Cupcakes

Baking project this week was Guiness-Chocolate cupcakes with Bailey's ganache and frosting. Amazing! My good friend Megan (who is going away to school soon) came over to hang out, and we decided that cupcakes were on the menu for the day. I got the recipe from Confessions of a Tart

http://confessionsoftart.blogspot.com/2009/04/guinness-cupcakes-with-baileys.html

They were so good! They're gooey and drippey and all over incredible. I'm not sure that they're a winner at the Christmas party, though. Going to keep looking for that perfect dish. (This year I'm winning the cooking competition)

Household Organizer

As you enter our apartment there's a small household organizer. I got it at a thrift store, and until this morning the top was corkboard. The previous owners had clearly painted the frame black. The reason I know this is that they got black paint all over the corkboard. (Which is why I picked it up so cheap. Difficult to complain.) So I've been ignoring it for the past few months.
Fast forward to today. My local quilt shop celebrated its second birthday! www.sharedstitches.com It was amazing! There was birthday cake, there were fruit trays, door prizes, and they gave away free stuff if you bought enough. (I bought enough.) And, by the way, THE ENTIRE STORE WAS 20% OFF. Holy cow! I met a girlfriend there at ten and we didn't leave until one. It was amazing.


I bought the next fabric I need for the quilt I'm making, a ruler set so that I can make a really cool design (I'll post once I finish one), a few yards of some out-of-my-comfort-zone fabrics, a few fat quarters, and one fat eighth. I didn't know what I was going to do with the fat eighth, but it was this beautiful cream batik, and I couldn't pass up the oportunity to have it. I'm kind of a batik fiend.
I got home today and was drooling over my new fabrics, I figured out how to use the fat eighth and cover up the corkboard!

Beer Shelf

In the process of cleaning the kitchen, I moved James' beer bottle collection. (Oh, the horror!) We talked about them and agreed that we would put up a shelf in the kitchen for the beers we have regularly. I went to a thrift store and spent $6 for a set of three shelves. We don't know what we're going to do with the small ones yet. I'm thinking I might put a bottle with some straight knitting needles on one... We hung the one shelf above the door into the kitchen. All it needs now is the Guiness bottle that James is drinking from and we'll have a complete set of the house beers.

Cheers!

James finished the Guiness. Yay!

Day One

Today I realized that I could take better care of my home. Okay, so this realization has been skulking around in the recesses of my mind, but today I decided to change this.
I had a headache from sleeping too much (since I didn't have much to do today) and was feeling generally irritable. I went to bake some bread and realized that before I could make said bread, I would have to clean off at least a section of counter. As I was kneading my bread (a cheese and garlic loaf, yum, yum) it occured to me that almost every other part of my life is regulated, calendared, and checklisted to death, and almost everything gets done on a regular basis. But since no one *makes* me do housework, I'd rather sit and knit or read instead. In the interest of domestic happiness, I'm going to change that.
So here's the deal; at least once a week and once on the weekend I will clean something or work on a project for the home.
Today's goal: bread and a clean spot in the kitchen.