Kitchen Experiments

If there's one thing I love, it's definately being in the kitchen. This past Friday we had a "potluck" dinner at a friends house and were asked to bring a desert and then we celebrated Kyle's 26th birthday at our house on Satruday so I wanted to make him birthday cupcakes.

So to start I decided I wanted something fun and different to take to the potluck dinner so I decided cake balls... which I'm not sure they are suppose to be as challenging as they were for me... making the cake balls was a piece of cake, dipping them in chocolate however, was a challenge. I have yet to become an expert in melting chocolate... I don't have a double broiler so I just put a pan in pan thing, but for some reason my chocolate just doesn't go very far. So needless to say the first batch weren't very pretty and stayed at our house, but the second go around they turned out pretty and were presentable for friends! Kyle had also made blondie brownies so we took those as well, all in all I thought it worked out great!

Then on to the next task, yes I've made cupcakes before but I decided to take a pineapple coconut supreme cake and turn it into cupcakes, I also decided to make home made icing, which I had never done before. So the cupcakes were a breeze, again phase 1 - check and on to phase 2, making the icing... well that didn't go exactly as planned. I was just making a buttercream icing, but I didn't exactly have 1 of the key ingredients (butter) so we substitued, but I don't think we'll do that again. By the time I got it to the consistency we wanted I had almost used a full bag of confectioners sugar, yes for 24 cupcakes. Needless to say we had a full bowl of icing we threw out :-( Next time we will have butter to work with! So I started with all this...

And ended with this...

Wish I could figure out how to rotate the pictures, but I'll keep working on that. All in all the kitchen experiments ended up being super tasty, but there are a few things I have to continue to work on. Oh and I love my kitchen aid mixer, had to be one of the best wedding gifts we received, it sure does make baking fun and seem like less work!

Hope everyone had a great weekend! We finally got our house all put together and as soon as I take pictures I'll get them up here, and we'd love to have guests any day!

All our love!

Kyle + Mary + Kato & Bear-Bear