Amazing Cupcakes

I love magazines. I love going through each one I get and cutting out any great recipes, articles about cleaning a certain part of the house or organizing a party or budgeting... I was cruising the pages of January's bon appetit and came accross a recipe from Society Bakery in Dallas, Texas, for these S'mores Cupcakes. YOW! they're awesome--especially if you love bon fires for the sake of roasting marshmallows, as I do.

Now these beauties are fantastic, but not without a price: they take forever to make: the cake part is a basic muffin mix, essentially, but 3/4 of the flour has been replaced with graham cracker crumbs. After baking, you have to let them cool completely, then dig out a hole from the top, squeeze marshmallow creme into hole, cover with not-hot ganache...by then it's been 3 hours. My favorite part is topping each one with a hand-roasted, homemade marshmallow, lovingly created by me. I definately owe some to people, such as Laura, because it was her birthday yesterday. Sorry, I'm a slacker. But I'll get it done, hopefully by August (happy half birthday?). If you'd like the recipe, click here. Even with all the time they take, let me tell you they are SO worth it.

Beautification: 809 Warwick Drive

I realized this weekend that I have yet to post any pictures of our home in a lived-in state. It's getting along pretty well; and it definitely feels like my home now, regardless of the 4 rooms still lacking furniture. (There's a lot to fill and I don't think I need to be in a big hurry to get a cabinet in my office and a couch in Mark's, ya' know?)

This is our living room, where we spend most of our time. Pretty much every weekend, Mark claims the coffee table as his homework station, docking his laptop there while he watches TV. I was hoping he would us the table behind the couch, but I guess sitting on the floor is much more fun. The table in the back is my "craft table." HaHa. Like I do crafts. It is most always piled up with books and magazines, or has my sewing machine on it. I've added a clock to the wall on the left.

This is my office. It's in the basement. That desk is a tree lawn. I refinished the chair seat and made curtains to match. I love it. My eliptical is also down here, which I've started using again now that I have no guaranteed  excuse that "I'll lose any excess wait at my slave-labor job."

Mark picked this brown fabric for the curtains in his office. He has installed a hanging bookshelf, which is the blue you see on the right of the screen. He's actually done a great job of putting his office together, and when he gets down there, he puts things away pretty well. I, however, just threw a bunch of stuff in there that had been hanging around the TV area, so I won't take a picture of that just now.

This is the front room. It used to be plum. We had some missionaries come over and eat pizza with us in exchange for helping us paint. Secret: I found that Monet print all framed and everything just sitting in the dumpster at an office where I worked a winter of '09. The chair is actually my dad's. We were holding it for him last year. It's now in his new Man Cave and looks great there. There is no other furniture in this very large room except for a mini bookshelf and a table with a gold fish bowl, but I hope to tear out the carpet this year and refinish the hardwood floors, then add some charcoal-colored furniture and a shag area rug.

This is in the master bathroom. The walls used to be a periwinkle blue, but it was very depressing for me, so I stole this sunshiney mustard yellow from my Dad's paint stash and voila! Happiness. Mark put this shelf up for me. I need to paint it, I'm going for white. The opposite wall has a coat hook entry-way picture frame that I've put 2 different waterfall pictures in: one of yosemite falls, and one of a waterfall that I hiked 16 miles to go see in Idaho.


before...



after.

Our crazy retro bedroom was painted before we moved in. I just couldn't handle waking up and seeing that. So here's my nice, plain bedroom wall and trim outside the now yellow bathroom. The basket is full of purses and acts as my night stand.

 

 

Here's our bed in the winter-style. In the warmer months, we just have a pretty, flowery light quilt. This year, I left the duvet cover off and just have an afghan over our down comforter--I kinda like how much lighter it looks. I'm thinking about adding two tiny kinda cast-ironish chandeliers to give the wall some action.

My big goals for this year are to attack the attic: remove the carpet and wallpaper and fix all the holes in the walls and ceiling. I also am working up some great plans for our backyard.

Happy News?

OK fine. I've been procrastinating this entry long enough. Actually, after I wrote that first sentence, I went and made myself lunch.

Over the course of this past year, I exerted more of my energy than I care to think about as a public gardener making $7.50 and hour and driving 100 miles per day (because Mark & I share a car and worked in counties on opposite sides of our county). I enjoyed it except when I was weeding, which KILLED my esophagus (acid reflux). But with that much driving and that little money, we drained our savings. Why did I do it? There's a new park opening in Avon this spring and its a Public Greenhouse! how neat. I'd love to run a public greenhouse. Well, this greenhouse is part of the Lorain County MetroParks and they prefer to higher from within. "So," says I, "I'd better be 'within.'" I applied at LCMP's Schoepfle Garden in Birmingham, Ohio (not found on any map) and was offered to work as a seasonal for the required wage previously mentioned. yuck. ok...if it will help me get a good job, I guess I can work like a slave for a year.

The position was up for application in August and I readily applied. Duh! I'm perfect for this! I have greenhouse background and I'm a real people person. I fit the job description perfectly. But the greenhouse building process was seriously stalled and I didn't get called for an interview until Mid-January. First interview was a screening interview, weeding out the not-at-all-qualifieds--no problem. The next week I was called in for the second interview. It was an hour and 15 minutes and my old boss, who was not the best boss to me, was one of the 3 interviewers. My mind froze. It was a terrible and awkward interview, but I did it. After the Q&A interview, I had 25 minutes to do a bunch of test-like questions as part of the interview process. I guess I did OK there. I then had to wait another week to hear the results. How did I do? Let me first share my favorite proverb:

There was a farmer whose only horse got out and ran away.
"That's horrible," said his neighbor.
"Maybe yes, maybe no," replied the farmer.
A few days later, the horse came back and brought a whole herd of wild horses with it.
"Wow. What a wonderful blessing," exclaimed the neighbor.
"Maybe yes, maybe no."
The farmer's son was out working with the new horses and through incident, broke his leg.
"What a sad and terrible thing," said the neighbor.
"Maybe yes, maybe no."
So, the farmer's son was in bed, healing, and a decree came out from the government that all young and able men had to leave home and fight in the terrible war which was developing at the border. Because of his broken leg, the son was not required to go.

So then I think we can consider that the phone call I got at 3pm of Friday, February 4, saying that the job was given to someone "more qualified" can be a run-away horse. Truthfully, I would like to wail and moan about how the (I'm sure) Man who has 10 years more experience than me probably has severely less people skills and will not meet the required quota of exciting programs that the people of Avon would like to enjoy. I won't talk about that, but I will say that this let-down quickly became a relief for me.

I had pushed my life-long goal of being a good and righteous mother to the back burner. Actually, during the interview weeks, I was even considering the idea of being a full-time working mom my whole life. Uh-uh! That's NOT what I wanted for myself. EVER. So, I'm working on a new course of life direction. Mark and I are not exactly getting by, so it's not like I'm trying to get pregnant right now, although that will be a beautiful and exciting time I look forward to. I'm hoping to get a good job that I can do just sometimes.