A cupcake experiment

I had never been that interested in making cupcakes, and I don't usually like eating them either, but after reading all the cupcake tweets and seeing photos of my friends' cupcakes on twitter I decided to give it a shot. After all, I've already baked cake and all you need to do is simply following the instructions to a T so I thought making cupcakes would be something like that.

First, I needed to decide what kind of cupcake to make, because there are tons of recipes out there in the wild, wild web. After narrowing it down to vanilla, butter, and chocolate cupcakes, I finally decided on chocolate. Because you know, when you have a kid, chocolate is a no-brainer.

Then of course, being the OC person that I am, I had to decide on the icing. I wanted to do everything right even if it's my first time and you're allowed to fail on your first try. I chose to make buttercream icing because I saw that people usually used this to ice their cuppies.

Finally, I gathered all the ingredients and made sure I had the right pans, then I settled down to the task. It wasn't that difficult but I got so stressed out by the two boys (my son and my nephew) nagging me to let them take a lick of the batter. The cupcakes came out beautifully but since they took a while to cool completely, I couldn't ice them right away and decided to save the icing for the next day.

The icing was quite easy to make, but putting them on the cupcakes and making them look nice was the hard part.

Anticipation

I'm eager to get my hands on the Kindle I ordered on Amazon, and while waiting to get it I downloaded Kindle for my laptop, as well as some free ebooks (also from Amazon). I cannot wait! I looked for a case on ebay but I didn't see any that I liked so I got this cute sleeve from fireweedlane on etsy. Shipping to the Philippines only costs $5 and I expect that it will take 3 to 4 weeks to arrive, but that's okay. I'm willing to be patient. :-)

Photos from fireweedlane of etsy

Beach trip #3

Quite a gray day at the beach

Tide was low when we arrived

I love seeing hermit crabs at the beach

The sun finally came out around midday

When we're in Davao we always go to the same beach - Paradise Island - every time. So to shake things up a bit we decided to try the beach a couple of resorts down, called Costa Marina. It was a Saturday so we were afraid that there would be a lot of people at the beach, but we were very pleasantly surprised to find out that we were among the few groups there that day. There wasn't the usual buzz of activity you'd hear at more popular beaches and the atmosphere was very relaxed. The sand wasn't perfect but I thought it added to the untouched paradise feel.

The tide was low when we arrived so we let the kids wander far from the shore to explore what they could. There weren't many fish but they did see some starfish. While waiting for the tide to come in, we swam a little bit and searched for hermit crabs - which to our delight we found were in abundance. We put them all in pails and observed them as they tried to get out. We set them free after a while but we had fun observing "crab mentality" in action.

A day at the beach is never a waste.

Loving the rain

I love sunny days and rainy days but I think I love the latter more.

Comic strip from Mutts

Davao!

This is what you see going down the stairs of our house in Davao. I make it a point to file a two-week vacation leave every summer and that's when we go here. We arrived yesterday morning and we went to the beach after having brunch. We saw some relatives and we stayed there until late afternoon. I let my son swim to his heart's content while I, my sister, and our cousin did a little sunbathing. See, this is what I love about Davao. Relatives are everywhere and almost everything is a 10- to 15-minute drive away.