Christmas Baking

Hey everyone! First and foremost, Merry Christmas Eve!! My family and I are all in for the night and we've already been to Christmas Mass and Christmas Dinner! I'm ready to get in my Lilly jammies and hit the hay!

Today I baked over 40 cupcakes for a family Christmas party tomorrow that my godmother--my Aunt Patricia--and her family are hosting. We all will hop over (or in our case, drive 5 hours through the treacherous Belt Parkway and NJ Turnpike to get to Lawng-I-land.) to her house to see each other and have some fun catching up and playing open trading--to many people that's the White Elephant trading game!

In order to pass some time and have something other than a ham to bring to the party, my mom suggested that I bake some cupcakes! I got all the different decorating things I needed yesterday and enjoyed my 4.5 hours of baking today! I absolutely love cupcakes and these were some of the goodies I came up with:

I was MOST proud of those wreaths! Using a star tip and the kind of decorating frosting you can buy that comes with the 4 different tips, I piped the wreaths myself! I loved loved loved how they came out!

Here's a close up of the wreaths!

I also dyed some of the frosting pink--what a shocker! Then I made other designs like the santa hat and some more artsy ones like the one next to the hat. I also added first name initials of all my cousins to cupcakes so everyone had their own!

My mom also found the most darling sprinkles in the grocery store that we added as well!

These were the few that we're keeping at home for ourselves!

As you can see with this red bow, sometimes the frosting came out WAY too fast and thick if you applied too much pressure to the nozzle. Clearly, this was not going to make the trip with us!!

As you're all baking at this time of the year, keep the wreath design in mind! It is super festive and easy to do!

Merry Christmas!

xxKatie

Happy Birthday Lilly! AND HUGE LILLY NEWS!

Today is Lilly's birthday! Happy 78th!

ALSO BIG NEWS: Lilly Pulitzer is going to have their first online sale in TWO DAYS. I believe its a gigantic Jubilee sale that starts staggered from 7am-11am. If you're a facebook fan (which you should be A-SAP) you get to see everything they'll have at 7am. I will be up BRIGHT and early before my 8am class that day!

It is 4 Days Only, but I know it will last WAY shorter than that! All of us who are facebook fans will be getting the cream of the crop right at 7am! There are like 3 Jubilee items that I have SEVERE buyer's remorse that I didn't buy, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they might just be there for me! Maybe I'll snag something early and make it "an early Christmas present" for myself (how does that sound, mom?)! Make sure that you join on facebook to get to see everything that is available especially if you're sizes 4-8, which seems to sell out the fastest at my store!

xxKatie

Cupcakes, yum!

I was just browsing Martha Stewart's Cupcake Week on her website, and thought these looked so yummy and adorable. I included links to their recipes if you want to try them out too! I'm going to have to think of a good reason to bake lots of cupcakes in the near future :-)

Hummingbird Cupcake

Coconut Cupcake
Meyer Lemon Cupcake
Strawberry Cupcake

A Post for Me

Hi all! I'm sitting here watching the clock and counting the seconds to spring break! It is just about the only thing on my mind these days and I can't wait! I saw this post on another blog "In the Pink", so I thought I'd copy it and do it myself. I think these little introspective posts are fun sometimes, so definitely post it yourself!!

If I was a month, I would be late May or June. 

If I was a day of the week, I would be Friday.

If I was a time of day, I would be dinner time.

If I was a planet, I would be Momma Earth.

If I was a sea animal, I would be a giraffe!

If I was a direction, I would be East like the water.

If I was a piece of furniture, I would be a bean bag chair (90's throwback style).

If I was a liquid, I would be Cherry 7-Up.

If I was a gemstone, I would be a pearl.

If I was a tree, I would be a Magnolia Tree. 

If I was a tool, I would go on Tool Academy (haha...).

If I was a flower, I would be a Gerber Daisy.

If I was a kind of weather, I would be an Annapolis summer day minus the humidity.

If I was a musical instrument, I would be a electric guitar.

If I was a color, I would be PINK!

If I was an emotion, I would be happiness.

If I was a fruit, I would be an apple.

If I was a sound, I would be steel drums.

If I was an element, I would be Krypton (Kr).

If I was a car, I would be a navy blue Honda Civic (I miss you Little Car).

If I was a food, I would be a sugar cookie.

If I was a place, I would be home.

If I was a material, I would be printed cotton.

If I was a taste, I would be cupcake.

If I was a scent, I would be Lilly Pulitzer Beachy.

If I was an object, I would be a shell.

If I was a body part, I would be a heart.

If I was a facial expression, I would be a big goofy open mouth laugh.

If I was a song, I would be "On the Street Where You Live" by Willie Nelson--that's my new favorite, from the Valentine's Day soundtrack.

If I was a pair of shoes, I would be platinum Jacks--my signature!!

Now it's your turn!! Try one out for yourself! I had a lot of fun with this one!!

Here's the fam last spring break! CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOU GUYS!

xxKatie

Cupcakes!

So today, for Z-Club, a community service club that I'm part of at school, we had a bake sale!! My friend Audrey's boyfriend is "polar bear plunging". The Polar Bear Plunge is an event held every year organized by the MD state police. People "plunge" into the Chesapeake Bay in the middle of winter to raise money for the MD Special Olympics. He made a big-ish presentation at school at our biweekly morning meeting. He made a bet to plunge in a yellow banana suit if he got $200 in donations. If he got $500 in donations, he would plunge in one of Audrey's bikinis. Now, Audrey is French, so they're small bikinis and Bob, um, isn't her size.

Anyway, we had this bake sale and all the profits would go to Bob's PBP fund. I think we made over $40, so we were all very pleased! The theme of the bake sale was PBP, so a lot of the decorations were themed to go along with Bob. I made cupcakes (I'll tell you about this new kind later) that were white frosting with little pink and green bikinis on them. I am so disappointed that I didn't take a picture of them, because I LOVED them! My friend Mary-Claire made blue frosted cupcakes with banana runts on top. Other members made chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter-nutella cupcakes, blueberry muffins, and some of the BEST brownies I've ever had. It was so much fun and it reminds me as to why I love Z-Club!

The cupcakes I used were a new item from Duncan Hines (I think, maybe it was Betty Crocker). I am all for boxed goodies. Its about being simple. Anyway, it was a little red box, with enough batter ingredients to make 12 cupcakes instead of the industrial 24. I mean talk about perfect! They are just like Funfetti ones, except you don't use whole eggs, only egg whites. They are light and fluffy and my mom described them as like more angel-food-cake-y than the regular ones. Now, I am still partial to Funfetti, and I always will be, but these make a nice, smaller, backup. Definitely look for them next time you're in the grocery store!

P.S. I am loving Verizon. I get service in a lot more places, and anyone thinking about switching, it's totally the right call, no pun intended!

xxKatie