Valentine's cupcakes and surprise

Here are some cream filled cupcakes I made a few days before Valentine's Day.
Making the batter.
After baking...

Filling was the tricky part. The bags I had sucked and I only could squeeze out like a drop. But, I have recently bought some new bags and tips so this trick should work better next time.

Getting iced....

Pink and red sprinkles!

Ready to go to work.

And at work on Valentine's Day, the nursing home was selling some balloon/candy arrangements. I got one that was from a secret admirer/Johnny Depp...

Which left me wondering all day who it was....

I found out the next day who it was from....which left me with my jaw on the floor saying "WHA??? No way! You're kidding". And I'll just leave it at that.

And on a side note: If you guys haven't read this blog that I follow, you don't know what you're missing! Seriously its like I have a twin in NYC. Read it now!!! http://volcanicensemble.blogspot.com/

Goodbye Winter

Here's some pics from last month's big ice storm....which should be the last for this year. Here's my attempt at getting into my car to go to work.
There was a solid 2 inches of ice on all of the windows....

I wasn't able to get it all off until that afternoon...with lots of frostbite.

Solid ice up the sidewalk.

Piled up on the ramp...

A look down the deserted street that I could not get to.

The other side of the street.

Backyard...

Upcoming Plans for the NAMI walk

It's that time of year again when I start recruiting you guys to help me out with our fundraisers and planning for the NAMI walk in May!! In case you've forgotten NAMI stands for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and I am the team captain for the Adapt of Illinois walk team. The walk is at the Muny parking lot in Forest Park on May 28th. If you would like to join our walk team please go to this website: www.nami.org/namiwalks11/STL/AdaptIL
If you would like to donate money under my name please go here: www.nami.org/namiwalks11/STL/Casey

But, hang on! This year our team has designed an AMAZING t-shirt which I believe could win the t-shirt contest...if we can afford to get them printed. The cost to get 20 shirts printed will be around $200...so it would be much appreciated if anyone could offer us some cash/check donations to help cover that cost.

Also, if you make a donation for our shirts and you own a business...we will gladly add your business logo to our list of sponsors on our shirts!!

We also have two more upcoming fundraisers (that money goes directly to NAMI). The first one is in 2 weeks: a bake sale at our office in Belleville March 18-20th. If anyone would like to offer some baked goods to sell or want the address for the bake sale, contact me!!

Our last fundraiser, which I will be sending out invites for on Facebook, is a dining out experience at Olga's Kitchen. We have flyers, and if you take one out to eat at either the Alton or Fairview Heights Olga's on April 30th, we will receive a portion of what you spend at Olga's. If you "Like" Olga's on Facebook you can receive notifications for upcoming fundraisers.

Thank you guys for all of your help and support, and please let your bosses know about putting their logos on our shirts for any small donation!!

Tortellini and Triple Chocolate Cookies

Here are some things that I made forever ago, and I'm just now uploading.
First is my try at making cheese garlic bread. I got 2 baguettes for like $1 and made up my own recipe from there.
Now tweaking a recipe I got from allrecipes.com for garlic butter sauce for the tortellini.

Tortellini boiling...

Finished tortellini with the garlic butter sauce on it...OMG it was soo good. Jonnie, if you're reading this, feel free to give me any extra bags of tortellini you have lying around your truck anytime...

My finished garlic bread...tasted good, but wasn't very pretty looking.

Trying out my first plate.

Making the chocolate dough for the cookies.

Added 2 different types of chocolate chips...now they're double chocolate...

Out of the oven.

Add a kiss on top and they're triple chocolate...soo good.

New toy and snow!

Here is my new toy that I got about a week before Christmas. It's a Mr. Coffee Frappe maker. I don't like coffee, but I love frappuccinos. I used to make them with this Java Ice syrup by Nestle (which they took off the market last year, because they always take things I LOVE off the market...like Double Dip Crunch when I was 10). So anyway I have been searching for another easy way to make my own frappuccinos. And then I saw this at Target, and it comes with a recipe book for all kinds of coffee and tea mixed drinks (even alcoholic ones). The first picture is of all of the ingredients you add to the blender. Ice, sugar, chocolate syrup, and milk.
Then you press the button and the coffee starts roasting and dripping down into the blender.

Then, all of a sudden the blender starts up...and gives you a freaking heart attack!!! No seriously I always start it up then go to the back of the house to put on makeup in the morning...and it's so freaking loud I can't possibly describe it to you. No matter how many times I use it, I still jump 3 feet every time.

The pitcher is pretty small and only makes enough to fill up my travel mug and a little bit of a small cup to drink with breakfast. And then all of the ice goes to the top and all of the liquid goes to the bottom and they won't mix together. So it ends up being like drinking some cold coffee sludge...but its ok. Still, if anyone sees any more Java Ice in the grocery store, let me know. Or we could all email Nestle and protest because my own recipe was way better. But I am gonna start going through the Frappe recipe book and I have planned to make a cookies and cream/coffee shake soon, with cookies and cream ice cream. So we'll see how that goes.

The next 2 pictures are outside my apartment on Christmas on my way to work. It looks fairly similar now, except all the white stuff is an inch sheet of ice.

Lovely slushy parking lot which nobody ever plows until 3 days after it snows. And they didn't even plow it on this occasion ever actually.

New lamps

Here are the three lamps that I made in December. This first one is a blue wine bottle of Riesling that's almost 2 feet tall. I gave it to Bob and Virginia for Christmas.
All lit up...

This is a Seagram's gin bottle with colored lights. Will put it up for sale on Etsy as soon as I finish this post. www.etsy.com/shop/Freefallin44

All lit up...it really looks like a Christmas tree...

Here was a really pretty green wine bottle that I gave to Mark and Shari for Christmas. The label had a picture of a bridge on it. I wish I had written down what type of wine it was before I gave it away...

All lit up....

Now I just need to get up some motivation to make some Valentine themed bottles...plus I could use some sales to motivate me!! Tell everyone you know!!

Coffee cake and Christmas cookies

Coffee cake: the brown sugar and butter crumbles....
Cake batter.

Ready for baking.

Finished result...it was really good, but the recipe called for sour cream in the cake mix...which tasted funky to me. But it was still really good and didn't last long at work.

Peanut butter kisses. This recipe was a pain in the butt. It called for an ingredient which doesn't exist, so I had to improvise.

The end result was really good, but now I'll have to figure out how to make the mystery ingredient myself (baking mix). I used Jiffy chocolate chip cookie mix, but it came with the chocolate chips in it already...so I had to sift them all out...

Oatmeal cookies.

Chocolate peanut butter cookies. Batter.

Peanut butter balls, they look like the balls of tree sap from Jurassic Park.

Peanut butter balls covered in cookie batter and rolled in sugar. These were really good too, but definitely did not look like the beautiful picture. Which is why this picture is pre-baking, the after baking part was not very attractive, but it tasted good.