Cookie Monster....DENIED!

I can bake and decorate a cake like no other, I'll admit it and toot my own horn. I make a mean frosting from scratch as well. Once you have my frosting you'll never go back to that canned frosting from the store. YUCK.

I don't get it! What happened? This weekend The Boy and I decided to make double chocolate chip cookies from a 3 in 1 cookbook I purchased on clearance from Barnes and Nobles for $9.99. I had all of the ingredients except for the chocolate chip morsels. I did have the round melting chocolate that you would buy from Michael's, to which you melt and then dip fruit in. It's the same thing, right? It's chocolate and the recipe said to melt the chocolate chips with butter, so what would it matter?

OH IT MATTERS! The batter came out the consistency of cake batter. The recipe said it would be thin, so I went with it. I refrigerated the batter for 30 minutes, just like I was instructed. The batter became firm and I made little balls and spaced them 1 1/2 inches apart, just like the directions stated.

So WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?

The cookie balls all slid towards the center of the pan as they melted back to liquid form, and instead of 12 individual cookies, we had one large cookie. Only the inside was like pudding and not very tasty at all.

Needless to say The Boy and The BF were laughing at me, while I was almost crying. How could this be? I can bake!

Spooktacular Pumpkins and Cakes!

This year I decided that I wanted to felt our pumpkins as opposed to carving them. I'm so over the little safety knives that always break and the mess that is carving pumpkins. Then I remembered that if we don't carve our pumpkins then we won't have any pumpkin seeds.

Hey LISA, Why can't you do both?

What a great idea! You are so SMART! So this weekend The Boy and I felted our pumpkins. The BF is going to spray paint his pumpkin once he draws up a "killer" stencil. We will see, if that happens. I think the pumpkins turned out pretty well. It was more time consuming then I was expecting it to be, however I think it was worth it.

Since Halloween is on a Saturday this year, we will carve and bake our pumpkin seeds on Halloween!

Materials needed to FELT your PUMPKINS.

Pumpkins
$.37 felt squares (purchased at Walmart) I forgot to buy Yellow for the windows. Oh well.
Scissors
Hot Glue Gun
Pencil and Paper

Draw out a stencil of what you would like your pumpkin design to become. Then place the stencil on the felt and cut. Hot glue the felt together if needed and then just hot glue the entire project to the pumpkin. Since we are carving our pumpkins on Halloween, I only glued the corners of the project to the pumpkin. This will make it easier to remove and hopefully we will be able to re-use the felt designs again next year.

The Boy's GREEN BLOB pumpkin. I think it turned out perfect! Reminds me of something out of Monsters, Inc.

My Spooky Ghost house. I really wish I had yellow felt to do the windows instead of white. I really wanted to have ghosts coming out of the windows. OH well, maybe next year!



Now for our SPOOKTACULAR CUPCAKES!

I cheated in making these cupcakes. Hey it's been a long weekend and I can cheat whenever I want to cheat. Don't judge me. I cheated by using STORE BOUGHT ICING, instead of making my own. I'm disappointed in myself but I just didn't want to deal with the mess and time of making my own frosting.



I printed out these wonderful Halloween Cupcake Toppers. I found them on Two Hearts Together's blog. I then used my neighbors circle punch to punch them out. I taped the cutouts to toothpicks so I could stick them in the cupcakes.




The Boy helped me to decorate the cupcakes. I frosted while he put on all the sprinkles.

I packed them up in two separate tins. I'm taking some to work for my co-workers and so is the BF!

Lack of Sleep + Hectic Crazy days = Grumpy Lisa Anne

I feel like I haven't slept in days. Probably because I really haven't. Since Friday my life feels like it's been turned upside down. Not in a bad way, just overwhelmed with so many things going on. The 100 degree heat surely didn't make anything better. I love sweating like crazy all day and having to carry paper towels in my hand to wipe the sweat off. On top of that me having to get up at 5am to drive 2hrs to work this morning, just pisses me off. I'd like to thank the two huge trucks who rode my A** this morning with their high beams on. Thank you, If me driving 75 mph in the slow lane is too slow for you, then F You, seriously, go around me. It's times like that when I wish I could have just slammed on my brakes, but I was just to tired to play that game. Told you I was grumpy. Wednesday can't come fast enough when I can at least sleep in till 7am. The joys of being able to work from home one day a week.

So I have so much to write about, in fact I checked my email this morning and I've won 3 blog awards and haven't even had a chance to accept them. I will do so today in this blog.

Here are the events of my weekend.

RJ's Birthday party was on Saturday. I was in charge of making the cake. His party started out as a Spongebob theme but then RJ changed his mind and wanted a Cars birthday. Even though I'd been planning to make this cake for about 2 months now, of course I lagged on getting what I needed to create my masterpiece. After a 2hr drive home Friday night, I picked up D and A (didn't even step in the house for 5 minutes before I was off) and headed off to Michaels Arts and crafts at at around 7pm. Hey, I had 3 50% off coupons and I needed A and D to redeem at the register. Only one coupon per customer. Lame. So a quick trip to Michaels turned out to last a little longer then I was anticipating. Hello, I should have know this, I'm a shop-o-holic and A and D don't help any when they bring me to the clearance section of Michaels. Oh you should see all the ribbon I bought for just $1. Well you'll see one of them when you view the Quirky bags in this post. So anyway, Thankfully D offered to help me make the cake, and of course I accepted. I started at 8pm and D came over about 9pm. We finished what we could finish that night, of the cake, and I went to bed around 1:30am.

Here is a picture of the cake. I frosted the cake and D made the cute sign in the back of the cake. It was a huge hit, everyone loved it. The fresh strawberries in the middle were delicious. Thanks to D's wonderful strawberry cutting skills! I've also included some pictures of other cakes I have made for different occasions throughout the past year, for you to enjoy.

I thought this cake would be easier to make. It was really tricky getting the red frosting on the top of the cake to be smooth. I didn't just spread the red frosting all of the cake either as I didn't want the roads to turn red so I had to frost it in sections. The dirt road is actually brown sugar. After the fact Brian told me I should have used Gram Crackers. Oh well, next time. How great of a job did D do on making the Cars sign? It really made the cake. I would have made the grass look better, but I ran out of frosting and time.

I made this cake last December for my nephews birthday. Everything you see here is edible except for the CD. The Wii remote turned out so good, as It actually looked REAL!! Thank you to whomever invented edible markers. You ROCK!! The actual Wii cake was almost a disaster to make. Cake is not meant to stand up on it's side like that, as you can tell it's leaning. I don't know how I got that to work out as well as it did. My little version of Christopher turned out amazing too. Who would have thunk that I could sculpt fondant. It looks just like him believe it or not. Especially the spiky hair. See how he is holding a mini Wii remote. I loved making this cake!
Hurry, Hurry step right up!! The evil clown cake. Yes I remember this one. One of my first cakes. I had to make it for my Wilton Cake class. The theme was learning how to make those ugly rainbow clowns. I didn't want to just put the clowns on a boring sheet cake, so I made this circus tent. You can't see it but I actually made a lake on the top of this cake. I used blue food coloring and piping gel. It looked just like water, wet and everything. I also used brown sugar around the water to make it look like a beach. This is right behind the clown on the right side of the cake. I searched high and low for a small train set, as I was going to make train tracks around the bottom of the cake, and it just didn't happen. What horrible piping I did on this cake. You can tell it's one of my first cakes.

I made this for a friend of mines coworker. One of the first cakes I actually sold. I totally free handed Spongebob. I couldn't believe how great this cake came out and I just slapped it together. You can tell I free handed Spongebob, just look at his hands, he has no fingers. I love what the confetti blower things did for the cake. I think they actually made the cake. You can't really tell but there are Jelly fish all along the borders of this cake. They were one happy customer. I think my Carebear cake, that I made, not shown here, came out a lot better.

This cake was my 1st experience using fondant. I think I made the fondant too think, but it turned out okay. Fondant tastes nasty, so I don't recommend anyone making a fondant cake that they are actually going to eat. They look pretty, but this is a cake, it's supposed to taste as good as it looks.

Finally, I made this cake for the fun of it. The BF loves fish and we had a salt water tank at the time so this was fitting. It was so easy to star pipe this cake. How cute is this? Do you like how I have the background of the cake looking like real water. Oh I love this cake.

So those are a few of my cakes. I have so many I could show you, but not enough time to keep this post going. I must move on to the rest of my weekend.

So in between the cake cooking and cooling, I also showed D how to sew. I gave her the sewing machine that was posted in a previous post of mine as I had just broken down and bought a new one. These are the creations I made that night, I was up till 1:30 am sewing that purse. How cute did the little bag D made come out?

How cute is this? It's a little bright and crazy, but the ribbon was only $1 for an entire roll and the fabric was $1.50 for an entire yard. I have cuter bags coming, these are just my practice bags.
I also made these two Friday night along with the purse and the cake. I told you I was a busy girl. Come to think of it, I don't have a picture of the one D made. I remember because the ribbon she used was different then what you see here. Dang. Sorry about that!! She did a great job though!!

Saturday morning I was up at 6am and drove 2hrs to pick up my son from his Dad's. I was exhausted from Friday nights cake making and sewing adventure. My back and knees where hurting and not to mention it was going to be about 100 degrees with not 1 but 2 birthday parties to attend. Thankfully the birthday parties were both across the street from house. They were both water parties too. It made it really easy to walk back and forth between the two parties. This morning all the guys were over at 9:30am for their fantasy football draft. Me, I had to hurry up and finish the cake (needed to add the grass, frost some cupcakes and put on D's sign). I also had to go with D to buy not 1 but 2 birthday presents all before 1pm. D and I went in on an indoor trampoline for RJ. Yeah that was a fun gift to wrap. It was a crazy day, running around and 100 degree does not sit well with me. I felt tired and bloated and sweaty all day long. My relief came when my sister requested that my son slumber party with her two boys that night. I ended up at D's house while the BF was at a comedy show (Cheech and Chong) and her husband A was at a card room. A nice little Girl time was a great ending to two long days. I didn't get to bed till after 11am and was up at 9:15 Sunday morning. I guess that counts as sleeping in?

Sunday morning I felt like crap and was still overly tired from all the running around I had been doing the past 2 days. Emotionally and physically burnt out. I had to get some work done for my second job. I had been putting it off but needed to complete it all before Monday morning. I spent 3hrs working all while hearing my son complain that I wasn't giving him enough attention. Sorry I have to work 2 jobs just to pay the bills and sometimes that's not even enough, plus my other obligations. The topper to my weekend was taking my son to his Dad's house at 9:15pm and not getting home till after 11pm (yes the drive is 2hrs round trip and he meets me in the middle). Then I had to get up this morning at 5am to drive to work. Lucky me!

So this morning, does the crazy ever end, my new car is now having problems. Great, this is just throwing another wrench in my knowingly already busy day. The dash keeps flashing "check fuel cap." Hello, I did, it's fine. What the heck? So here I am at work writing this, trying to hurry because today's going to be a long day. I have so much work to do it's not even funny. I feel like crawling under my desk and falling asleep. I need to call the dealership to get the car checked out, go to 3 banks on my lunch hour so I can make deposits and pay some bills. I just want to sleep, is that seriously to much to ask?

Right now I'm here in body, but certainly not in mind.

Have I lost you all yet? Are you my readers falling asleep and yawning saying, well Lisa this is the real world, you should live a day in my shoes? I say to each his own man.

I have so many blogs to catch up on and comments to reply to, that my brain hurts a bit just thinking about it. I'm looking forward to getting a good laugh or creative spark though. So here are the 3 awards I've won since the weekend.

Thank you to Vicki over at Frugal Mom knows best for giving me this award. Wow I just noticed she's given me two awards. Thank You!! That makes 4 awards this weekend. I feel blessed and saddened that I didn't get a chance to comment on anyone's blog since Thursday. I'm sorry. Anyway she has an awesome blog. You really should visit her, if you haven't already.

My 3rd award comes from one of my Favorite blogs to read. Amy over at keeping up with the schultz family. I love her posts and all the pictures she puts of her cute little baby girl. Thank you for the Splash Award as it is given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs. I know, I know I rock!!


Last but certainly not least, my 4th and final award is from Yonca over at Yonca is cooking. Thank you for this award. I really try hard to make sure I visit all of my favorite sites everyday, while still working 2 jobs and visiting new sites each and everyday. I'm a busy girl, I know!!

So I am supposed to pass all these awards, something I just can't possibly do. This post would go on for days, and I'm sure I've lost followers already from having to read this. I'm making up for lost days here people. So please bare with me. So these awards I am passing on to all of my readers and followers. Pick an award and take it. You all deserve them as much as I do!

So some good news before I end this long and drawn out post. Damn it Lisa, end this already will you? The good thing is, my Blackberry hasn't been vibrating in over a month. It sucks royally because I never know if someone has sent me a text message unless I check my phone.Well how is that good, you ask? Well, Since I'm not even a year into my contract and I didn't buy the insurance I totally thought I was going to have to buy a new phone. So I went into the T-mobile store on Sunday ready to spend $250 on a phone I didn't even like, but it was the cheapest they had only to find out my phones still under the manufactures warranty. Yay me!! So Blackberry is sending me a new phone! Well a refurbished phone, but who cares, I just saved $250. I should receive it in 7 to 10 days. So that was refreshing, even though I was at the T-mobile store for 2hrs on Sunday.

So that was my crazy weekend to which I still have not recovered from. Those are just the major events, of course, if it doesn't seem hectic to you then well I don't care. It was for me. =)

Longing for some real sleep and the heat to just go away! Bring on the rain!

Come on Rockstar Coffee Light Vanilla 15 oz drink, kick in already.