Happy Valentine's Day

I hope everyone has a wonderful Valentine's Day with their sweeties!

Cupcakes

Many know that I have an obsession regarding cupcakes. Recently, there have been a couple of new cupcake bakeries open in town. Due to my fascination I only felt it right to go and check out their goods. The first bakery I visited I was not entirely impressed with. The cupcakes were cute, looked delicious and came in a variety of flavors. However, after paying $2.00 a piece for mini cupcakes we soon found that they were dried out. I couldn't even finish my red velvet cupcake, and it was pint sized.

This last weekend, So Cupcake celebrated it's grand opening. Wanting to recoup from the prior weekend's cupcake disappointment - I made my way to Highland Drive. The store was decorated fabulously and the owners were a delight. So Cupcake sells full sized cupcakes as well as minis. This place more than made up for the other. Their cupcakes are amazing!

If anyone else loves cupcakes too, I completely recommend visiting So Cupcake.

Needle & Pin Productions

For Valentine's Day I have teamed up with my friend Hollee, who owns Emberlily Design to offer designer special gift packages, that include my aprons. Yay!

Aprons, Aprons, Aprons!

Some may know that I have been working on some reproduction vintage aprons and trying to make a business out of it. Well, I gave myself the deadline of having aprons available for sale through Etsy, by February 16th. Now that this deadline has been made public I have to make it happen.

While I was working the other night, Larry decided that my fabric basket was a comfy place to take a nap. I can't really blame her, it did still have some fabric and patterns in it so I imagine it was softer than the floor.

Chili

Yummy!

A few weeks ago I made homemade chili. This is a recipe taken from a chili that Jon's mom makes, but I have made a few changes along the way. There is no actual written recipe just a list of ingredients that I combine to make this delightful dish.

* Kidney Beans
* Chili Beans
* Chili Mix (the hot kind)
* Diced Tomatoes (I prefer the kind with jalapenos in them)
* Stewed Tomatoes
* Tomato Paste
* Tomato Sauce
* Ketchup
* Brown Sugar (This cuts the acidity created by the tomatoes)
* Morning Star Crumbles (This is a vegetarian substitute for 1 lb browned ground beef)
* Cheese
* Sour Cream

I then combine all of these ingredients together, except the cheese and sour cream, in my crockpot. I can then let it simmmer for a couple of hours. We think it's great to serve with breadsticks.

Jon's Birthday

The 11th was Jon's Birthday. As I posted earlier I wasn't able to post any pictures until now due to laptop/camera malfunction. However, Jon was nice enough to download my pictures for me and give me a cd of them.. so here they are!

For Jon's birthday there was no cake, instead I made him homemade butterscotch pudding. The whole time I was making it I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out because I hadn't done it before. I don't think I have ever tasted butterscotch pudding before so I was nervous about that too. In the end though Jon said it turned out good.

Modern Inconveniences

Friday was Jon's birthday and I was all excited to post pictures from that and other various things I have done in the past couple of days, but when I went to download the pictures from my camera, my laptop would not recognize my camera.

I have already had the problem where my USB ports on my laptop stopped working, so I went and got a cardbus which slides into one of the ports on the laptop to remedy the earlier USB issue. However, it's that cardbus that is no longer working. I might just have to break down and buy another laptop, since the USB issue is not repairable.