cupcakes & menus

Well, a big giant THANK YOU to Sara over at Our Best Bites for this wonderful cupcake recipe. Of course as usual I had to juggle stuff for what we had on hand, but this is a huge hit...well, at least the making and oogling over them part. We are saving them until we meet up with my husband's family tomorrow.

I will post the recipe with our changes added, at the bottom of this post.

We are heading down to the cabin at Lake Quinault tomorrow morning. We'll be meeting up with J's family-mom, dad, The weirds: sister, brother-in-law, and their three children-they live in Maryland and are visiting for the week. We are so excited! We haven't seen them in what seems like forever-the spring. I had no idea what to bring so, we will be bearing gifts of CUPCAKES!

Quickly, I will post my menu for next week(23rd-29th), since I am unsure when I'll be able to get back on to do it. If they work out and are a hit, I will post recipes.

Sunday: Baked mac & cheese, w/ green beans
Monday: Caesar salads w/ french bread or baguettes-Whatever I try to make that day!
Tuesday: Chili & cornbread -we'll be making a double batch!
Wednesday: Ground beef stroganoff w/ corn
Thursday: Taco skillet w/ lettuce salad
Friday: Extreme Nachos -big kids are gone, so it may end up being just chips/chz
Saturday: Leftovers or new recipe!

That's it!
Our Best Bites cupcakes
Okay, while I do have to say that ours did not turn out as beautiful as Sara's - they are in our eyes. Our colors may not be as bright, they may appear lumpy, and we are missing orange, we couldn't have had more fun making cupcakes. Ultimately we decided to make ours huge - we doubled the amount in each muffin cup, by mistake and I believe it worked out to our advantage. We only had half of the colors in the gels, so we just used extra drops of the regular food coloring. We also didn't have the paper muffin cups, but hey, we are trying to cut down on the waste. The below recipe and directions are from here I will note where I have changed it.

COLORBURST CUPCAKES or as N calls them "Rainbow muffin cupcakes"

1 white cake mix
2 eggs
1 C sour cream
1/2 C milk
1/3 C vegetable oil (*we used olive oil)

Combine all ingredients until incorporated (about 30 seconds). Scrape sides of bowl and then beat on med-high speed for 3 minutes.

Divide batter according to how many colors you are using. I used 5 colors and it worked out to a little over 1 cup for each color. *we used 4 colors and used 1 cup of batter for each color*

Use food coloring to color batter to desired intensity. I used a 1/4 t and they were very bright! *we started with 1/4t each, then added a couple of extra squeezes of the regular food coloring to get a brighter color.* You could easily make pastel rainbows using a little less. *Layer each color of batter, it said to use about 2 teaspoons of each color in each muffin... my child interpreted that as 2 TABLESPOONS... I thought it looked a bit much so I did about 1 tablespoon, and soon figured out that we were not going to get more than a dozen cupcakes out of this. In turn they ended up huge. We played it off as it was all planned. It was also suggested on the site to use a bit of water on your fingers to spread each layer of color. It definitely helped.

Bake them according to the package directions(*20 minutes was perfect for our cupcakes), until a toothpick comes out dry. Wahlah!********
BTW, I have no idea what I did to these pictures, I think I may have kicked your dog.