Jalapeño Whoopie!

This may be one of my all time favorite things I have ever made, Jalapeño Cornbread Whoopie Pies with Honey Buttercream filling. It's just like delicious cornbread shmeared with butter and honey except it comes all wrapped up in one little sandwich all ready to be enjoyed! I've tried several whoopie pies before, most of which were adapted from cupcake recipes, but this was my first stab at a somewhat more savory flavor and I'd say it's a huge hit. I'll definitely be trying out a few more savories in the future. This one had just the right punch of spice from the jalapeños contrasted with the sweet honey buttercream...AMAZING! I got the recipe from here. The only thing I changed was using about 4 times as much honey to make sure I achieved that delicious cornbread with honey taste.

I can't wait to have a pretty white kitchen to take better food pictures in! And it'll be much much bigger. 2 more weeks till home ownership!

Seattle Wedding Weekend

This weekend one of Ryan's co-workers got hitched! They had actually been engaged long before we were and finally tied the knot. It was nice to actually go to a wedding right downtown Seattle. We could have easliy walked to it, but decided to drive a little closer since I was in heels and Ryan was in a suit and we didn't want to be tromping around the city in our nice clothes. The groom's family owns a winery over in Eastern Washington, so they donated all the delicious wine for the event. Even before the wedding started they filled us up with their wine. I think this was the first wedding I've been to where I've been sipping the wine during the ceremony. Our little place cards were also little bottles of home made limoncello which was super cute, and they had home brewed beer with labels that had their cute little puggle's face on it. There were a lot of super cute little personolized touches to everything. The cake was actually made by one of the other firm partners' wife who has a little training in culinary fields. It was delicious and super pretty! I would love to be able to bake like that some day. Really I just need a reason to bake a big cake like that so I can practice! The wedding was a ton of fun and I think the couple was super pumped to have it over with and get to be married finally.

Another fun surprise for me Sunday night...The Pioneer Woman picked another one of my photos as a semi finalist in her photography contests! This time the theme was black and white photos. I submitted a few different ones, but the one she chose was this one of Ryan's little brother, Aaron, during a hike we did last summer. I guess the pioneer woman just likes little brothers since those are the ones she keeps picking of mine, good things I have such cute ones! You can see the post with my photo here. If I keep this up, maybe I'll even win someday! Even just making it to the final round of picks I think I would win a prize and she gives out some pretty awesome prizes. I'm having fun just seeing my photos pop up on her blog for now though, it's pretty awesome!

Seafair part One!

This weekend was kind of our start to Seattle's Annual Seafair. There are events all summer long, with the big shebang next weekend with the boat races and Blue Angels air show. Saturday we started out with a visit to one of Ryan's projects so he could check out an issue that the client was concerned about. Also, I hadn't seen this one under construction yet, so I wanted to check it out! As usual it's awesome and has some amazing outdoor spaces and views of Lake Washington. We're also nerds and were checking out some of the features in the home for use in our soon to be home renovations. It's nice to be able to see in all of these houses how things work so we can get an idea of what we want in ours. Plus we can also price it all out that way too.

The rest of the afternoon we spent wandering around Seattle, and picking up our race packages for the Seafair race that night, which is what we did Saturday night! The cool part about this race is that it runs part of it along the parade route which is packed with people waiting for the parade to start, so there's lots of people to cheer for you! It's also a pirate themed race, so lots of silly people get dressed up as pirates to run. It was good to get a good run in for the day. On the way home after the race we walked by the beginning of the parade route, so we got to see a lot of the floats and other participants before they started the parade.

After a quick shower we headed back out to the craziness of Seafair in an attempt to get some dinner at 'Serious Pie', Seattle's famous chef, Tom Douglas's pizza place. It just happened to be right on the other side of the parade route, so we scooted across at a break and put our names in for a table. After waiting a few minutes we started hearing cannons going off right outside so we stuck out heads out to watch the rest of the parade which included several floats of pirates shooting off ridiculously loud cannons! I'm sure there were a plethora of less than amused small children who felt the noise was slightly excessive for a nice family event. Luckily there were only a few shot off right by us so it didn't kill our eardrums too badly. Back inside we had a great dinner. The pizza was good, but I must say the highlight of my meal was my amazing root beer float! When I saw it on the menu I knew I had to have it and it completely hit the spot...mmmm tummy love.

Sunday morning Ryan got up bright and early to head off to ride bikes down mountains, which gave me some free time to grab brunch with my favorite Queen Anne ladies, Sarah and Leigha! As much as I'll miss living right down town, I think Queen Anne will be a nice change and I'm eager to get to know all the little local places over there. We also just had a ton of things to catch up on with Leigha's baby news and Sarah just getting back from Paris and our house buying plans! It's so amazing to see how much we've grown up from our little West Middle School selves ;)

Later that afternoon since I had some more free time before Ryan got home, I decided to try out some recipes. I was completely obsessed with the strawberry cupcake I had at the Capital Hill Block Party last weekend, so that was my first challenge to try to recreate. I made angel food cake cupcakes and little whoopie pie wafers and topped/ filled them with a delicious strawberry butter cream. I still think it was pretty amazing, but I probably could have pumped a few more strawberries into it. Either way, I'd say it was a success. As usual with my excessive baking I brought the rest into work so they could get devoured by others before I put myself into a permanent sugar coma. Sad thing is that I set them out when I got to work just after 7am and they were gone in the next 30-45 minutes. Apparently people think cupcakes are an appropriate morning treat! Delish!

CHBP!

Just a few more weeks of freedom until our weekends are consumed with home ownership! This weekend we mosied up the hill to the Capital Hill Block Party. It's actually an all weekend long festival of bands on several different stages in the Capital Hill area of Seattle. We just got tickets for Saturday since that's when most of the bands we wanted to see were playing and because it was Aimee's birthday, so we got to celebrate all day with her! We met up with a group of people just as one band was finishing up, so we all headed into a nearby bar for some drinks and to make Aimee wear their awesome birthday hat. The bar is called Unicorn and is themed like a circus. We hung out there for a while until the next band we wanted to see were up and we headed down the street for that.

The rest of the night we were in and out of bars and checking out all the good music and other booths. I also finally got to try Cupcake Royale's seasonal strawberry cupcake...it was like a dream come true. It was just a white cake with strawberry butter cream frosting, but oh my word the frosting was to die for...it was bursting with strawberry deliciousness. I am definitely going to have to try to figure out their secret for that one...sooooo good.

The final band of the night was the headliner, which we really wanted to see but apparently so did EVERYONE else, so it was super packed. After being pushed and dragged around for about half an hour we moved to the back of the crowd for a little while then ended up just heading home. Moral of the story; good music, good food, good fun, but lots and lots of people and probably just as fun hanging out outside of the block party rather than dealing with the crowd inside.

Sunday afternoon we spent getting ideas and pricing out some things for our upcoming house renovations. The big things is really going to be the kitchen, but it's going to be amazing! I can't wait to throw on a pair of overalls and get back into construction mode. It's been far too long.

In other news, I'm almost finished reading Born To Run that talks a lot about minimalist running and ancient super foods for healthy living and such so I've been trying out a lot of their ideas. I got a sweet new pair of running shoes that I'm now pretty obsessed with. They feel like running in slippers which is awesome. I'm not sure how I feel about transitioning to the 5 finger shoes, but I'm trying to slowly get into the idea of barefoot running. I've also started trying a lot of recipes with chia seeds which are supposed to be the ancient miracle food that the helps promote energy. I'm giving it a try, but I think what would really promote more energy in me would be to get more than 6 hours of sleep...ever. Either way, it's a good book and fun things to try to get nice and healthy!

Cookies & Pictures & Movies...hoorah!

A lot of excitement going on in the last few days. Last week I had to give a presentation to a group of fellow officers on Public Speaking. I must say it was slightly nerve-racking. I haven't given a presentation like that in a loooooong time. To get myself a little more psyched up for the event I decided to make some cookies to share since the presentation was given at lunch time. So even if my presentation didn't entertain people completely at least maybe the cookies would! I made some delicious banana pecan chocolate chip cookies. They were awesome, although next time I might add more banana since it was such a subtle flavor in this batch, but they still got rave reviews and were completely devoured, and the presentation went pretty well too I must say.

Saturday morning I woke up to a completely awesome surprise! One of the blogs I follow is the Pioneer Woman, and more specifically the Pioneer Woman Photography blog. Every once in a while she has photo competitions where there's a theme and you can submit your theme relevant photos for he to choose her favorites from and then a winner. This week's theme was cell phone photography, so you could submit any photo that you had taken with your cell phone. I submitted a photo that I had taken of Kristen and Jordan at their wedding, along with a few others. There are thousands and thousands of entries for these competition, and everyday the Pioneer Woman selects about 20 or so of her favorite submissions. Saturday morning, SHE PICKED MINE!! Yay!!! You can see the blog post here. She has about 4 days of her favorite submissions, so out of the thousands of photos submitted, mine was at least in the top 100...awesome!

After all that excitement, we headed over to Bainbridge Island for a BBQ with a few of the guys that I work with. It was fun to finally meet all their wives and see everyone in a non work environment. When we got home from that, we got ready for our next excitements...HARRY POTTER 3D! I'm not quite sure what to do with myself now that I can't look forward to the next movie since there won't be one :( I guess I can still look forward to the DVD release then I can have a full Harry Potter marathon...which would clearly be awesome.

Sunday we went by our (fingers crossed) future home! We'll do the home inspection this week and finish up all the loan paperwork, then it'll all be official! We have until the end of August for closing, so we'll take that time to finish up our design ideas so that as soon as the keys are turned over to us we can start the renovation process! Although it may be a slow process and not be completely done for another couple of years, it's going to be great! I can't wait to get started with it all. We also took Ben out at the house and let him run around the yard...he's going to looooove being able to run all over the place when we let him out.

Blog Shout Out!

I read a good amount of blogs, and wish more of my friends/family would write blogs so I can keep up with everyone easier! I do have one cousin who has a fabulous blog that I would encourage everyone to subscripe to for a variety of reasons. First of all, Amy is a fantastic writer and anything she writes about is truely captivating. Amy carries the BRCA 1 breast cancer gene and her blog It's in the Genes follows her journey through breast cancer. As previusly mentioned, Amy is a fabulous writer, so all of this information is laid out much more elequently on her blog than I could ever put it. Besides fighting cancer, being a mother, being a wife, being a writer, and maintaining a blog, Amy is also writing a memior on her experience. If she gets 5,000 subscribers to her blog, her editor believes she can get her memoir published. I would highly encourage all to subscribe to her blog to help in the effort as well as gain the enjoyment of reading her talented writings!

On another note, papers have been signed on our house, we have 5 days to do an inspection and get final loan approvals, then we should own a home!

The Hunt!

We've been doing a little house hunting the past couple of months in preparation for the end of our apartment lease coming up in the fall. Ideally we would love to stop paying rent on an apartment and start paying a mortgage on a place. We've been looking mostly in the Capital Hill and Queen Anne areas of Seattle since those are the closest to downtown that you can purchase single family homes in, unfortunately that also means they're really expensive, really old, and really small. We've been to several open houses and gotten an idea of what we could get in the price range that we were looking at. Luckily we are kind of looking for a place that is move in ready, but has a good amount of work to be done on it so that we can put our own touches into the house. Although I'm not sure what will come out of it at this point, we have put our first offer in on a house...how exciting!

This is definitely one of the cheapest places we have found at all! The location is great towards the top of Queen Anne and perched up on the hill so it does get a few good views. One big part about this house that we liked is that it actually has a yard! It's one of the biggest lots we've found in the area which means lots of room for puppies and expansions and gardens! A few negatives...it is a really small house that needs lots of updating and there's a height limitation put on it by the owner pretty much meaning that we can't expand vertically. Other than that, there's a lot to work with, and I think we'd definitely be up for the challenge, and the mortgage would actually be even less than we're paying in rent right now...yay! Obviously the general look of it isn't really our style right now, but we've got all kinds of ideas brewing to rectify that!

We're going back and forth with offers and counter-offers at the moment, so we'll see what happens with that. We also still need to do an inspection on the property which could make or break it too. Home buying is our next big adventure though, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of updates to follow!