Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Three Down, One to Go

All three kitties now live in the new apartment. They love the huge windows and are enjoying jumping in every box I empty. Now all I need is Trae to move down here and our little family will be complete!(Update: He moved in two weeks ago! Yippie!)

We moved everything into the new apartment on Friday, June 18th, so my view went from:



to boxes EVERYWHERE. I was just getting use to my roughing-it ways too!


On that Saturday, we did not unpack much and that Sunday, Trae left, but he helped a good bit before leaving. So as you can tell, we have already unpacked a lot in a very short amount of time.

I had already broken in the new kitchen, seeing that much of our kitchen stuff we moved up earlier. Even with only a folding chair and tailgate table, having a fully stocked kitchen made the empty apartment feel like a home. I posted a poll on my Facebook page, and asked people to weigh in on what I should bake first. Overwhelmingly, friends wanted me to make chocolate chip cookies, but I had the urge to make a cake. So I decided to combined the two and chocolate-chip-cookie-cupcakes with caramel buttercream drizzle were born.

Luckily, our new place is within walking distance of the best grocery store: Harris Teeter. (l can literally see one side of the store from my window. I am in baking heaven.) When I became determined to bake, two things had not occurred to me.
  1. I had no idea what baking supplies I had. A few of the kitchen boxes I had not fully unpacked since I had not purchased shelves for the laundry room where our pantry would now reside.
  2. I had no cookbooks. My trusty Betty Crocker cookbook was in a box under a lot of other boxes in SC. 
Problem two was fixed after a Google search. While recipes already exist for chocolate-chip-cookie-cupcakes, I did not like them and made my own by combining two randomly found recipes. The one-two-three-four cake recipe on cooks.com worked great and I will probably use it again as a base for future recipes.

I had already made a preliminary trip to Harris Teeter to get some basics such as eggs. Then after getting half way through the cake and cookie recipes, I realized that I did not have vanilla. A quick jaunt to Harris Teeter fixed that dilemma and caused the inspiration for the drizzle. I made up my trusty caramel sauce found on BakedBree.com, then mixed the sauce in with a can of cream cheese frosting. Delicious. I had to restrain myself from eating it all with a spoon. The mixture was extremely liquefied, but a short trip to the fridge fixed that problem. 




After these cupcakes, I am well liked in my new job! 

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