Cupcake Wars

Have you ever seen the Food Network show Cupcake Wars?

Basically, they have four different cupcake bakers participate in three different baking rounds and eliminate a team after each round.  In the first round, they have to make cupcakes with some different strange ingredients that go along with the theme.  For the second round, they make three different cupcake flavors that they would serve at some specific event.  In the final round, they make 1000 cupcakes and design a display for them.


Two different Utah County cupcake bakeries have won over the years.  About a year ago, The Sweet Tooth Fairy (many locations, but based in Provo) won.  We were really excited to try the winning cupcakes, but I accidentally left them in the car while we went to the Farmer's Market...in August.  They didn't stand up to the heat very well.  We didn't love them, but I am willing to believe they were much better when they didn't have to deal with a hot car.

Just a few weeks ago, a company called Cravings that has a store in downtown Pleasant Grove won.  There aren't really a lot of businesses in Pleasant Grove, so I was excited to try the cupcakes and support a local company.  Here are the four winning cupcakes:

Clockwise, from top left: Chocolate strawberry cake with blue cheese frosting and pop rocks (clearly, from the weird ingredient round), fruit pizza, better than what, and carrot cake.

Our hands-down favorites were the better than what, which is chocolate cake, homemade caramel sauce, whipped cream frosting, and homemade toffee, and the carrot cake.  Anything that involves homemade toffee is a winner in my book.  The carrot cake had candied nuts on top, and anything that has candied nuts is a winner in Gerrit's book.  The other two were also good, although Gerrit wouldn't touch the one with blue cheese.  I tried to explain that there was hardly any at all, but he is very opposed to blue cheese.

Playground Days

We're finally starting to get a few warm days at a time, so when they come, I've been trying to get the kids outside to enjoy the sunshine.

Miles was having fun on the playground equipment until he realized that I was talking to my mom on the phone.  He loves to have very long, very random conversations with Grandma.  I usually have to wrestle the phone away or I'm pretty sure he would just keep announcing every thought that occurred to him for at least an hour.

Molly, on the other hand, was very enthusiastic about the playground.  Especially about eating tanbark.  This is a picture of my futile efforts to distract her with my purse.  I'm pretty sure I only have these pictures because I brought out the camera in another failed effort to distract her :)

End of the Alphabet

Here are the last of the letter lunches.  It was fun to do them with him, and I learned the magical power of a themed meal to encourage Miles to eat things outside of his normal routine of peanut butter sandwiches or cheese, lunch meat, and crackers.  Now I need some new sort of plan...any suggestions?  I've been toying with international recipes, but it needs to be something relatively low-prep if I am actually going to do it.

The end of the alphabet was considerably harder than the start of the alphabet.  You'll notice that some of these lunches are a little "creative."

Letter T:

Turkey on toast, tater tots, tangelos, and tomatoes.  Miles ate this lunch really well, but that's probably because these are already foods that he is familiar with.

Letter U:

Udon noodles and ugli fruit.  I could not think of anything else.  Thankfully, they started carrying ugli fruit at our local grocery store about a week before this lunch.  I had never actually seen one before!  They're a hybrid of a grapefruit, an orange, and a tangerine.  I really liked it, but Miles and Gerrit were not fans.

Letter V:

Vienna sausage, "velvety" cheese dip, vegetables, vanilla wafers, and V-8.  Miles was very insistent that this was actually Velveeta, but I didn't want to buy a bunch of it just for lunch, so it's actually just random homemade cheese dip.  I kept the name to appease the three-year-old.

Letter W:

Waffles (syrup on the side because Miles loves to dip), watermelon, walnuts, and water.  I don't have a waffle iron, so this was my first time actually buying frozen waffles.  Gerrit thought this was weird.

Letter X:

This is one of the previously mentioned "creative" lunches.  I couldn't think of anything that started with x besides xanthn gum, so we decided to use foods with the letter x in them instead.  We had tex-mex (a pork quesadilla), Chex Mix, and letter X fruit snacks.  Target makes tic-tac-toe fruit snacks, so we just picked out all of the letter X ones.

Letter Y:

Here's another one where I had to stretch a little....This is a "yummy" sandwich, yellow fruit (banana and pineapple), yams, yogurt, and a yellow cup.  Miles loved the yams!  I was going to eat the rest of it for my own lunch, but I ended up feeding him most of it.

Letter Z:

I was expecting this one to be hard, but it wasn't actually so bad.  We had ziti, zucchini, and za'atar (a Middle Eastern spice blend) in oil with pita bread to dip in it.  Miles also ended up dipping his zucchini, too.

Amusing Himself

If you leave Miles to his own devices, he starts to sing.  Now, he doesn't sing normal songs, he sings songs that he comes up with on his own.  We were walking through Target one day when he started to sing "Baby loves to spell!"  Repeatedly.  At the top of his lungs.

Gerrit took some secret video of one of these songs.  I tried to transcribe as many of the lyrics as I could figure out...

Here are some highlights of his very creative lyrics:

"The glades, Mommy, the glades"
"Just so he won't bellmo"  (I think that he is singing part of "A Song About Elmo" here)
"The broken one in piles.  These are all garbage."
"William.  William.  William..."  This kept going for a while.  It is his middle name, for whatever that is worth.
"Minda needy" or "Minda deedy" or "Minda greedy."  Gerrit thinks that Miles was saying that his Aunt Marinda is greedy.  I am not so sure.
"1 2 3 4 5 6 7.  That's how we did it!"

Out and About

Miles cries if I tell him that we aren't leaving the house.  On the one hand, that makes me feel kind of bad that he doesn't like being at home, but on the other hand, I don't blame him for wanting to leave the house when we have this much fun out on the town.

 After all, we don't have any own any special owl hats at home.

 Or have any awesome "letter b" sensory bins...(although he loved this one so much that I think I will make one for him.)

 No bugs this big.

 Although we do have chairs.

And we don't have any really messy paint/bouncy ball/soda bottle contraptions.  He shook this so vigorously that the ball flew out of the bottle and attacked my jeans.  I guess it was fun!

 No miniature cars...

and definitely no giant riding Cliffords.

I guess we need to go on some more boring errands until I figure out some more fun things to do at home:)

Storybots

Every week, before our letter lunches, Miles and I watch some Sesame Street videos about that letter on YouTube.  Right around our E lunch, I noticed a link on the side for something called a "storybots" video.  I figured that Miles likes robots, so it couldn't hurt.

Fast forward a few months later...Miles and Molly are obsessed with these videos.  They have one for every letter, and I cannot even tell you how many times we have watched them. They also have nursery rhyme songs that you can insert your kid's face into on their website.  Miles is a huge fan of that one.  I get a lot of "Mom, make me a Storybot!  Molly wants to be a Storybot!"

So, just in case you want to introduce letters to any of the kids in your life, here's one of their videos.  They really are pretty fun.  It says a lot that I still feel affectionately towards them after all the times that we have seen them.

Hogle Zoo

The zoo in Salt Lake City is free on the last Wednesday of the month.  The last Wednesday of February was actually a nice day (read: pretty cold but at least not snowing), so the kids and I headed to the zoo with approximately a third of the people from the nearest four counties.

I hoped Molly would watch the animals from her stroller...

but she gave up on that pretty fast. :)

 You could watch the seals and sea lions swim, and we were entertained by two very energetic seals racing around their tank for about 10 minutes.

What kid doesn't love climbing on animal statues?

 Miles was obsessed with the size of the elephant poop.  He was fascinated by it at the circus, and he still was.

 There were bears playing right in front of us, but I couldn't get close enough to the glass to get much of a picture.  Trust me when I say it was cute.

 Miles loves giraffes the most.

 I felt bad for some of the animals, because most of their habitats were covered in snow.  This poor lynx really only had as much dry ground as you can see in the picture.

Itty Bitty Ball

We signed Miles up for Itty Bitty Ball at the city rec center this past month.  Every week, they do a different sport and learn skills that go along with it.  Miles really loved getting to wear his "Team Yellow" jersey every week, and he was pretty crushed when the session ended.

Here's basketball week:

Doing stretches with the coaches.  I think that one of the coaches was one of my ninth graders from student teaching, but I wasn't brave enough to ask.

Watching a bunch of 3 and 4-year-olds play defense is about the cutest thing ever.

Football week:

 Little kids with flags may run a close second to defense.

 He loved this "footwork course."

Soccer week:

 They were supposed to practice scoring goals.  Miles thought it would be more fun to crawl around with the ball instead.  I just don't even know.

And then he had a major meltdown when he got caught in this little goal trying to get his ball out.  Soccer day was kind of a rough one.

Baseball week:

Miles told me that baseball was his favorite.  I think it's because he already plays with Gerrit sometimes.

 These helmets were a little too small, but still pretty cute.

 I was supposed to be pitching to him. Yeah...I don't have pitching skills on the best of days, and I was holding Molly.  This was kind of a bust.

 It worked a lot better when the ball was attached.

Sewing Lessons

I love fabric.  When I was a little girl, it was such a treat to go to the fabric store with my mom and look at all of the rows of fabric.  Now, I mostly look at fabric websites and drool at all of the beautiful designs.  I decided I should actually sew some stuff with the fabric I look at, (crazy concept, I know), so I decided I would make bags for all of the women in our family for their birthdays this year.

Here's the first one!  I made this one for my mother-in-law.

 A closer look at the strap.

The lining

It even has a little pocket!

If you are a good seamstress, you will notice that I am not that great at sewing yet.  This bag was definitely a learning experience, but I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

Actual sewing things I learned:
-How to understitch a lining
-How to make a bias tape

Other important lessons I learned:
-If the instructions really don't make any sense at all, it is probably your own fault.  Yeah, I sewed the interfacing to the front instead of the lining.  It magically made so much more sense when I realized my mistake!
-Do not sew really late at night (see above.)
-Do not sew with Miles right next to you, unless you enjoy picking up your entire box of pins three times in one hour.
-Do not stab yourself in the face with a seam ripper.  Now, I know that this seems like a really basic piece of information, but I actually did this twice.  Gerrit ended up confiscating the seam ripper.