donut muffins

These muffins are just perfect. The muffin is delicious and fluffy but the powdered sugar adds just the right amount sweetness to make them absolutely divine.

cake bites

Growing up my mom always made baked goods for our teachers & neighbors. That must be where I got my need to share baked goods love with my friends & coworkers each Christmas. Last year it was lemon poundcake, which is a tried & true recipe for me.

This year, however, I wanted to try something new. Inspired by Bakerella’s, adorable Cupcake Bites, I decided to try to make some of my own. They did not come out as planned, but I like them non-the-less. They were a big hit with recipients and delicious, to boot. However, they were pretty time intensive and I won’t be making them again anytime soon.

Ingredients: Chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream frosting, candy bark & rainbow sprinkles.

banana cookies

Modified version of the banana cookies recipe on bread & honey* (originally from simply recipes). I omitted the spices & used peanut butter chips because I had some on hand. The cookies are light and soft, a lot like banana bread. I think next time I’ll embrace that & stick with pecans.

bread & honey: banana cookies

* I’ve recently noticed that half the recipes I follow are from bread & honey. The recipes that Summer and Alicia choose always appeal to me. And the finished product is almost always delicious!

handmade nation

The boy has baby fever & is concocting plans for us to have one at home of our own. Right now I think we should be content with visiting the little toad & providing awesome handmade gifts, like this quilt I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s the first actual quilt I’ve ever made and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. I was a little worried I’d injected it too much of my taste into it and not taken the nursery theme into account enough, but the parents seem to love it.

The DIY ethic has been influencing me more & more lately, to the point that I’m having a hard time buying things I could make myself, even from other crafters, although I have been trying. I bought an awesome bag last month from Jmacc because I fell in love with the fabric print. In an attempt to make our place feel less transitional, I bought some wall pretties last week – a woodblock from Cabin & a print from A Minor Thread. And I just finished knitting a simple ribbed scarf with some glorious handspun yarn from Feral Feminine.

One area where I don’t have any guilt about the extreme DIY is food preparation. A friend introduced me to rice pudding a few weeks ago and I spent all day yesterday thinking about it, so I made a batch when I got home. I’ve yet to perfect the recipe, it needs way less sugar, but I’m already thinking of way it can be incorporated into other dishes. And Monday night I tried out a recipe for pumpkin butter that I’d bookmarked a few weeks ago (del.icio.us is my friend). It made the house smell wonderful and it tastes delicious on everything.

my weekend in food

This past weekend was filled with lots of yummy food. Some good for me, some definitely not.

The boy simply HAD to have a Simpson’s pink sprinkle donut from 7-11, so we split one late Friday night.

And Saturday we were lured to Dairy Queen in order to try their new Waffle Bowl cones, which were super overrated & way too sweet. I mean, seriously too sweet.

We attended a vegetarian birthday potluck Saturday evening where we sorta made up for our previous gluttony with delicious veggie cuisine, including my contribution, a cucumber & couscous summer salad. I added a can of chickpeas to the recipe found here.

And Sunday morning I made whole wheat French toast & used up the last of my peaches in a delicious uncooked compote.

In non-food news, I cannot stop listening to Bishop Allen’s latest album, The Broken String. It is some serious goodness.

Some serious cuteness is Dahlia trying to distract me from a large consignment order!