that's what she baked.

New toys!!

I FINALLY got a kitchen scale and a food processor. They’re great so far. More colors in my kitchen!

The whole ride home we were trying to decide what we shall do with all these strawberries… and of course, we decided on Strawberry Shortcake. 

We soaked the rinsed and cut strawberries in simple syrup* (I will do a post on this sometime soon) and baked biscuits from scratch (I didn’t have a biscuit cutter so we used a canning jar lid) and made whipped cream. The treat was well worth all the driving and work we had to do earlier in the day. 

*Tyler and I enjoyed these strawberries for the rest of the week on yogurt for breakfast. A great way to elongate the life of fresh strawberries. 

A couple of weekends ago my lovely niece Lena visited my new apartment. We thought it was going to be nice out so we didn’t want to stay inside. I had never been strawberry picking before (at least I can’t remember), and even though the farm was an hour north of here, I thought it’d be a great activity for us to do. The day was pretty grey and chilly, but we had a great time. We worked pretty hard as there were slim pickin’s and literally crawled on our hands and knees, but we filled up 3 containers. It ended up being so cheep, too! I really liked the farm a lot and look forward to go there for other picking seasons.

Hello friends! I’ve been out of town for short while, but before I disappeared I made cupcakes as a “thank you ahead of time” to the other teachers for covering my responsibilities while I was away. These pictures are actually from a week ago. I had so much frosting left over from the art show cupcakes but wanted to pair the strawberry cream cheese frosting with a different cake. I was thinking of things that go with strawberries and I thought of strawberry banana smoothies, so I thought I’d make some banana cupcakes. The taste combo was a success. 

Pictured is the cupcakes in the teachers room (it moved recently and we still haven’t finished unpacking). 

Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting(I topped my strawberry jam babycakes with this)

I didn’t follow an actual recipe, but I’ll just tell you what I did for this delicious, light, and different version of a cream cheese frosting.

Ingredients:

• 12 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
• 6 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 3-4 cups confectioners sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 
• 6 strawberries, diced up and drained (I only had 6 strawberries to work with. Also, you need to try and squeeze as much of the juices as you can out of them, so they don’t make your frosting all goopy)

Directions

Combine the butter, cream cheese and vanilla with an electric mixer, until light and fluffy. Gradually add the confectioners, a little bit at a time, wiping the bowl as necessary. Finally, add the strawberry pieces. I thought about putting them in a food processor, but I kind of wanted bigger strawberry pieces. The coloring is natural, and I love it. Because I only had a few strawberries, the taste wasn’t overwhelming, and I thought it went really well with my cupcakes. 

If you make this frosting, you might want play with measurements. I have a lot of frosting left over, and that’s after decorating 30 tiny cupcakes. It’s in the fridge right now… there’s really a lot leftover and I’m trying to decide what else would be a good cake to top off with strawberry cream cheese frosting?