Empty Cupboard Shortbread

Today I did some baking in my new kitchen!! (It is bigger in real life. Phones don't take great pictures.)

Having a beautiful home is the advantage of moving. The disadvantage is paying through the nose to do it.


Since a shoestring budget is too extravagant for us right now, I'm doing this thing where I don't buy anything ever- except gas to get to work. It's a good plan, but I don't have a whole lot in the way of baking ingredients. I mean, I've got the basics: flour, sugar, butter, baking soda and powder. Looking at recipes online though, I kept coming up short on all the parts. So, my friend introduced me to a wonderful website called myfridgefood.com. You go on and check off the ingredients that you have and the website tells you what you can make. It's fantastic. In this way, I learned that I had all the ingredients for Easy Shortbread.  And 20 minutes later, Ta-Da!

 I was hoping to make some sort of cake, but the  shortbread turned out really delicious. I mixed a few chocolate chips into some of them for a little pizazz. They are also really delicious with some raspberry jam spread on them.

Messy Kitchens, Unfinished Business, and Hope for a Better Tomorrow

My boyfriend and I are moving to a new apartment TOMORROW! This is very exciting for a number of reasons. Please allow me to list a few:

1. It will be just the two of us. No room mates, no couch guys, no pets (except Batman the angelfish). Just us.
2. The apartment is beautiful. Cute and clean and pretty and bright. More than enough space for us.
3. I will finally (after a year) have a kitchen that I WANT to cook in!

This is what I've been working with so far

And the rest of the kitchen is worse. No clean counter space, floors that have given up pleading to be mopped. Just really a disaster. 

I do not deny that part of this is my fault. However, no one has incentive to clean if no one else cleans. Why should I bust my butt to clean a kitchen when it's just going to be nasty when I come back? 

I know that the new kitchen will be different because Mike and I have very similar habits and goals for kitchen cleanliness. It may not always be spotless, but it will never be this gross. 

Now, onto the main point of this post: 

Given that I have had this disaster area to work in, one might wonder How do you make delicious, innovative cupcakes in a kitchen I'm afraid of? 

Well, I made a box mix of chocolate cake and portioned it out into this cool pan, all the while making as little contact with the kitchen surfaces as possible.

After they baked, I let them cool, dumped them out, and put them onto a plate

The tv tray made a wonderful kitchen counter substitute. I cut off the rounded tops of the cakes so they would be square and then iced two or three stacked on top of each other.

I ended up with these charming beauties. I had planned to decorate them, but they got gone before I got the chance! Ah well.

Threadcakes!

Threadless.com sponsors an annual cake contest which I learned about last year on my favorite blog,
Cake Wrecks. Basically, you pick a t-shirt design like this one

and make a cake inspired by it.

I roped my loving  and supportive grandmother into helping me on this endeavor. We make a great team since she has mad baking/decorating skills (she's done every birthday cake in our family for 40+ years) and I have mad art skills. She was uncertain at first. She asked me, "Do you really think we can do this?" The thought that we couldn't never even crossed my mind. There were hiccups, but nothing we couldn't handle. We had a great time and I think it's a great piece for both of us to have in our respective portfolios.

You can view our cake and all the others here.

Our entry includes our baking story and lots of photos of the process.
But in a nutshell, it shows how all of this

turned into all that

Here are some details

The long knobby legs reminded me of dripping water color paint and I wanted the cake to tell a story rather than just be pretty. Including an over-turned paint bucket seemed like a good way to tie everything together. Why are there flamingos on the side of this cake? Well, because a bucket paint turned over and magically spilled to make a pretty picture...Eh, it doesn't completely make sense, but maybe it speaks to that feeling all artists get from time to time- where you're not quite sure what that blank page will turn into, but as you go along it seems to create itself.

SO, here's hoping that we win! There are a lot of fantastic entries this year and more are coming every day. I'm not sure how we stack up against the competition, but we gave it an excellent effort if I do say so myself.