Oh My, It's November.

Well, October sure went by in a blink.  Not much of anything done to really be considered an accomplishment either.

On the other hand, some accomplishments have happened.  The kitchen remodel is paid for.  All the decisions on color, wood, counter top and design have been finalized. I am so excited and so ready to start emptying and tearing out cabinets.  I have had both grand babies several days this month so have not been able to get too much done as far as house work.

To top all that off, on Tuesday evening before Halloween my daughter, Miss Zebra, came home and informed me that she needed a priest or monk costume for the play this weekend and 100 cupcakes for Thursday morning.  So, being the great mom that I am, I spent Wednesday morning running around picking up ingredients for 100 cupcakes.  You know, mixes, powder sugar and Crisco for icing, paper baking cups, two more muffin pans so I could cook more at one time, decorations to put on cupcakes. Plus, since it was the day before Halloween had to go to two different shops to find the costume.  Then came home, ate lunch put Mr. M down for his nap and got started baking.

This is the first of three batches of white cakes, made one batch of chocolate.  Each batch was 4 dozen, but being the wonderful math wizard that I am, didn't realize when I was counting that 24 is actually 2 dozen, not 1 dozen.  I over cooked a bit.  I bought some white cardboard boxes to put the cupcakes in, each held 35 cupcakes.

I made the orange ones, daughter made pink. Those are molded candy melt bats.

I swirled these out as well. One row has caramel and sprinkles, then the caramel bag busted.

At 1:15am we flat wore out.  Our energy and ability just left.  We also ran out of icing and I was just not up to making a third batch of butter cream icing.  Really great tasting butter cream icing, if I do say so myself.  Now the bottom photo is the box Miss Zebra decorated, she has a thing for molded chocolate and made mummies, bats and jack o lanterns.  Not all of the molded decorations made it on to a cup cake.

 

Here is a little closer look.  We used the Wilton spray color, the yellow, silver, green and gold worked fine.  The purple and black not so well.   I can tell you this much, the Wilton cake decorating class that I took with Miss Zebra sure helped.  We didn't get as fancy or creative as we had originally planned, especially since reality of time sunk in, but we did a pretty good job.  I still have one box of cupcakes that have not been iced, but she took 3 boxes (35 in each box) so ended up with 105 cupcakes.  It was a food sale at school with the proceeds going to her school club.  I donated the ingredients and such for the cupcakes, would much rather spend $20 on something that they sell and get 100% of the earnings rather than buying a candle or cookie dough that is over priced and only gives them about 40% of what they make.

I bought a large star tip, thinking the larger tip would let me ice the cupcake quicker.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that instead of a rigged swirl it makes a swirl that looks a lot like a rose.

I love this tip, will be using it a lot more.  Maybe next time, make a little smaller swirl and add some leaves.  It all turned out any way.

This is Miss Zebra working.  About midnight she pulled the stool up to the counter.  OH HOW HAPPY I will be when the new kitchen is done and I have more counter top space for doing things like this.  It was really hard for both of us to work in there at the same time.  She set up there because that is where the microwave is.  I ended up moving to the dining table.

Along the lines of the kitchen, I bought a new gift for me.

Isn't it just so pretty.  It has a bowl lift which is supposed to be easier to add ingredients with, a quieter motor and a soft stir setting to help the ingredients mix together a little before starting a mixing cycle which helps keep the dust cloud down.

As you can see, it is a step up from I already had.  Which still works just fine.  I just wanted an upgrade and different color to liven up the new kitchen.  All my kitchen appliances are stainless steel so the grey would look good on the counter.  In fact, will be going back to Costco to buy the Kitchenaid 13 cup food processor as well.

Thanks for stopping in, come back soon.  Please feel free to leave a comment, it is always nice to know that some one out there reads this.