Versatile Blogger Award!

Hey, how's this for pretty cool?

The Parenting Patch nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award.

I'm going to pull out a word I haven't used since I was a sophomore in high school. Spiffy!  Thanks so much to the folks over at The Parenting Patch for the nod!  :)

In return for being recognized as a blog-worth-reading, I am nominating some of my favorite blogs for the same honor.

Here are the rules:

Each Nominee Should

1. Nominate 15 fellow bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award
2. Add an image of the Versatile Blogger Award
3. Thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link to their site
4. Share seven completely random facts about yourself
5. Include this set of rules
6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination

Random Facts

1. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a paleontologist.
2. My favorite way to eat cake is to flip it upside down and eat the cake first, leaving the frosting on the plate, which I scrape up later.  A little bit of "cake film" clings to the frosting and it's decidedly splendid.
3. When I submitted my first novel manuscript to a publishing house (at age 18), I received a personalized rejection letter which pointed out both my manuscript's good points as well as things to work on.
4. I am freakishly afraid of spiders.
5. Gone With The Wind is my favorite book, and I have read it upwards of 15 times.
6. Although my husband and I did sort of meet at church, we were officially matched on eHarmony.  He brought me three bars of chocolate from Switzerland on the first date, and the rest is history.
7. Corduroy gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I Nominate

1. Katie Jacobs
2. A Connecticut Mom in King Todd's Court
3. Adorkable Gal
4. Bake or Buy?
5. Peanut Butter and Jargon
6. The Food Evangelist
7. So Tasty, So Yummy
8. Diminishing Lucy
9. Dream of Cakes
10. A Bear in the Kitchen
11. Closet Cooking
12. Turbo AMANDA
13. A Guy, A Girl, Pellet Guns, & Pigtails
14. Jasquatch
    
15. not martha

Check them out and pay it forward!  :)

Coconut Chick Cupcakes (Cupcake of the Month Series #4)

Easter, springtime, baby chicks....  puts you in the mood to make some cupcakes, right?

Little, adorable cupcakes that look at you and say, "I'm too cute to eat!"  But you eat them just the same.

This is the April cupcake from my Martha Stewart Cupcakes calendar, and while they are a bit labor intensive, they turned out to be far to sweet for their own good.  I actually ended up only decorating six cupcakes as chicks, and the rest received a generous smear of the Swiss Meringue Buttercream that went with the lemon-kissed vanilla cupcakes on my recipe cards, along with a sprinkle of Wilton yellow sugar crystals.

Keep reading to see how I made them.

I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth...

It's been a really busy few weeks.

First of all, I took a fantastic spring break road trip to Georgia with my husband last week.  The weather was wonderful, I ate some of the most delicious and interesting foods ever, stayed in a reportedly haunted inn in Savannah (though we had no unexplained visitors), visited with friends, and overdosed a little, at least on my husband's part, on historical geek-ery.  I will not regale you with my impressions of the delightful historic Savannah houses we toured, or the trek up Kennesaw Mountain - though according to my FitBit I climbed the equivalent of 99 flights of stairs.

Secondly, this week I had to do report cards and parent teacher conferences.  It isn't the sort of week particularly blessed with free time.

Needless to say, I haven't done much cooking the past three weeks or so.  However, I do have several recipes waiting in the wings, and you can look forward to the April cupcake of the month as well.

Keep an eye out for some "food reviews" from our vacation, and I may also be embarking soon on a "pecan pie experiment."

Yummy things are coming soon around here!

Whole Wheat Penne Primavera (Meat-Free for Lenten Fridays)

I tried out another recipe from my Turbo Fire recipe book a while back, and sort of forgot about it.  But since we're about halfway through Lent, and it happens to be a meatless dish, I thought I'd share it in case anyone needs a tasty meat-free meal idea for this coming Friday.

Now, the way I prepared this meal is a bit differently from the original recipe, mostly because of what I had on hand in my refrigerator.  So I'll give you the run down of what I did when I made it.

Chocolate Devil's Food Cupcakes (Cupcake of the Month Series #3)

We celebrated my cousin's birthday this weekend, and it was the perfect occasion to make the chocolate devil's food cupcakes from my Martha Stewart Cupcakes calendar.

Mine ended up looking nothing like the picture on the calendar or the recipe card.  This is either because my ganache frosting hadn't thickened enough by the time I had to head out for the party, or because the frosting in the picture is actually a chocolate buttercream.

Either way it was fantastically delicious, and I have twelve (plus the extra ganache) leftover in my freezer.

Caprese Pizza from Pampered Chef (Meat-Free for Lenten Fridays)

In case you didn't know, The Pampered Chef has a variety of absolutely awesome cookbooks.  A cousin of mine had a Pampered Chef party back in November, and I bought their "29 Minutes or Less" cookbook.  I've tried several recipes, and plan to try several more, because the fact that I can eat these meals within a half hour of starting to prepare them is very attractive during the work week.

The Caprese pizza recipe has proven to be one of the "old reliable" recipes of the ones I've tried so far.  With the onset of the Lenten season, and thus the need for meatless Friday meals, I jumped all over this particular pizza last week because, lets face it, you can only stand pasta with marinara sauce or frozen fish chunks for so long.

I do deviate from the original recipe a bit, but not much.  Here's what I do.

High Fiber Breakfast Muffins

I'm sort of on a bit of a healthy food kick, or at least I'm trying to be (don't let all the dessert posts fool you).  The other day I decided to try making the high fiber breakfast muffins from the recipe book that comes with the Chalene Extreme workout program, to use up some ingredients I had around the house and to switch it up from the fiber bars I've been munching on for a week or so now.