Celebrations and Cupcakes

Tomorrow is Ella's birthday.  Ella has been taking care of my kids since Eli was just a few months old (he is now 11 1/2).  My kids, as well as myself, adore Ella. Nobody takes care of babies the way she does.  She gets them to sleep when no one else can and she loves to bathe them and took such pride in how they smelled and what they wore.  Ella has a calm gentle way about her which resonates into every corner of our home. 

Her birthday lands on Cinco de Mayo.  This always makes the celebration and the prep all the more festive.  This year the boys wanted to make cupcakes. This was a good excuse to use my new cookbook, The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

Although I wanted to make the Strawberry cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, I was out voted.  I will have to find another occasion to make that selection. We went with the standard vanilla cupcake with vanilla butter cream.  We also decided that the frosting should be "pink".   

When they came out of the oven I was a little disappointed that they didn't rise all that much.  I would have preferred a taller cupcake.  We all decided that they were good, not great.  We are going to pick a few more recipes from that book and give it a second and quite possibly, a third chance.  The book is a beautiful book, the photography, the design, the paper. All of the above attracted me to purchasing this book. Howeve, as of right now, the jury is still out.

I happen to love some of the recipes from Elinor Klivans cupcake book. Pretty much everything that I have made from this book is all very tasty.  

We will keep you posted on our progress with The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

Black Bottom Goodness

I had some cream cheese in my fridge that I definitely needed to find a use for.  I have been really into my Joy of Cooking cookbook and have been reading it extensively.  

I happened to be snack mom for Isaac's baseball team, so this seemed like the perfect after game snack.  This is a really easy recipe to assemble.  I love cakes and brownie recipes that don't always require using the big heavy mixer.  And this is one of those recipes (used my hand held mixer to cream the cream cheese, sugar and the egg).  Don't get me wrong, if (god forbid) we were required to evacuate our home, my mixer would be one of the three items I would grab and throw in the car.  

The cupcakes were out of the oven about 15 minutes before the boys got home from school.  They were gobbled up by the boys and their friends and never made it to the baseball game!

I really didn't want the balance of the cupcakes in the house, so I packed some up for the "moms" on the team.  Another mom brought guacamole and chips and some other goodies.  Now all we need is for someone to bring the margaritas and we can have our very own happy hour at the park!