still alive

lots has happened and no time to blog.
THe most recent being the daughter's 12th birthday. It fell on a girl scout meeting night so she had her cake there. Then on Saturday she took a friend with the family to Red Robin for diner and to see the new Journey movie (in 3D of course, aren't all new movies released in 3D now?)
Her family party was last Sunday and her request was that in lieu of cake we have cupcakes. (too much cupcake war challenges I believe) So we decided on making both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. Each with it's share of a chocolate surprise inside and each with raspberry filling.

To differentiate between them, we used pink silicon baking cups for the raspberry filled ones, iced them with raspberry buttercream icing, and topped them with a fresh raspberry.




The chocolate surprise cupcakes had tie-dyed buttercream icing. I did it with a lesson I saw on pinterest (admittedly some of my free time has gone there)





The rapsberry cupcake filling came from the recipe found here but I combined the idea for this frosting along with this recipe for an incredibly delish frosting

Much of the rest of the time has been spent helping the kids with their school projects, trying to set up the craft room in the basement and lots and lots of school preparations and grading....

I have knitting to talk about but I'll save that for another day!