KAF Chocolate Stout Cake

I received a Tweet from King Arthur Flour on St. Patrick's day about this chocolate stout cake so naturally I had to make it!


It was incredibly rich and dense and the pieces definitely need to be cut into thin slices but this is definitely a cake I will be making again in the future.


If you choose to make this cake, make sure you have a tall glass of milk close at hand!

Oscar 2010 party Up cake

Last night we had an Oscar party at my friend Wendy's house. She hosts this party every year. The menu is always themed toward the movies that were nominated. Naturally I took it upon myself to make an "Up" themed cake for the party. It was a chocolate cake (from a box mix) because Kevin loves chocolate. I made a buttercream frosting for the cake and balloons. The house is made out of fondant. This was my first time working with fondant. I guess it came out okay, though I wish the house looked a bit better.

I'm sitting here at Wendy's house and I feel incredibly bored and lonely. But I also feel very....zoney??? Focusing on anything is not really an option right now so I'm not going to get any of my new book read. Oh well. I guess I'll write some, mostly random, stuff.

Today was a gorgeous day out!

Lily woke up WAY too early.

Tried to do the P90x yoga DVD today and it was a major FAIL! Pretty much got through 15 minutes and was done. My shoulder started hurting and they were in this intense sequence and most of the "rest" poses are the downward dog. Oh well. I'll work up to it for sure.

I'm feeling rather dejected these last few hours. I'm ready to move. I'm ready to have a home. I'm tired of waiting.

I'm excited about heading to NY on Tuesday though. I can't wait to see O! I think I miss him more right now than I did at any point during the deployment. Lily and I went over the calendar the other day and I showed her where her birthday is and put a big star on it. I told her that's the day daddy will be back and we are crossing off days every evening so she can have something visual to show the passing of days. What does 'next month' mean to a 2 year old?? Well, I guess I should say 3 year old since she'll be 3 in about a month and a half. Crazy.

After my failed workout, Lily and I headed to the East side to get my MIL. We had a dance party in the car on the way over. Lily kept asking "what's that song" and even started singing to Technologic by Daft Punk. She's a pretty awesome kid. When we grabbed grandma we went to Michael's where I spent WAY too much on cake stuff. My MIL had bought me a $100 gift card to Michael's for xmas and I still had $36 on it. I also had a 50% off coupon so I got my $65 cake tool caddy for free! I'm so excited!! I did have to buy some more stuff because I'm making an Up themed cake for the Oscar party on Sunday. I have a vision in my head of how it's going to look and I found the stuff to (hopefully) make that happen. The only question now is what type of cake am I going to make??? And, do I want to make a cake from scratch or work with the boxed stuff? I want to start making cakes from scratch, but is this the time? If it turns out okay (I guess even if it doesn't) I'll post pix.

Speaking of pix...later I went to Best Buy and started looking at cameras. I found and awesome little 14.1 megapixel Nikon that has a 10x zoom. It was $300 though. A bit more than I was hoping to spend. :-( Maybe I'll look on Amazon.

I also started thinking about Lily's birthday cake I'm going to make. I think I'm going to do Tinkerbell. She loves Tinkerbell. I have a vision...again. I just hope I can make it happen. I'll probably do a test run first to make sure it turns out okay. I'll just have to find someone to give the cake to. Maybe my in-laws church or something. We'll see. Let's see how Sunday's cake goes.

I tried my first lentil soup today and it was amazing! My MIL made it and I totally need the recipe. I had two helpings with a few corn tortillas and it was pretty much heaven. Although, I need dessert! I'm obsessed with pineapple sherbet with apricot/mango/orange fruit preserves on top. Yum...okay. Need that now.

O and I went on a date night on Friday. It was really nice. We started at BJ's where we had some beer and decent food. I realized when my meal came and I took the first bite that I am becoming a bit of a foodie. I was incredibly disappointed in the meal that I once thought was amazing. It was bland and I sat there telling O everything I could do to make the food better. Some simple salt and pepper increased the taste by a long shot even! Oh well. After dinner we went to Mavericks to hang out with O's aunt and uncle and watch a cover band. We had a great time and ended up rolling in at around 4am.


The next day O had to go to the storage unit and try to uncover the boxes of his clothes so he could have something to wear. While he was gone I decided to make a cake! I'm actually really excited about how it turned out. I wanted to do something to commemorate the Race for the Cure we did this year so I made my own stencil then decorated a cake!


I'm so excited with the way it turned out! It was a white cake with strawberry filling and buttercream frosting. We actually haven't cut into it yet because it is too pretty.

Other than that...O left for NY this morning. And in true Manna and Otty fashion the alarm was set for Monday-Friday so of course it didn't go off this morning and O's dad woke us up an hour late. Therefore, we had to run around and rush and it was just crazy. But that tends to be how we (unintentionally) roll. LOL!

Okay...I'm off to watch Julie & Julia....again!