Mommy's Little Monster turns 3!!!

April 13th was my little monster's third birthday! I can't believe how time flies (especially since this post is almost a month late). I feel like it was just yesterday that she was a baby...

Now she's this big kid who does things like get in a jumping balloon...

She opens her own presents...

She blows out her own candle now...

She has tea parties with friends...

She even goes to the theater to see movies in 3-D!

But...she is my little monster and I love her and would do anything for her. This includes making a 3-tiered Tinkerbell cake!

She may be a lot of hard work but at the end of the day I know that the time is passing too quickly and I just want to make it stop. Can you please be my baby forever??? Please!?!?!????

Tomato Soup at Sunset

A friend of mine recently had lap band surgery and has been on clear liquids for the last three weeks. Finally she was able to eat slightly more solid food. So I made her some homemade tomato soup. I don't have any pictures of the step by step instruction but I can tell you that this soup was souper good! LOL!

All the ingredients were fresh and ripe. I had never made homemade tomato soup before but it was surprisingly easy and it turned out delicious.

I served mine with a dollop of ricotta cheese, some fresh ground pepper and I crushed a few Ritz crackers onto the top (which I don't have a picture of).

While I was making the soup, Little Butt was eating dinner and talking to me. The next thing I know, I look over and...

The poor thing had fallen asleep eating dinner. I had to pick her up and go lay her down on the couch where she took a good nap. What a good little helper she was!

Anyway. Here's the recipe. I got it from a Good Housekeeping Soups & Stews cookbook:

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon butter or margarine
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 1 stalk celery, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and finely chopped
• garlic clove, crushed with garlic press
• 2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
• 4 pounds ripe tomatoes, cut into pieces
• 1 can (14 to 14 1/2 ounces) chicken broth (I used low sodium broth)
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 cup water
• snipped chives (optional)

Directions:

1. Melt butter in 5-quart Dutch oven over low heat. Add onion, celery, and carrot and cook until tender (about 10 minutes). Stir in garlic and thyme and cook for an additional minute.
2. Add tomatoes, broth, salt, pepper, bay leaf, and water; heat until boiling over high heat. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, about 45 minutes. Tomatoes will break up and mixture will thicken slightly. Remove from heat and discard bay leaf.
3. Spoon 1/3 of mixture into blender and puree until smooth. Place in separate bowl and repeat with the rest of mixture 1/3 at a time. 
4. Soup can be refrigerated and served cold or placed back in Dutch oven to reheat and serve hot. Sprinkle with chives immediately before serving, if desired.

Each serving (1 cup): About 80 calories, 3g protein, 13g carbohydrate, 3g total fat (2g saturated), 4mg cholesterol, 405g sodium (unless you use low sodium broth).

An Easter Post

Easter was fun. This was the first year that I actually decided to celebrate the holiday the correct way for Little Butt. The way my mom always did it was: we would color eggs the night before Easter. We would do dozens of eggs because there were so many people in the house. We would leave our baskets and the eggs on the table and the Easter Bunny would come after we had gone to sleep and hide the eggs and leave candy and presents in our baskets. So that's what happened.



Little Butt put all her eggs in the basket.



She was very gentle with them and made sure they each had their own place.



Little Butt's Easter basket full of goodies.



Here she is with "Princess Aurora" watching The Princess and the Frog.



I also made some fun Easter cupcakes. I made lemon cupcakes (lower fat using applesauce instead of oil) and a homemade lemon butter cream frosting. They were pretty yummy and cute!



Peeps as far as the eye can see!



And finally, my little kitchen helper! I thought he was totally cute with all the colorful jelly beans inside so I snapped a pic!

Scentsy, cake truffles, and more...

My friend Wendy hosted a Scentsy party. So naturally, there being an event and all, I decided I would make a cake. I had posted that I was going to make a Banana Bourbon layer cake but I decided I wanted to try something a little more "advanced" with cake decorating instead. I decided to try my hand at Bakerella's cake truffle ball gift box for the party. I had saved scraps from my Up cake and the St. Patrick's Day Chocolate Stout Cake. I also bought a box mix of red velvet cake and ended up making two little cakes with a bunch of cake truffle balls. They are a lot harder than they look and some are pretty ugly but I'm happy with my first attempt at this gorgeous cake idea.

This was the second cake I made, after getting all the kinks out. Although, I tore the fondant when I tried to stuff the top with too many truffles.

My sad little first, trial and error cake.

That's a lot of cake! (sorry about the crappy pix quality)

Truffles were covered with either a vanilla candy or milk chocolate coating. Toppings were candy sprinkles, coconut flakes, and praline crunch. Delicious!


Now for the random kid pix:

Lily butt "smiling" for the camera!

Her friends show up in the most random places.

She told me "thank you" after I took this pix.

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.