Cupcakes

One of the best things about finishing school has been the freedom I have now. When I see a fun recipe, like this one for turtle cupcakes from Annie's Eats, I can make it that weekend without thinking twice about how I'm spending my time. It's awesome!

I did in fact see this recipe last week and decided to make them Saturday. Having never filled cupcakes before I was curious about the process. All in all it went really well.

I used a pairing knife to cut out little holes in each cupcake.

Then I filled them with a little caramel-pecan mixture (yummy).

Then I replaced the cutout piece (minus a bit of it), iced the cupcakes with caramel buttercream and finally drizzled each cupcake with ganache and more caramel. Tasty!

I didn't change the recipe at all but I didn't have enough caramel leftover to drizzle the tops. No worries though, I didn't mind making an extra batch of caramel, especially when it means a jar of leftover caramel - that stuff is so tasty.

Progress in the dining room

You probably remember that last year we purchased our dining room table and chairs. Up until that point, our dining room had been our dog's room. Really, it was.

So we felt great about adding the table and chairs.

The next priority for me was a light. I looked around the interwebs quite a bit and decided I loved the West Elm glass jar pendants. I quickly added them to my Amazon wishlist which I keep stocked full of items I love/want. I expected to buy them after Christmas but was wonderfully surprised to receive them from my in laws! Such an awesome gift.

We were stuck with the best way to hang them, as the husband did not want to create two more holes in the ceiling to accommodate the pendants. I reviewed several of my Pinterest boards and found a picture of something that just might work. We bought a dowel, the husband cut it and spray painted it and we hung the lights. I really like the end the result and it was actually pretty easy!

While I'm super excited to have a great set of lights, the room is a hot mess right now. We still need to finish cleaning up from the pantry and cabinet reorganization and get rid of a few extra things we're currently 'storing' in the dining room. Then we can move on to fun things like wall art (and you might get to see how the entire room looks)!

The last piece

One of the first projects we tackled in the new year was the final piece of our pantry make-over. While there are still a few organizing things remaining, the last major addition to the pantry was a spice rack. Our spices truly were getting the best of us and when I really thought about it, so were our oils and vinegars.

I either had to grab a chair to reach an oil or vinegar I needed or we bought more thinking we had run out when all along we had a perfectly good bottle of ____ vinegar (or oil) hiding in the back of the shelf. I think we have 4 bottles of apple cider vinegar for this exact reason.

And the spices numbered so many that they were overflowing into an extremely unorganized mess on the bottom shelves of another cabinet.

While having the spices and oils/vinegars right next to the stove is helpful, our pantry door is essentially right next to the stove when open. So we had no issue rethinking our kitchen organization and moving those items to the pantry.

When we looked at the door we decided building two separate units would be the best solution and the husband got to work on it one Saturday morning. It took him a few hours to build both racks and install them. I opted to leave them unfinished. I thought the stain we used for the shelves would be too dark and I hate painting so...unfinished they stay! :)

In the next picture you can see our new spice bottles. We buy a lot of spices in the bulk food section of the grocery store and needed bottles that would keep them fresh. We searched a number of places (Ikea, Container Store, World Market, etc) but had a difficult time finding containers that had a quality seal. Our search ended when I found these bottles. Woo-hoo!

The end of year project(s)

I knew the days between Christmas and New Years would be the perfect time for us to accomplish a larger project - one that might require a little more than the two days of each weekend.

While we had a lot of options for this project, I decided to go with painting our bedroom. Yes, we did paint it once. And I hated the color. HATED it. It was my first experience picking out a grey and man oh man did I do a terrible job.

I even had another paint color picked out before I finished the bed skirt (and b/c I'm a visual person, I took a picture of the sample):

The new color is much warmer and is a subtle blue-green. I like it infinitely better than the terrible grey. Plus it actually goes well with the other colors in our house, rather than seeming like a cold random room.

The husband and I are quite the painting team. I always do the cutting in (or edging) and trim and he does the rolling. We can usually knock out some painting pretty quickly but with a room this size, extra large trim, and the need for three coats, this job took us a couple of days. It was totally worth it though!

In between coats, our second big job was the installation of all new blinds in the ENTIRE house. Yep friends, we bit the bullet and used some much appreciated graduation money (thanks mom, dad, and Honey) to buy 3 custom sized blinds and 17 additional blinds for our house. Whoa.

In addition to really odd paint colors, when we bought our home only two rooms (the master bedroom and guest bedroom) had blinds. The blinds in the master were so disgusting they were yellow. We've basically lived with crappy blinds or no blinds since we moved in.

While the sun shining in the room above looks nice and only a person standing directly in front of our garage can see in the windows, we thought it might be nice to finally put in blinds.

Baltimore trip

Our Christmas trip to Baltimore trip came on the heels of our visit to NC and a full week of work. It was a bit hectic preparing for the trip but so nice once we got there. We arrived Sunday afternoon and spent most of the time relaxing with family. It even snowed Christmas eve! Of course, while it was pretty, it wasn't exactly my cup of tea! :)

The husband built this little snow cooler for the beers.

We had a great time celebrating my MIL's birthday Christmas Eve. Oranges and grapefruits from our yard acted as a centerpiece for the table.

 

Our families are incredibly generous and we are so grateful for the gifts from them - several of which will be highlighted in upcoming posts! :)

The finale

You could probably call graduation the finale of my education. The weekend of graduation was full of celebrating the end of my educational career (ha) plus an early Christmas with my family. On our way to Winston we were fortunate to catch dinner with some of our NC friends in Raleigh - definitely a nice way to start the weekend.

Graduation took place on Thursday. We celebrated with a light lunch at Natty Green's afterward, followed by dinner at 4th Street Filling Station in Winston. It was all fantastic and I'm so lucky to have had the opportunity to celebrate throughout the day with family and friends.

The Saturday after graduation we had our family Christmas celebration.

Per tradition, we started out with a "Christmas Eve" dinner at Honey's where shenanigans occurred.

And then we celebrated "Christmas Day" with brunch at my parents' house.

As usual, my parents and family were extremely generous with gifts. For me, the showstopper of the bunch is the Roomba!!! (Yes, I am super excited about a vacuum) And it is awesome people - freakin awesome. I cannot express to you how much I'm loving that thing - it is handling our dog hair problem like a champ. The dogs' opinions are a little mixed. Gracie doesn't seem to even notice it exist. The one exception is when it wakens her from a nap at which point she relocates to another room. Shadow on the other hand is handling it like her usual self - she currently finds it somewhat alarming (and thus deserving of a few good barks) but once she gets used to it she'll be fine!

It was a packed few days but so worth it!

MIA

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last wrote a post on this little blog. While I'm sure I've said at least a thousand times here that we've been busy, the end of December may just take the cake on busy-ness. But it was all good, fun, and celebratory (or at least most of it).

What all did we do in those last few weeks? Here's a rundown for y'all. :)

And the month of January (all 7 days of it) has followed in a similar fashion, albeit with no traveling. Throughout the next week or so I'll have updates on all of that stuff listed above and what we've tackled so far in this new year.

Oh, and before I forget,