It's a Rojas Life: Valentine's Day or Week

So anyone who works in the medical field is used to working holidays. We work all those holidays that traditionally everything is closed. Therefore you get in this habit of just celebrating things in advance. I work Valentine's Day but Valentine's Day is not a holiday you typically get off for work anyways. It is no Christmas. Post Autumn though Valentine's Day has been very fun.

Autumn's first Valentine's Day we celebrated by receiving the best gift ever.....my new floors :). I wanted to do something special for grandparents so I made butterflies out of Autumn's footprints and framed them. We made 3 of them and kept one for ourselves.

I used finger paint and scrapbook paper. This year I decided to do the same butterfly footprint just not in the framed 9X9. Instead a 5X7 frame.

I read this and realized my wording made absolutely no sense.

Much better wording. Even though I feel the butterfly looked better last time. But hey you can't win them all.

A comparison of what a difference a year makes. Look how much our feet have grown! And let me tell you grandparents hearts melt over these butterflies. I am not even joking. And it cost only 5 dollars to make.

So my new hobby is baking. My first attempt was Fred's Ninja Turtle Birthday cake and ever since then I have just loved it. I used to be more focused on decorating. Now I am into flavors and cupcakes. They take way less time to decorate but longer when it comes to constructing them. There are many steps you can ruin as well. Last month I made a strawberry cake with cream cheese icing in the shape of a heart. I posted a picture of this on facebook. Therefore I did not want to do the traditional red velvet, strawberry, cherry, or heart shaped cake/cupcake again. I found this recipe for Chubby Hubby Cupcakes based off the Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor and decided salty and sweet is perfect for Valentine's Day.

Now I find the construction of cakes fascinating. I love all the steps that go into a final project. This is just crushed pretzels and butter baked to the bottom of the cupcake liner to start the base for the cupcake.

Then I made homemade vanilla cake. This is the first time I ever used cake flour (not self rising) to bake a cake. Won't lie I was a little worried they wouldn't rise. But as you can see they did :)

While those bad boys cooled. I made a peanut butter filling. This is made with peanut butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract. Now most of you know Autumn is scary allergic to peanuts. So this was done while she was safely napping and I made a couple cupcakes without filling so Nibs could have some. She is a sweets fanatic. My yellow kitchen aide looks amazing. Seriously best gift ever. Thank you Mom! (as in my mother not myself)

So this recipe suggested making the buttercream in the food processor. I have been making homemade icing for awhile and had to do a double take on reading this. I was a little scared but excited for this step because seriously sounds so much better than adding one cup of powdered sugar at a time. This icing was made with unsweetened chocolate. I have never used unsweetened chocolate before. After scraping the chocolate into the processor I took the empty bowl over to the sink with the spoon, and out of habit when I see chocolate, I licked the spoon. Oh my that is bitter and dry and just plain not good. Unsweetened chocolate not good by itself.

But the final project amazing. And the food processor worked awesome!

Then I filled in the cupcakes with the peanut butter filling.

And finised project. They are delicious. The recipe is from the-baker-chick.com I find lots of amazing recipes from this website.

I tried to get a photo of her with the butterfly picture. It wasn't happening. This new toddler stage we are at makes getting a good photo very difficult because the Nibs is always on the run. Here are a few photos of Miss Autumn because she is just a cutie to look at :)