You Capture: Pretty

Happy Tuesday! I thought a great way to start out this short week would be to share with you my You Capture photos! This week's theme was "Pretty".  I am a lucky girl.  My parents own a greenhouse. That means, I get to experiment with new plants every year....for free! I spent Memorial Day weekend planting some of my gardens. I snapped a few shots along the way.

I hope you enjoyed my photos for this week's challenge.  I plan to share more of my gardening adventures. I am a newbie to the gardening world, but I'm loving it so far!

A Harley Davidson Birthday

A coworker of mine loves his Harley and was celebrating a birthday, so I made him these.

 Red Velvet cake with chocolate cream cheese icing....yuuuuuummmmmm!

I made one special topper just for Scott!

Now if only the weather would agree with us so the Harley could actually get out of the garage!

Divas: Girls Night Out

Today I would like to share with you a fun layout from my 30th birthday party.  My girlfriends and I had a great night out.  This is one of my favorite photos!

I used Tim Holtz stencils to ink the flourishes.  The rest of this layout was done entirely with Teresa Collins products.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my layout!

Real Parties: Paris, Pink and Poodle Skirts!

Check out this adorable Paris in Pink party from reader, Amie!  Amie's daughter Audrey celebrated her 2nd birthday with this beautiful Paris inspired dessert table.

 Amie made almost all of the treats for this table.  Check out how great her cake pops turned out! I don't know about you, but I still haven't been able to master those!

 I love the pink sixlets in the martini glass! How fun is that?!  The red velvet whoopie pies sound delicious!

 Audrey and her cousins partied away in their poodle skirts and tops.

 And of course, in true "Its my party and I'll cry if I want to" fashion, Audrey expressed herself.  When Amie shared this photo with me I couldn't help but laugh.  Oh the life of a 2 year old!

The tears didn't last too long. Back to fun, treats, and celebrating for this birthday girl!

Thanks so much for sharing with us Amie!

My New Obsession

Its official. I'm addicted......to mini donuts.

 This weekend I bought a Babycakes Mini Donut Maker. I love it! Its so fun!!  Right away I tried out the sour cream donut recipe that comes in the book. Delicious! Tasted like pancakes, and was amazing in my coffee!

You can expect lots more donut posts!!

I'm thinking cupcakes with donuts on top! A donut tasting bar! Donut party! The possibilities are endless!!

Lets hear it for mini donuts! Hip hip hooray!

Strawberry Pie with Chocolate Drizzle

My boyfriend David is not a big fan of my desserts.  He is more of a pie guy.  I don't make a lot of pies.  Not for any particular reason, I just usually make cakes, cupcakes, stuff like that. I came across this strawberry pie recipe, and my mouth watered!  Its a perfect summer dessert!

 Strawberry Pie with Chocolate Drizzle 

(Recipe from Our Best Bites)

Ingredients:

1 quart, fresh strawberries

1 8 oz. package of cream cheese, softened

1/2 tsp. Vanilla Extract

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup Heavy Whipping Cream

1/4 cup powdered sugar

1, 9" graham cracker crust

1-2 ounces chocolate

Directions:

Beat cream cheese, brown sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. 

In a separate bowl, beat heavy cream and powdered sugar until soft peaks form.

Add approximately 1 cup of heavy cream mixture to cream cheese mixture.  Beat until smooth.  Slowly add the remaining cream mixture.  Mix until combined.

Spread mixture into graham cracker crust.  Place in refrigerator.

Prepare your strawberries.  I chose to quarter mine, but you could cut off the stems and place them cut side down, or half them, or whatever makes you smile.

Once your strawberries are prepared, take the pie out of fridge and arrange strawberries on top.

Place your chocolate in a ziplock bag.  I used chocolate chips. If you use a chocolate bar, make sure to break it into pieces.

Microwave chocolate in zip lock for about 1 minute.  Continue at 20 second intervals until the chocolate is melted.

Snip off the end of the ziplock and drizzle over pie.

Refrigerate pie for at least 3 hours.

This pie should serve 8, but don't be surprised if you devour it all by yourself!

Heading to the Lone Star State!

Just wanted to let you know, there wont be posts from me this week, I am heading to Texas!

Don't get too excited, its a work trip. I'll be back next week with some more fun posts!

Enjoy your week!

Together In Gray

Today I would like to share this layout I did of David and I.  I am really into the gray and black combo lately.

 For this layout I did a lot of paper tearing. I cut the circle designs from another paper.

I had some frame stickers that I accented with chalk ink.  I also accented places with black puffy paint!

I think the black and gray combo really makes the color photo pop!

The papers and frames are from Webster's Pages Life's A Portrait Collection.

The butterfly was from my personal stash

The Fleur Di Lis stickers are from Jolee's.

A Royal Affair

I wanted to be one of those crazy people who got up at 3:00am, poured champagne and sat around with their girlfriends watching the Royal Wedding live. I loved the idea of having a slumber party and then some breakfast foods at this freakishly early time in the morning.  However, I work at the freakishly early time of 6:00am. While I was awake and could have watched the wedding, I was getting ready for work. That's no fun! I couldn't take the day off....OK, I could have.  But I didn't really want to use my vacation time for that.

So I programmed my DVR, and invited a friend over for a Saturday viewing party because neither of us were available to watch the wedding on Friday. We both avoided all news media for that day and watched it together on Saturday night.  I had some left over cupcakes from another project, and some cookie dough chillin in the fridge, so I quickly whipped up a Royal Dessert Table for us to enjoy.

 I used some pictures from my trip to London a few years ago to decorate the table.

I made some fun cupcake toppers, crowns and of course the engagement ring! I am obsessed with this blue disco dust. I thought it would be a fun way to represent that gorgeous sapphire!

 Mini Cakes!

 What table would be complete without Royal Cookies!

Yep, there is that disco dust again!

The wedding was beautiful, and it was kind of wild watching the crowds gather around all of the sites I've traveled to. It really fueled my desire to go back to the UK! Vacation may need to be planned ASAP!

Thanks for checking out my Royal Treats!

I also used printables from these sources: 

How About Orange

Brides.com

You Capture: Pink

I fell behind on my You Capture posts.  I know, I hang my head in shame.  I had grand intentions of taking "Spring" photos, and then it got cold, and gray, and lame outside. So I sorta forgot. I meant to take the "Smile" photos too, but it just happened to be a week where smiling, and finding people smiling, wasn't something I was in the mood for.

However, this week was Pink.  I was working on Easter stuff (read THIS post for why I am behind on Easter), and photo ops presented themselves. 

 This is Bob.  He's a flamingo. We met in 2003, on spring break in Fort Meyers Beach, FL.  He wobbles his head and sayings like "Yesserd" (its a Pharrell and Snoop Dogg reference btw).  Anyway, Bob and I have had some pretty great times.  I found him hiding in the garage.  Poor guy, was all lonely out there.  Its OK now, I brought him inside.

 Peeps. What can I say about them?  These two in particular, their fate ended as S'meeps later that day.

Jelly Beans. I painstakingly picked out all of the pink jelly beans from 4 bags of beans.  I had actually meant to make these cute gifts, packaging them as "bunny noses" but I ran out of time.  Now then beckon me from their bowl on my dining room table.  The siren call of jelly beans is impossible to resist.

Bunnies & Beans

What's that you say? Easter is long gone already? Oh. Well, that's OK, I'm still sharing my Easter stuff now. Its not uncommon in our house to "reschedule" holidays.  Why?  David and I work opposite schedules.  We do not share a day off together.  We often have to squeeze in celebrations during the week after I'm done with work during the day.  So, our Easter celebrations happened after the time everyone else celebrated.  Here is how we enjoyed this spring holiday!

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This is our "Bunnies and Beans" Easter Dessert Table!

 David and I looooove jelly beans. During Easter, you can find all kinds of jelly beans, so I decided what better than a Bean Tasting?!  I bought us a few different kinds of beans to try.  However, this is a Bunnies & Beans theme, so I made these cute origami bunny bowls!

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Aren't they cute?! I learned how at Origami Spirit via How About Orange

 What tasting is complete without Tasting Notes?!  David and I both agreed that Jelly Belly made the best beans, followed by Sour Patch Kids, and then we differed.  He liked Starburst, I liked Jolly Rancher.  All around, we just love jelly beans!

 Of course I had to make some bunny cookies!

 These Peeps Cookies were too cute to resist, thanks to Sweet Sugarbelle!

While I'm on the subject of Peeps, we also have S'Meeps on the dessert table!

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If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you already know I love to use paint chips. For example, HERE for Valentines Day and HERE for Halloween. So I made some peeps out of paint chips. Does that make them...."Peep Pips"?  Ha ha, I know. Terrible joke.

As if we didn't have enough sugar, I also made some special cupcakes.  These babies were filled with Cadbury Creme Eggs, others with the Cadbury Caramel Eggs and others with Reese's Peanutbutter Cup Eggs!

Later I used some of the table decor for our actual Easter Dinner. Check out the sweet Egg Chandelier! I found a tutorial HERE via How Does She?.  I actually wanted to do all yellow eggs, but I literally got the very last pack of those plastic eggs.  I put in some battery operated tea lights, and hung them from our existing light fixture.

OK, I know picture overload, but here is the last one.  As a side dish I made these super fun crescent roll carrots and stuffed them with potato salad! They didn't turn out quite as nice as the tutorial HERE but I couldn't find the crescent roll "sheets" and I didn't have the cream horns.  So I improvised.  Still think they turned out great! Thanks to Kim at Party Frosting for sharing this awesome idea!

A few more great details to share....I made some pink chocolate cups on the dessert table with a tutorial from Celebrations at Home

That super cute Easter subway art was from Eighteen 25.

Our Easter might have been a little later than everyone else's but it sure was fun!