I’ve been seeing signs of spring for weeks now, but it seems like over the weekend everything decided simultaneously to bloom. Flowering trees everywhere! I love it.
Saturday was my Day of Cupcakes. I made two batches of cupcakes at the same time, which seemed like it was just asking for disaster – like carrots in the vanilla cupcakes or lemon in the carrot cake cupcakes. But I persevered and wound up with two batches of cupcakes: vanilla cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon cream cheese buttercream, and carrot cake cupcakes topped with cream cheese buttercream. My family has eaten some of each, and no one made any weird faces, so I am going to call it a win.
Carla was a huge help with the cupcakes. She’s pretty hit-or-miss with wanting to help me bake, and that’s fine. But she was very interested in helping to decorate. I put her in charge of the carrot cake cupcakes, which were adorned with toasted coconut and Cadbury mini-eggs. She did a great job – they are adorable.
I made the chicks for the vanilla cupcakes; Carla provided supportive commentary and added the eyes. I think they turned out to be full of personality.
Now we’re back to normal, so I need to come up with some dinners for the week ahead.
Hmm. I have been staring blankly at this document for some long minutes now and I still can’t come up with a single dinner idea.
Okay, this is the exact reason I created a “database” of reliably delicious dinners. I will just visit that post and pull out a few options, plus tacos, which just now occurred to me.
Dinners for the Week of April 21-28
- Tacos: We haven’t had tacos in a while. Let’s do it.
- Big Salad with Chicken: Okay this isn’t a recipe per se, it’s just a bunch of veggies and lettuce and roasted chicken topped with balsamic dressing.
- Mediterranean Chicken and Veggies: Sheet pan meal! I will probably buy or make some hummus and pita to eat on the side of this.
- (Not) Skillet Enchiladas: We still have sauce in the freezer from my adventure with beef birria, and I think it would be fantastic as an enchilada sauce.
Okay! That’s a decent starting off point! We also have begun The End of School Year Madness already, so there’s an evening school event one night which will necessitate some sort of grab-bag style dinner. I’ll deal with that at the time.
Those cupcakes are adorable! Well done on not crossing streams with the dueling recipes, that was a daring move. I like the stunned chick toppers.
Ha – it was a risky move, to be sure! I like to think the danger kept me extra on my toes.
OMG those chicks! I thought it was a stock photo.
Awww, thanks, Jen!
I am in awe.. IN AWE of your cupcake prowess!!
Thanks, Maya! ☺️
I love adding edible eyes to desserts– so darling and also creepy.
Those cupcakes!! I love them!
The cupcakes are AMAZING! Oh, how adorable! I love both styles. The nests of eggs are so sweet, and the chicks are delightful with their funny facial expressions. I love that they’re wondering how they became cupcake toppers.
Well, this post made me smile so much! My day is brighter!
Those cupcakes look incredible!!! Well done you! So festive and fun – you are really good at that!
Good luck with end of school madness!
The chicks on the cupcakes are so cute! They look delicious as well, as in my opinion, you can never have enough icing. I have often baked 2 or even 3 recipes at the same time and don’t think I’ve ever messed up. I do ensure I’m not distracted and check & double check regularly.
Easy recipes on my plan this week are stuffed peppers. For the first time I roasted the cut peppers with a little olive oil, salt and pepper for about 20 minutes, then filled and baked. They were so good! I cooked a big spiral ham on the weekend and ham and split pea soup is simmering as I type this.
I’m a little jealous as spring looks a little further ahead in your area than here in Southern Ontario. We keep getting teased with a sunny warm day then back to chilly grey and wet.
Your cupcake decorations (and, in general, all your desserts) look like something that belong in a bakery window, Suzanne. 10/10 on appearance and I am very sad I don’t have one in front of me this very second for a taste-test (I’m sure that would also be a 10/10).
The cupcakes looks amazing but the vanilla/lemon ones are especially cute! Well done, you!!
The Mediterranean sheet pan dinner looks especially good! I need to bookmark that and make it in the future! Now that I can cut things up again I also need to make the Chicken Shawarma dish you’ve posted. But this week I am not around much since I fly to MI tomorrow. I made a veggie-packed marinara on Saturday night and we’ll have grilled ahi tuna on Friday night.
Suzanne, yours and Carla’s cupcake decorating skills leave me in awe!
Those cupcakes look like a professional did them. Well done!
Tacos! We need to do tacos or something Mexican this week. That’s my goal.
Both cupcakes are cute! I’m very into frosting, so I would put a serious dent to the vanilla/lemon batch, but of course I would also need to have one of the carrot cake muffins to balance it out. The golden raisins are not a deterrent.
I love the cupcakes! I’m not sure about chocolate eggs on a carrot cake base, but I would just eat them first so it wouldn’t be an issue. Lemon cupcakes sound like HEAVEN and almost make me want to bake.
We have the big salad with chicken often. We have a toaster oven that roasts up to 3 bone in chicken breasts at 375 to perfection in 45 minutes. That gives me time to make my salad, and it is perfect.
Our dinners this week…well, tonight we are (again) having the tacos you turned us on to with the green salsa, though as we don’t have a slow cooker, we are using the stove. Works just fine. Also I’m making a pasta dish that we love – corkscrew pasta with sun dried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and broccoli florets, lots of Parmesan cheese on top. My husband is low carb, so for him it will be the veggies on the side of pork chops. After that, who knows. Does your grocery store have frozen spanikopita? Little ones? We always add those to our Mediterranean feasts. Tasty.
I love the chick cupcakes. Is the ratio of frosting to cake crazy? It looks like the kind of dessert a kid would be all about. I’ve not grown out of the Give me all the Frosting phase of my life, so I’d be game.
Tacos have saved me a few times lately. I just discovered packets of ground turkey meat at Costco and they are easy to thaw in a pinch and no one notices with the taco spices that they are eating turkey instead of beef.
I cooked and baked up a storm for Easter, so we will be enjoying brunch food for dinner for the foreseeable future, and it’s good food that reheats easy and everyone will be very happy.
Those cupcakes look professional! I love carrot cake and can handle a few raisins in them, especially if there’s also coconut. I’m a big fan of that! They are all adorable; the chicks look like a cartoon or meme, like What’s going on around here and why are we sitting on these cupcakes? Tacos are so customizable which is the beauty of them.
Beautiful cupcakes. They came out so well…
The cupcakes are cute, but those little eyes are a bit disturbing. Not sure I could eat a cupcake with that chick watching me.
Okay, I can tell I’ve been out of it lately because I somehow missed a post about cupcakes???? How did that happen! Anyway- they all look so, so cute. Even the ones with the startled chicks, lol.
My dinners really hit a new low this week. I need to step it up a LITTLE in the future, sigh.
I am in AWE at the chicks. AWE. How on earth do you do that? (The eyes alone are amazing, lol.)