Baby Shower Cupcakes

I made these fifty baby shower cupcakes for our neighbor Liz who was throwing a baby shower in Ohio! The theme kept with the blues and silvers of winter rather than pink as the Mom to be is not a fan of pink. Vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. Very fun to make.



There were 20 covered in white sugar crystals, 10 with homemade white chocolate snowflakes, 10 with baby blankets that say "baby" on them, and ten with baby "stuff" (Pacifiers, footprints, and bottles).

Snowflake Sugar Cookies

So I guess it is now tradition for me to try and squeeze too much into my visits home. I just can't help it. For some reason home+Mom+Mom's-fabulous-kitchen-and-everything-in-it=baking! for me. I'll plan months in advance of a trip home what I want to cook for dinner or bake for dessert. I store up my recipes and copy pages out of cookbooks and come armed and prepared to camp out in the kitchen. Part of this trip home was squeezing in sugar cookies. I wanted to try just simple and pretty snowflakes with Mom's new snowflake cutters (so cute!).



We were doing well with the dough all made and waiting for us in the refrigerator, but time snuck up on us and after decorating the tree Saturday night there was just no energy left over to start on the cookies. We were baking/icing/decorating all these cookies up until the minutes Brandon and I had to pack up and walk out the door. Sammy managed to be hired and fired all at once as Mom and my bakery's apprentice (but he did do such a nice job on his cookies!). And Brandon got to show off his white piping skills with a very, er.. original spider man snowflake- nice job hun! (Spider man snowflake not pictured hehe).

Martha Stewart Magazine will be the death of me.

If anyone reading this has come across this magazine and thought to themselves, "Hm, this would be a fantastic recipe to try"- please, I beg you, flip the page. Brandon and my Mom can attest to the fact that this recipe was not only quite difficult but single handedly allowed us to dirty every bowl and spatula in my Mom's kitchen (which is saying something considering my Mom has so many bowls and spatula's we don't know what to do with them all). Maybe it was the fact that my pregnant and irritable self didn't have enough patience while making them, maybe it was the fact that we were rushing out to dinner that night, or maybe it was the fact that there was my beautiful christmas tree waiting to be decorated... whatever the case, these *individual* {cough-cough-GIANT) Martha desserts were more trouble than they're worth. Mom's original chocolate mousse recipe still reigns supreme althought we liked the cake recipe and the mousse had its strong points. We all decided that just ONE of those rounds is enough dessert for 4 people (unless your name is Jacquie and you happen to be pregnant with one very hungry baby girl!). And on a side note I have to mention that little Sammy loved the mousse because it lacked the strong coffee that Mom's mousse (originally my Aunt Sharon's recipe) calls for.