Wedding: Octopus Cake Toppers

I love octopi. My love for octopi initially grew out of my fascination with the plural. "Octopus" actually has three acceptable plural forms. The first, octopuses, reflects the Americanized plural. The second, octopi, reflects what many people think should be the proper Latin plural, assuming that "octopus" is a second declension Latin noun. Finally, the most correct plural is octopodes -- as it turns out, octopus is not Latin, it's Greek! So, octopuses/i/podes were initially fascinating to me from an intellectual angle.

Then, I started seeing octopus art. And, wow. I never thought about it before, but those eight tentacles make for some fluid and striking artwork, both two- and three-dimensional. Rapidly, octopi became my favorite animal. So when it came time to make cake toppers for the wedding, I knew I had to make octopi in love.

Photo Credit: Dad

Wedding Outdoor Signs

Weddings are incredibly expensive. I didn't realize exactly how expensive they are until my husband and I began planning our own. Keeping costs down was difficult, but ultimately rewarding: instead of spending money, we opted as much as possible to spend time. As you already know, my friend and I baked the cupcakes for the wedding, and I also made some corn muffins for dinner. In addition to food, however, the husband and I also made most of the decorations. The wedding felt really intimate and really "us" as a result!

My parents live in the middle of the woods -- a perfect place to gather materials for sign-making. My dad and husband bonded over cutting and assembling the signs we had outside the mill on our wedding day. Then, my husband and I each painted our own sign. Mine? Beware of Bride, of course!

Photo Credit: Dad

My husband made a groom crossing sign, with an octopus chasing the groom. These ended up being an enormous amount of fun to pose with for photos.

Photo Credit: Dad

Browned Butter Cupcakes with Coffee Buttercream

I'm phoning this one in; I'm wiped after roughly 14 hours of work and traveling to and from and between work locations. I know, I know, everybody has those days. Unfortunately, knowing that the experience is shared doesn't make it less exhausting when it happens!

Shortly after the wedding, I decided to make one last batch of cupcakes for fun: Brown butter cupcakes with coffee buttercream. I don't remember enough about them to give them a full rating, but I do remember two things: 1) browned butter is not as hard to make as I expected it to be, thanks to the great instructions over at Bake Your Day, and 2) these were ridiculously delicious! My lack of memory notwithstanding, these are totally worth trying.

Cheddar Ale Soup

Let's fast-forward to a more recent meal. I've been making more soups than usual lately, mostly because they're a little less expensive to pull together. Given my love of cheese, it is probably no surprise that this cheddar ale soup was irresistible to me.

Fruit Loop and Cookie Dough Vodka Cocktails

I am a big fan of cocktails made with strangely flavored vodkas. My first vodka discovery was Van Gogh Vodka. At the time Van Gogh had such exciting flavors as Acai-Blueberry, Mojito, and my favorite, Double Espresso. More recently, I've been getting into Three Olives. At first, I bought their Triple Espresso for the sole purpose of comparing it to the Van Gogh Double Espresso; Three Olives blew Van Gogh out of the water. Then I fell in love with Bubble -- Three Olives' bubblegum flavored vodka. Ridiculous and delicious. The husband and I even have bacon vodka (hint: scary) and smoked salmon vodka (good for Bloody Marys!) on our shelf. I know a lot of people are not huge fans of vodka, especially weirdly flavored vodka, but I can't help but love things that make drink-making easier. Typically, to allow the flavor of the (weird!) vodka to come through, all you need to make a delicious cocktail out of a flavored vodka is one to two other ingredients. It's simplicity itself.

When I visited my sister most recently, I left my hubs at home so we could have some quality girl time. To facilitate said quality girl time, we knew we had to stock up on strange vodkas for the weekend. Our choices? Three Olives Loopy (fruit-loop flavored vodka, what?!) and Pinnacle Cookie Dough vodka.

Thanksgiving - Dinner

And here's the doozy: The big feast. Prior Thanksgiving feasts have heavily featured food baked in ovens. For example, the cider scalloped potatoes we made in 2010 obviously required baking. You just don't get that kind of gooey cheese without a working oven. In 2011, we made at least four dishes in the oven: Cornish hens, Brussels sprouts, green bean casserole, and cider scalloped potatoes. Oh, and this year? Found out the day before that my parent's oven was down for the count. Only the broiler was working.

Valkyrie Outfit

My husband likes to go to the Ren Faire. I am okay with the Ren Faire, but it exhausts my introverted heart. To help me enjoy the Faire more, hubs makes me an outfit each year. One year, he made himself a Viking outfit, and me a Valkyrie outfit.

Thanksgiving - Lunch

In addition to making a quicker, less labor-intensive breakfast for Thanksgiving 2012, we also prioritized making a quicker, less labor-intensive lunch. Of course, as in prior years, we heavily featured cheese and wine.

Savory Chocolate Bread

Food just goes well with my family. Not only do we all love to cook -- and eat -- but we also are all driven to share our food finds with each other. Nothing makes a meal taste as good as sharing it with someone you love. My sister has especially good taste in artisan foods, and likes to treat us to delicacies they make in small shops in her city. So, when sis brings fancy food down to us, we gobble it right up. One food gift was a beautiful loaf of savory chocolate cherry bread. Unsurprisingly, it didn't last. While I temporarily forgot about it in the bustle of living and working, eventually, an obsessive hunt across the internet for exciting bread recipes yielded a recipe for savory chocolate bread. The game was on.

Thanksgiving - Breakfast

By now you all know that my family knows how to rock out Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving 2011 was exhausting -- my sister and I were on our feet all day. We cooked so much for Thanksgiving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert last year that we didn't get any time just to spend with our family. This year, we wanted to spend more time with our family, and consequently went for much, much easier recipes. Let's begin this Thanksgiving review with our fast and delicious breakfast, cooked entirely by my sister while I took the role of sous-chef.

Blueberry Milk

Like any good kid, I loved chocolate milk when I was younger. In high school, the farm right down the road began carrying other flavored milks, including strawberry and orange cream. Orange cream rapidly became the love of my young life -- I never imagined that flavored milks could be so adventurous! While I have not been able to find orange cream milk for years, much to my dismay, I recently ran into a beautiful recipe at gimme some oven for blueberry milk.

Guinness Bread

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a happy, healthy, and productive 2013. Me, I'm trying to get back into good habits. I won't say that I'm making resolutions -- the guilt when I fail would crush me -- but the end of the holiday season is as good a time as any to work harder on eating healthy, getting some exercise, and posting to the blog.

As you all know by now, I am an absolute egg fiend. A day without eggs is a day without sunshine; a breakfast without an egg will ensure that I am hungry again in an hour. Sometimes, when I have time to chop and shred in the morning, I grab whatever veggies and cheese we have in the fridge and we start the day off with a veggie-egg-and-cheese scramble. However, many days have early meetings, and early meetings combined with a reasonably long commute mean I need to whip up something fast.

While my husband is walking the dogs and making me coffee (bliss!), I'll quickly grab some eggs and some bread and make the classic eggs in a basket. When I'm feeling even more rushed (or lazier, let's be honest), I just toast some bread in a pan and top with an egg over easy. Now, I've had lots of different types of bread with over easy eggs, or with eggs in a basket. But hands down, the best bread for a hearty bread-and-egg breakfast is this Guinness Bread.