Well that's not the same thing...

I tried to make these adorable "spider bites" from Bakerella to take to Tim and Kelsey's Halloween party.

Instead, I ended up with this.

Not the same.

I couldn't find black licorice wheels ANYWHERE. And I always have trouble dipping my cakeballs in chocolate. They break apart, or the chocolate isn't right, blah blah blah. In any event only a few, messy, clumpy, not very pretty cakeballs survived. And at that point we were late and tired so ... this is what we got.

How do you make cake balls that are smoothly coated and not lumpy??

We are the champions

We won! Every year at Kelsey and Tim's Halloween party, they name best couple costume and best individual.

We are a pregnant 50s housewife and her milkman. Get it, eh eh?

Mandy won the individual contest.... rightfully so. She's just... creepy creeperson as a boy scout. Though, Adam's pretty darn scary as the boy scout's mother.

I got asked about five times if I'm really pregnant. Including by a couple who saw me less than a week ago (Candace, I'm looking at you).

Not pregnant, and will be enjoying our recently-won dinner at Macaroni Grill.

Monkeyin' around

Happy birthday to two of my favorite crazy monkeys, Adam and Lauren!

Here's their birthday cake:

 It was pretty easy to make, and surprisingly tasty, even to me (I don't like bananas!)

Recipe: Monkey Cake from Smitten Kitchen

Preheat the oven to 350. Line the bottom of two 9" pans with parchment paper, then butter or spray with nonstick spray. Mix dry ingredients together. Cream butter and sugars. Add eggs one at a time. Add pureed bananas, sour cream, and vanilla. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in two batches.

Bake 40-45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow them to cool pretty well. Then wrap them in saran wrap and let them sit in the freezer. Usually I do this over night, this time I did it while we were at church and that was plenty long enough. Unwrap them and use a serrated knife (I used a bread knife) cut out the pattern, leaving two ears.

While frosting, I always recommend putting a thin layer and as a "crumb coat" and letting it harden in the fridge/freezer for a few minutes (I did ten in the freezer for this cake) before icing the whole thing. It just makes it go on smoother. The recipe specifically says to ice the white part of the face first, but I was in a hurry and not paying attention. Fortunately for me, my white frosting was much stiffer than my chocolate, so I was able to layer it on top of the chocolate without it bleeding through.

Time on this is pretty minimal and it makes a pretty impressive looking cake. Let's just say it was completely gone by the end of the night.

Ingredients:
3 1/2 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 cup packed golden brown sugar
4 large eggs
2 cups mashed or pureed very ripe bananas (5 to 6 large)
6 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Frosting
4 1/2 cups powdered
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, at room temperature
6 tablespoons half-and-half or whole milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled

Mix all the ingredients except the chocolate together. Reserve about a couple of the frosting (for the face) before adding in the melted chocolate. 

Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone has a spooky and treat-filled Halloween.

Mirror, mirror

Ok, we've actually been done with this project for a while now, but I've sucked at blogging this month.

After adding all those pretty stripes to our bathroom, the builder's grade mirror just looked, well, boring. I found a tutorial for building a frame for your mirror and we went to town.

Carefully, we took measurements for our mirror. At home depot we found primed MDF and got the kind man to  cut it to our specifications.

At home, we painted two coats of the same color we're using for the trim in the bathroom, letting it dry well in between. It's important to paint the backs of the boards because parts of it are reflected in the mirror. We used Gorilla wood glue to glue three pieces together to form the top decoration for the frame. Again, dry. Caulk. Dry. Paint. Dry. Lots of drying time.

We then used liquid nails to glue the boards straight to the frame. If you try this project, be sure that you put the glue toward the middle of the boards, otherwise it squishes out and you can see it. It dried pretty quickly and after a couple of weeks, I can say it seems to be holding pretty solidly.

We added caulk to soften the seams where the boards meet, and along the bottom where it meets the backsplash.

It's far from perfect, but I think it adds a little something extra to the room.

Before/After:

It does throw that nasty gold vanity light into stark contrast. Definitely time to replace that!

Fabulous find

Every time we go to the San Marcos outlets, I love going in the Pottery Barn outlet and Hans thinks it's pretty much a waste of time. Even though it's an outlet, the furniture is still outrageously expensive, and it's usually got some pretty significant gouges or chips and stuff.

Well, Hans can no longer complain because this weekend we hit the PB jackpot! We were browsing and came across this lovely console table. Our jaw dropped when we saw the $105 price tag. We kept looking it over for something wrong with it, but couldn't find anything! We've been looking for a good console table for the living room and the two we narrowed it down to (Ikea and Target) were both more expensive and not as well made.

We had to fend some lady off for it, but we brought it home giddy with the rush of scoring such a great deal. I'm excited to have a place to add some decoration to our otherwise sparse living room.

Root Beer Bundt Cake

Well, what's left of it anyway.

With Jalaine and her friend Charlie in town (and with Friday off, for a change!) I decided to do some baking. I've actually never done a bundt before, so it was different! I used a recipe from The Kitchn and am pretty happy with it. I'm not sure where the root beer part comes in - I couldn't taste it. But I also couldn't find root beer with cane sugar and just used IBC. Maybe that would have made a difference. It's very dense, very moist, and very, very chocolatey. We devoured pretty ruthlessly. Must have with milk.