big congratulations to my friend celebrating her 1st year smoke free! And many more to come!

Spring Oreo Truffles

I have been itching to make some Oreo Truffles, which are the amazing combination of a bag of crushed Oreos, a package of cream cheese, and some chocolate coating [find the recipe here]. For some spring flare, I used white chocolate coating that I dyed pastel colours. I have made these truffles before, but they were trickier this time around, probably because I gave myself the added pressure of wanting the colours to look good (normally I just cover everything in milk chocolate, which hides any imperfections).

Good Looking Spring Oreo Truffles

Not pictured (love editorial control!) are the truffles where the coating was too thin, or where the truffle part got mixed into the coating, giving them a dirty snow kind of look. I had made these before so I only skimmed the recipe, but it turned out I skimmed the part about using two forks to help coat the truffles evenly. Oops. So these ended up being a little harder to make than I thought, but the amazing thing about baking is that even if the end result doesn't look like it's supposed to, it still tastes pretty good!

Tasty Spring Oreo Truffle