Getting started...

Hi! So a little bit of background on this blog before I start charming you all with my witty stories and commentaries on life. I'm home for the summer from school and needed some extra ways to entertain myself when I'm not at work. I decided that since I love baking and to me it's one of the greatest ways to relieve stress I'd bake! I decided to make it somewhat of a challenge for myself and bake a new type of cupcake every week. Talking with my little from my sorority and telling her about my cupcake plan, she convinced me to keep track of all of my trials with a blog and thus the birth of what you are reading now.

This blog entry should actually be dated back to last Thursday, but I had quite a bit of trouble coming up with a name so pretend that the date stamp is June 9, 2011. Anyway I have quite a bit of downtime at work and decided to put it to good use and develop my own compilation of recipes from different places. I stumbled upon Martha Stewart's website and started taking some of the cupcake recipes from there. The first recipe which caught my eye was for Snickerdoodle Cupcakes. I mean who doesn't love Snickerdoodles? They're such great simple cookies, and I figured they'd make for some great cinnamony cupcakes!

After a trip to Michael's with a hefty coupon and a heftier amount of money spent to purchase what I deemed to be necessary baking supplies (pastry bags, tips, and REALLY cute cupcakes liners), I headed home to get to baking. Several reading errors later...note in the recipe where it instructs you to cream the butter and sugar...yea I added cream, butter, and sugar and mixed them together only to be greeted by a curdled mess of nastiness which reminded me to slow down and actually read the recipe instead of skim it...I had plump cupcakes full of cinnamon that tasted great. Unfortunately none of them were picture perfect...I was a bit overzealous with the ice cream scoop that I was using to put the batter into the cupcake tins and the majority of them overflowed. So there are no pictures...bummer. I did make one change and made a cinnamon cream cheese frosting instead of the frosting that is in the original recipe. It was really tasty. Next time I make them though, I'll probably tweak the cake recipe a bit to get some more flavor.

Since I wouldn't want to deprive you of a picture in my first post, let me introduce you to my dishwasher.


His name is Augustus(we call him Gus/Gus Gus/Gussy), and he's 14 weeks old. He's a Golden Retriever, and the majority of my summer thus far has been spent loving him. As you can tell from the name of my blog...I'll also be recording the adventures of Gus so stay tuned for lots of puppy love this summer!