Happy Things

Day 14: 10 Things That Make You Happy

It would not even be fair if I answered this post with the general term for "things" and wrote about my family and friends that make me happy.  Because honestly the list would go a mile long and you would get so sick of names and pictures.  I have soooo many family and friends that genuinely make me happy and I am so thankful for that!  So, for the sake of your time, I will keep it simpler by writing on the more specific term for "things" that make me happy.

JEEP RIDES WITH THE TOP OFF

SUNSETS

 FLOWERS, ESPECIALLY LILIES

SATURDAY MORNING SPECIALS AT MY PARENTS HOUSE

GAMES OF ALL KINDS

THE TEACUPS AT DISNEYLAND

FOOD

 RIDING HORSES

MORNING CUP OF JOE

TRAVELING: ESPECIALLY EUROPE

Buffalo Chicken Dip

     YUUUUUMMMMMM!!!!  This stuff is so good!  Some friends had made this dip a couple months ago for a Bible Study get together and it was delicious and gobbled up by everyone.  Ever since then I have been thinking about and craving this dip, and I finally got around to making it on Wednesday.  Yup, its still tasty as ever.  So I just have to share the recipe with you guys!  

Buffalo Chicken Dip

4-5 chicken breasts

12oz bottle of Frank's Buffalo Sauce 

2 cups shredded cheese mexican blend 

1 brick of cream cheese

1 cup ranch dressing

1.  Boil the chicken breasts for about 20 minutes until all the way cooked through. Then shred the chicken.  You can do this with two forks or with a food ninja.

2.  While boiling the chicken, combine the buffalo sauce, cream cheese and ranch dressing in a pot. Keep on very low heat.  If the heat is too high the cream cheese might burn and the buffalo sauce might bubble up and explode.

3.  Once the cream cheese mixture has fully melted and mixed together, add the shredded chicken and 2 cups of cheese to the mixture.

4.  Mix thoroughly and make sure you don't have any dry pockets.

5.  Cook in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes.

Tips

You can use any buffalo sauce you like- it doesn't have to be Frank's

You can also use a number of different types of cheese.  I like the colby and monterrey jack blend and cheddar works well too.

You can double the recipe, but the cooking time of 30 minutes will remain the same.

Eat with tortilla chips, Enjoy :)

*I am unsure where this recipe originated from.  I researched it for a while and there are many similar recipes but I did not find this exact one.  If you know the source I will happily give credit where credit is due!

Yummiest Chicken Noodle Soup

   Here's to the yummiest in my tummiest chicken noodle soup!!!  The first time I made this recipe I pretty much squealed at how good it was and the fact that I had just created it! (I am by no means a chef.)  And then the next day I proceeded to make a double batch of it so I could eat it for dinner every night the rest of the week!  Hands down the best chicken noodle soup I've ever had.  (Which is saying something because Progresso's and Panera's chicken noodle soup are pretty hard to beat. ) The original recipe is from Allrecipes.com and honestly I wouldn't change a thing about it.  Every time I've made this soup I've changed a little here and there by adding more carrots or onions or spices or celery or chicken etc.  but I just can't beat it;  The original is by far the best.

{Mmmhmmm! It even looks like it smells good!  I was lucky to get a picture before everything was gobbled up!}

P.S.  The recipe calls for salt and pepper to taste, my taste buds desire about a tablespoon of pepper and boy oh boy is it good!  I recommend trying it with lots of pepper!  I also don't add any salt.

P.P.S.  I have made it without sauteing the onions and celery (which also means not using any butter)  and the taste was not that different.  If you are short on time and need it to be easier you can just add the raw onion and celery and the soup will still taste fantastic!

Nutella and Cream Cheese Crescents

 
   Nutella and cream cheese crescents.  Enough said.  This dessert is so yummy and so easy!  All you need is a can of crescents, cream cheese, nutella, sugar and cinnamon.  Roll out the crescents and put about a tablespoon of cream cheese or nutella in the center of the crescents.  Roll them back up.  Mix a bowl of half cinnamon and half sugar.  Roll the crescents around in the sugar/cinnamon mixture and bake as directed on the can.  YUM!  You might want to make more than one batch though, because my husband ate the whole first batch in about a two minutes.  (I was lucky to get a picture!)  Enjoy making- and eating- these delicious crescents, I know I did!

P.S.  You can even mix the cream cheese and nutella in the same crescent!

P.P.S.  Peanut butter and nutella sound like a great combination too ;)

Painter's Cupcakes

  What do you do for a friend on her 30th birthday who is also an art teacher extraordinaire?!  Why, make her cupcakes on a painters's palette of course!  Here is my latest cupcake creation:

 
   I think they are adorable and am pretty happy with how they turned out.  The paintbrushes were a little difficult, but a dozen tootsie rolls later I was able to create a couple that passed the test.  They were the perfect cupcakes to make for my artistic friend, but they would also be great for a kids birthday party.  They aren't too hard to make either.  You can make regular cupcakes from the box and use canned frosting.  I  just separated the frosting and made them different colors.  I cut out the palettes from cardboard boxes using an exacto knife for the little thumb hole.  The wood of the paintbrush is made out of caramels, the bristles are made out of chocolate tootsie rolls and the pink divider is made from a cherry tootsie roll.  Its an easy little creation that makes someones day even more special!  Good luck!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

 As I mentioned in my previous post, I went to a birthday party and made two fun cupcake recipes!  The first recipe I ventured was a strawberry lemonade cupcake, and you can view how that turned out here. The second one was a chocolate peanut butter cupcake.  Yum to both!  Although I have to admit the chocolate peanut butter ones were my favorite.

   I got the recipe for the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes from Annie Eat's Blog, although lack of ingredients caused me to tweak the frosting recipe a bit.  Being my biggest critic, there are a few things I would change about the recipe:  Next time I will save myself the trouble and use a devil's food boxed cake mix instead of making the chocolate cake by scratch.  The made from scratch recipe was a little dry for my taste, and the devil's food cake mix I usually get always turns out moist and delicious.  I wouldn't change a bit about the peanut butter balls that go in the center of the cupcake, those were DELICIOUS!  However, some of them did kind of disappear and left a little hole in the center of the cupcakes, but some turned out fine and were still intact in the center.  The ball disappearing didn't effect the taste, though, it was just kind of weird.

   On a really great note, I can honestly say this peanut butter frosting is the best frosting I have ever tasted!  Annie Eat's recipe called for a cup of frozen whipped topping, which I didn't have, so I used 1/4 cup fat free vanilla coffee creamer and two spoon fulls of marshmallow creme instead.  Everything turned out great in the end so I'm sure no matter which ingredients you choose to use, this frosting will not disappoint!

Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes

   For a friend's birthday party I decided to go all out and make some cupcakes:)  I had two different recipes I had been wanting to whip up, so what better time than a birthday?!  One of the cupcakes that I  tried out was a strawberry lemonade cupcake.  I got the idea for this concoction from Easy Baked's Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake but went for the full touchdown by making cupcakes instead.  The cake recipe called for a boxed strawberry cake mix, so I used a strawberry boxed cake mix and followed the directions accordingly. However, the baker noted that the lemonade filling she used was not a good consistency to ice cakes (or cupcakes) so I followed her tweaked recipe for lemonade frosting.

Fluffy Lemonade Frosting

8oz package of cream cheese at room temperature

1 packet of Kool-Aid Lemonade

yellow food coloring

7 ounces of marshmallow creme

1/3 cup powdered sugar

8 ounces cool whip

Directions

1.  Cream together the cream cheese, Kool-Aid packet and food coloring (to your desired color) until well mixed.

2.  Then add the marshmallow creme and powdered sugar.  After that mix beat in the cool whip until everything is mixed and has a fluffy texture.

3.  Refrigerate the icing until right before serving.

   The frosting was a cool consistency, light and fluffy, but with enough base that the icing didn't run off or melt.  I am usually impressed with boxed cake recipes, and this strawberry mix was no different- the cupcakes turned out moist and delicious.  All in all, they really did taste like strawberry lemonade and were a fun summer twist to usual strawberry cupcake!

Wedding Food

"Food is essential to life, therefore make it good"  Truett Cathy

   Well said Truett!  And since food was essential at our wedding, we made it good!  Wil and I had all of our absolute favorite foods served: Chick-fil-a chicken strips and nuggets-with Chick-fil-a sauce of course, Mcalister's chicken tortilla soup, Silver Spoon's spinach queso dip, Panera Bread cinnamon crunch bogals (just like the bagels except in little balls), mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, brownies and funfetti cake!  Not only was it a unique way to add character to the wedding, it was cheaper than using a caterer.  Here's the breakdown: (All of these prices are based on serving a little over 200 guests.)

12 trays of Chick-fil-a chicken (7 strips, 5 nuggets) x $70.24 ($64+ $6.24tax) = $842.88

38 quarts of Mcalister's chicken tortilla soup x $7.70 ($6.99 + $.71tax) = $292.60

20 quarts of Silver Spoon spinach queso (chips included) x $14.19 ($12.99 + $1.20tax) = $283.83

Mashed potatoes/Mac and cheese bar $350

Panera Bread cinnamon crunch bogals $111

Coffee/tea/water/flavored creamers  $130

Cheese and cracker trays $130

Food Cost:  $2,140.31

   Our wedding was at a resort, so thankfully they had tables/chairs/plates/cups/silverware/etc. for us to use.  The food was set up at stations using warming/serving trays as well.  (We picked the food up from the restaurants and transferred them to the warming trays.)  We were able to get the tables, chairs, etc for free, so the only added expense was the labor.  $940 went to the servers for room set up/take down, food preparation and service during the reception.  

Food + Labor

GRAND TOTAL:  $3,080.31

This is for a full meal and dessert for a little more than 200 people.*

   Yes, that still is a lot of money, but it is way below average for full meal for a 200 person wedding.  It averages to about $15 per person, and we had plenty of leftovers for the out of town guests to munch on the rest of the weekend!  

* We had a friend make the cake- and she paid for the ingredients as a wedding gift- so that cost is not added into the budget, but at around $1.20 a box you can't go wrong!  (****Please please please use rainbow chip icing with your funfetti cake, its soooo much better than funfetti icing!)

*A couple of our cousins made the brownies for Wil's grooms cake, and they also paid for the ingredients as a wedding gift.  

July 4th Flag Cake

   Happy Independence Day!  I had a wonderful time with in Florida with family, and I hope everyone else did too!  We celebrated the good ol' American way- grilled out hamburgers and hotdogs, read the Declaration of Independence at dinner (courtesy of my daddy :) and proceeded to read the names of the signees haha), decorated a flag cake, gave the kiddos some sparklers and ended the day watching "The Patriot."  Yes, I would say our family is pretty patriotic.

   The flag cake that we celebrated with might look like it took a chunk of our day out to decorate, but it was quick and easy.  I also want to note that I cannot take credit for making it; my sister-in-law and my sweet little niece baked it and iced it while I took fun pictures of them.  I did cut up the fruit though, if that gives me enough credit to put it on my blog, haha!

   We baked a regular funfetti cake- using a box mix- simple and easy.  Let that cool completely and then set it on your platter.  Top the cake with cool whip dabbing it around to give it the fluffy texture.  Then make a square in the top left corner with blueberries, and stripes with cut up strawberries.  We cut the strawberries up in little pieces where the reddest part of the pieces could be on top.  We were kind of sad that only one piece of cake would get blueberries, so we spread the left over strawberries and blueberries around the whole cake.  Easy Peasy!

Baby Reveal Cupcakes

   I love cupcakes.  I love to eat them, decorate them, look at them, bake them, read books about them, buy them, and share them with others.  Not just any ol' cupcakes though, good-tastin AND good-lookin cupcakes.  Here are a couple examples of the cupcakes I am talking about: 

 

Most of the ideas for these cupcakes came from the books Whats Up Cupcake? and What's New Cupcake?, but some of them, I'm proud to say, are originals.  

Speaking of originals, one of my couple friends from church decided to have a baby reveal party to find out the sex of their baby.  I was so honored when they asked me to be the one to make the cupcakes!  However, it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, not making the cupcakes, but keeping the secret! haha.  The only people that knew the sex of their precious baby were the Doctor and I- for almost a week!!  Goodness that's a hard secret to keep; it sure was worth the wait, though!  Here's how they turned out:

They were having a girl, so of course the inside needed to be pink.  I saw a bunch of ideas online that had colored icing in the middle of the cupcakes, but I really didn't want to do that, because if there was icing on the top and icing in the middle that would make a very sicky-sweet cupcake.  So I decided to make the inside a colored cake instead of colored icing, which turned out perfect, and almost everyone thanked me after they took a bite.

Here's how I made them:  I baked a batch of chocolate cupcakes and a batch of yellow cupcakes normally following the directions on the box.  Then I baked a strawberry cake according to the box. (If you want it to be blue for a boy then you can use white cake and dye it bright blue.) After they were all baked and cooled, I plunged out the middle of all of the cupcakes with a handy cupcake plunger (shout out to my man for giving me this idea) and then just set the insides to the side (or ate them as I went, either way works).  Then I plunged the strawberry cake and stuck them inside the cupcakes.  If you want to be super careful that the colored cake doesn't show through or if you don't want to use icing on the top of the cupcakes then you can put some of the cupcake insides on top of the strawberry cake to pack it in there.  I did this for some of the cupcakes, but realized it wasn't really necessary because I was going to decorate the cupcakes with icing on top which in turn covered up the pink.

Then I iced the yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing and the chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing.  dashed some blue and pink sprinkles over them and added some blue and pink toppers I made with white chocolate.  I was very please with how they turned out, and even more pleased for my friends that are having a baby girl!!!