THR Mid-Day Muffins

Greetings to fans of Taylor's THR Mid-Day Muffins! This is a nice, healthy recipe that is sure to sustain you through a 45 minute presentation right before lunch. I hope you enjoy them, and just know that there are plenty more where these came from if Aars | Wells lands your business (wink!).  

Recipe

1 cup all purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup sugar

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

1 stick (1/2 cup) organic butter, melted

½ cup sour cream

½ cup greek yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

½ cup agave nectar

1 egg

1 cup carrots, steamed and shredded or chopped in small pieces

½ cup applesauce

½ cup raisins

½ cup walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line 24 muffin cups with paper liners.In a large bowl, whisk together flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a medium bowl melt butter and whisk together with sour cream and greek yogurt first.  Then add egg, vanilla, agave nectar and applesauce. Stir butter mixture into flour mixture until just combined.  Add carrots, raisins and walnuts.  Divide the batter among muffin cups, filling each about 1/2 full.  Bake in middle of oven until golden and a tester comes out clean, 15-18 minutes for regular size muffins, 15 minutes for mini-muffins.

Up to

I am terribly, terribly far behind on posting a month and a half's worth of events for three reasons:

1.  Our computer is old so it takes me forever to load pictures as it is, and to make matters worse the city accidentally cut our cable line while doing some sewer project and we had no cable or internet for three days.  Torture!

2.  I made cookies for the Lake Highlands High School Highlandettes (the drill team) 50th anniversary party.   

3.  Alex and I spent the past week in Jamaica.  This picture doesn't do the sunset justice.  It was beautiful and a wonderful, much needed trip.  We slept late, laid on the beach and read books.  Paradise!  But no kids so we have spent this whole weekend snuggling them to death.  Promise I will try to get caught up this week and post some more pictures of our trip!

Miscellaneous 3-27-2012

So we have been super busy lately getting ready for someone's FOURTH birthday and hence not much blog activity.  My apologies!  Also, there is always a lot going on in Dallas in the spring and fall because that is when it is tolerable to be outdoors.  So we've been busy bees!

Or busy butterflies.  This is the angel after a birthday party which featured face painting (so guess who wants it at their birthday party?)

These two have been so precious together lately.  When we are walking anywhere, Bobo will NOT hold my hand.  But if he doesn't, he'll run off.  Luckily, he will hold Gigi's hand (only Gigi) and walk wherever she leads him.  Gigi has been super sleepy (and grouchy) in the mornings lately but if I bring Bobo in to wake her up she rolls over and with eyes still closed, opens her arms up wide and he snuggles in there to give her a hug.  It is seriously the cutest thing ever.

My poor sick baby :(  Luckily it was a quick virus with no throwing up.  And we spent most of the day snuggling and watching movies.  Yea!

 I had to take a picture of this cute outfit.  I wish I had a rainbow shirt and pants!

 

Gigi requested a Barbie party for her fourth birthday.  I wasn't too pumped about that theme, but a friend suggested that they'd seen some cute "vintage Barbie" stuff.  After a little searching, I found a few pictures on the internet but I was kind of disappointed I didn't find a lot of Barbie-themed parties on party planning websites.  Fear not world, I will do a detailed post of our Barbie party!

I always want G to have a cute birthday outfit so I made her this shirt using the same principles as in this post. But this time I did sew a zig-zag stitch around the silhouette which took for-ev-er. 

These are terrible pictures but my friend Erin of Between the Sheets made the cutest invitations for the party. 

(Front)

 (Back)

 I made Bobo these pants using this tutorial.  They're so cute on him.

I made this spaghetti casserole that I've seen about 10,000 times on Pinterest.  It was good, but next time I'd use about half the package of spaghetti instead of the whole package.

Last summer was so hot some of our azaleas died.  There was also an incident with weed killer which we now know kills a lot more than weeds.  It will kill your beautiful, 18-inch tall begonias that you'd been watering twice a day to keep them alive in the record-breaking heat.  And azaleas.  Luckily a few survived.  Don't believe the label on that weed killer when it says it's safe for plants!

So pretty!

Gigi and Bobo have invented (well they think they invented it) a game they call "chase."  It involves starting at the pantry and running to the washing machine and laughing hysterically.  It's super fun.

It's really cute though and doesn't involve messing up the playroom so I'm fine with this, until someone gets hurt.

Since Bobo cannot possibly outrun Gigi he cheats and turns around before he reaches his destination.

Hope you've been having a great March!

Miscellaneous 2-28-12

This weekend I made Gigi and Bobo t-shirts.  It was super easy and fun.  I found this tutorial and found the images for their shirts online.  I did sort of have to free hand that dinosaur (using several examples) to get the exact look I wanted. 

We had enchilada casserole and pinto beans for dinner.  They are both so good.  Recipes here and here.  Even better, I had made the casserole in November, froze it and thawed it and it was still good.

I guess these cutie pies were in the mood to snuggle this morning . . . 

Of our whole king-size bed they are snuggled in the space of about half a person.

Hope you're having a good week!

Birthday Month

February is also known as "birthday month" at our house because my birthday and A-Dub's are both in Feb., 8 days apart.  So it is busy, busy and can also be a bit expensive, which is ill-timed since credit card bills reflecting Christmas purchases are rolling in.  That being said, when an opportunity came up to make cookies for a corporate Valentine party I jumped at the chance to have fun and make a little cash.  

One day I will do an exhaustive sugar cookie post.  Exhaustive is the right word because it is exhausting.

I forgot to take pictures of my purple cookies until I'd filled the box with half of my red ones.  You kind of get the gist.

I made 200 cookies!  Plus a few extra for the munchkins . . . no way could I make all those cookies and not share a few with them.  And for those who know what happens when I make cookies . . . you would be impressed to know I did not stay up past midnight one single night doing these.  I actually planned ahead!  

Here I am getting a little help from Miss Gigi--we sorted sprinkles by color (in our pj's) the Saturday before and she did such a good job and only ate the broken ones that weren't pretty enough to put on cookies.

A-Dub and Bobo played outside so he would stop disturbing our piles.

So then it was my birthday and look at the awesome and hilarious cake A-Dub got for me.  If you don't get it, go to this website.  cakewrecks.com.  And spend the next 5 hours laughing your ass off.  And remember they only feature professional cakes.  Nothing homemade.

A-Dub said it was really hard to convince the ladies at Tom Thumb to do the cake how he wanted but that they did do it right.

For dinner that night we took the kids to the Magic Time Machine and Snow White was our waitress.  She was very sweet to Gigi.

We let her pick out her own outfit.

This is a school bus.  You can reserve it to eat in . . . maybe next time?!?  We definitely will have to go back--Gigi has been talking about it a lot.

One of Bobo's new words that he says really well is "ballOOn!"  It's super cute.  He has been talking a lot but most words/phrases he only says the first few syllables of.  "I love you" is "aaaa llaaaaahhhh," "milk" is "mih," etc.  But he says balloon very clearly.

So you might think that due to my birthday's proximity to Valentine's Day I might be resentful towards it but quite the opposite, I have always loved Valentine's Day!  My favorite color is red and I like hearts so I always enjoyed getting heart-themed wrapping paper on my birthday presents. 

So I may have gone a tiny bit overboard . . . . . 

Double-fisting blow pops, courtesy of his sweet sister for opening them for him.

That is silly putty, which she later ground into her pants, necessitating them being thrown away.

I could not seem to make good heart shaped pancakes though and I was really frustrated so I made one enormous pancake and cut hearts out of it with a cookie cutter.  Not that it mattered because neither of them ate one single bite of their breakfast.  A-Dub and I agreed, next year we'll do candy after they get home from school.  And then they won't eat any dinner ;)

A-Dub and I both went up to school for the class parties but there was SO MUCH CHAOS in Gigi's room we didn't take any pictures.

First Kool-aid mustache!

Happy V-Day!!!

Yes I did make a heart-shaped pizza.  Two in fact.  I found this recipe recently, and it was really easy and good!  I made one pizza in each oven and my pizza stone will only fit in my bigger oven so we really got a taste-test comparison.  Pizza stone of course won hands down.  I am so curious about what goes on during turkey pepperoni production that makes it curl up. 

To celebrate our birthdays A-Dub and I had an "A-Dub and Taylor day" on the Saturday between our birthdays.  First we went shopping at Northpark, along with the rest of the entire city of Dallas.  We saw two people we knew just at the food court.  A-Dub is actually pretty fun to shop with.  We both like to get good deals, so we have a debriefing where we show each other what we bought and what good of a deal we got.  Then we went to the Bliss Spa at the W Hotel and had a massage and facial.  If you want a good massage, Karin at the Bliss Spa.  She was tiny and I was a little worried she wouldn't get the massive knots out of my back and shoulders.  I loathe getting a massage that is the equivalent of a back rub.  But I told her I really needed her to work me over and oh my goodness I could barely breathe I was in so much pain!  But it was a good hurt, and just what I needed.  Also they have heated massage tables which I love.  

Then we had dinner at Fearing's at the Ritz Carlton and spent the night there.  Fearing's is amazing of course and we left so miserably full we fell asleep before 11pm.  Lame.  We were all pooped out though (to borrow a phrase from Gigi).  Best part of the weekend--laying in bed that morning and watching TV while drinking coffee.  Then we had brunch at Fearing's which was equally amazing and we were equally stuffed.  We even had a (semi) celebrity sighting--Jaap van Zweden, the conductor of the Dallas Symphony was eating at a table right by us.  He looks exactly like his picture on their website.  We had so much fun on our weekend away but we missed our babies so much!

So then it was A-Dub's birthday and I wanted to make sure that after all the celebrating we'd been doing it wasn't just like whatever.  Plus it was a Monday--boo.  :(  I forgot to take pictures of his birthday breakfast but it was good.  Breakfast tacos with onion, green bell pepper and sausage.  Yummy.

He picked up the angels from school so I rushed home from work and whipped up this.

Red velvet.  His favorite.  I will post the recipe one day soon but I'm giving up sweets for Lent so it won't be for another 6 weeks at least ;)

Wish I'd taken a video of this boy having a meltdown because he did not have any cake in front of him yet. 

Gigi looks exactly like my sister in some pictures and this is one of them.

We let the kids eat first so we could have perfectly grilled steaks.  I am extremely particular about how my steak is cooked (medium rare--no one ever does it right (except in a restaurant and my mom :))).  These were perfect.  Yea, me!  A-Dub's favorites--rosemary roasted potatoes and sauteed spinach.  

We ate in front of a fire even though it was 60 degrees outside.

Before we had kids I don't think we ever ate a single meal at home sitting at the table.

A very happy birthday to my partner in crime, the love of my life, best dad ever, the extremely camera-shy ADub!

It has been such a fun February that I am completely exhausted!