Strawberry vanilla cupcake recipe

Hi all! Sorry that this is kind of a weird post. I'm sort of out of whack thanks to being sort of "on vacation" you could say so my schedule is kind of weird with driving up and down everywhere to visit my brothers who happen to be in different directions of the state. Fun times. But seriously I will try to at least post once a week, if not twice a week when I can. I have a few things I've been wanting to try out now that I'm here, and have access to an actual art store and places to buy different ingredients I can't get at home. 

Anyways, back to the post at hand! On the 12th we left for the states, which also happened to be one of my best friend's birthday unfortunately. So to make up for the lack of me being there on her birthday, I decided to bake some cupcakes for her and her family the day before I had to leave. Now, I've recently gotten into this thing of baking, but I don't like baking normal people things. I don't want to just make a vanilla cupcake. I want to make a vanilla cupcake with homemade blackberry jam filling and homemade blackberry frosting. I don't just make chocolate cupcakes. I make chocolate blackberry cupcakes. I don't just do a chocolate cake. It has to be a Swedish chocolate cake (which I found out is delicious when you first get it out of the oven, but if you let it cool off too long, which i waited until much later to actually serve it, the cake becomes about as hard as a rock.). So you get the general idea. I like baking things (mostly cupcakes) with a bit of a twist. 

And that is why I got so excited when I accidentally stumbled on this recipe for a cupcake base. Basically all you have to do is make this base up and then add your flare to it. And that's when I had a light bulb moment! I wanted to make strawberry vanilla cupcakes. The unfortunate thing is that this recipe is only in grams for the dry ingredients. Why? I don't really know. It probably has something to do with being more precise or something. So that's a tad bit of a pain, but with a little digging I found a site that you can figure out how many grams (or whatever) it takes for cups (or whatever you're wanting) and this website has different calculators for sugar, flour, and butter. So that's pretty nifty if you need to convert things like that.

For this batch I was only making six cupcakes so I had to mess with the recipe and decided to just borrow my dad's electric weighing thing (very technical term right there.) instead.

Ingredients (if you're doing the full batch): 

• 125g butter, softened (a little over a stick)
• 125g caster sugar (a little over half a cup)
• 2 medium eggs
• 125g self-raising flour (1 cup)
• 2 tbsp milk

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 375 F/190 C

Step 2: Beat your eggs and sugar until they are light and fluffy

Step 3: Add the eggs, flour, and milk and beat until smooth. 

All right now for the yummy part! 
Step 4: Add in about 1/2 a cup of strawberry pureed (thrown in the blender) and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Mix in.

 Step 5: place into cupcake tins and in oven for 12-15 minutes or until risen and the center is firm to the touch. 

Step 6: Wait until cool and then ice. I used a simple vanilla icing from scratch but there are some really amazing strawberry icing recipes (I might experiment and put one up sometime). I ha planned to place  strawberry on top of them, but i used all I had in the actual batter so that didn't work. 

The birthday girl's cupcake!

And the lovely birthday girl!

Please let me know how this went if you try it! From the batter I tasted it turned out pretty well, but unfortunately I forgot to make any extra for me to actually try (yeah, I know, that's kind of bad). So hopefully this recipe is correct and turns out well for all y'all! 

Lemon face toner

Okay so first off I would like to apologize for not posting anything in a while. Things have been super crazy around here. I had my SAT, traveling to the states, a wedding, and a new addition to our family in the last few weeks that has kept me pretty busy. My middle brother and his lovely new wife had asked me to be a bridesmaid for the wedding so that kept me pretty busy the days before the wedding on the 18th and my oldest brother's precious little Coralynn came 10 days early at 3:43 AM on the 18th as well so that kept us on our toes with a lot of reshuffling of plans. But everything has calmed down for the most part now and I finally have time to sort of catch my breath as I will be in America for the month.

So with all that said, let's move on to the actual post. As someone with severely sensitive skin (to the point that any little thing can set off an allergic reaction on my face) I am constantly looking for natural effective ways of tending to my skin. And I found a rather surprising one after doing some research. Apparently lemon/lime juice is a natural facial toner and if left on over night it can even out your skin tone and even get rid of freckles/dark spots.

At first I was a tad but skeptical as I mentioned that I have very sensitive skin. So the first time I put on just a bit and left it on for an hour. Noing bad seemed to happen so I went to sleep with it. Sure enough in the morning I had actually seen a bit of a change and no side effect. So I started trying it out at night and after a few days it really was working!

But there are some minor drawbacks. I have found that if you don't use it fairly consistently the effects go away and your face goes back to how it was. And also if you happen to leave it on when you go out in the sun (an d for me just going out in the sun is dangerous by itself as I am extremely pale and burn very easily) it causes even more damage from what I found from research appears to be a chemical reaction. But if you use it at night and wash it off in the morning before leaving the house it is fine. I do suggest if you are just going to be around the house, wash your face and put on another layer of it.

Okay so now how to use it. It's so easy it's ridiculous. All you need is a small squeeze bottle, a lemon, and water (if you have sensitive skin you will need more water). Squeeze the lemon juice into the bottle (depending on how much you want) and then dilute it a bit with water (more for sensitive skin). After washing your face, shake the bottle to stir up everything, squeeze the juice onto a cotton pad and apply to your face (I use it all over, but you can put it where you feel you need it). It's just that easy!

Coffee Slushie

While I myself am not a coffee fan, our volunteer here has fallen in love with something my brother used to make when he was at home: coffee slushies. So I've taken her word for how good it is after I suggested she should try it. It's a pretty easy recipe and a lot of it is based on your preference.

Step 1: Well obviously to start you need your coffee. You can brew it how you want and put it in extra ice trays. Usually there isn't a problem with this as far as staining the trays, but don't take my word on that one.

Step 2: Once you have your frozen coffee cubes (usually you have to put them in the freezer overnight), figure out how much you want to make. For about a small-medium sized slushie it's about seven normal sized cubes.

Step 3: Toss your cubes into a blender or whatever it is you happen to be using to grind them up. Add in your sugar (she put in about a teaspoon, but this depends on your preference for how sweet you want it).

Step 4: Depending on your amount of cubes, add in your milk. Fill it about to just below the top of the top cubes. She used about a cup for the seven cubes in hers.

Step 5: You can put in vanilla and cinnamon if you want to change it up a bit. She did not like it because it detracts from the coffee taste, but it is good if you want to tone it down a bit.

Step 6: After you've added all your ingredients, start the blender (or whatever you're using) and blend until it's at the consistency that you want. There usually is one or two small cubes that don't grind up all the way. You can try to grind these up better, but it takes a bit of work. 

Finished product

Vanilla Sugar Body Scrub

I love making body scrubs (as anyone living in this household can attest for). It's super fun and easy to make, plus the feeling of your skin afterwards is like rubbing a baby's fat tummy. Yes, a baby's chunky tummy is like the best part of big babies. Or any babies in general, but that's beside the point. The point is is that body scrubs are freaking awesome and feel like tiny babies dancing on you. Which is pretty dang awesome. Anyways so I was messing around in the kitchen one night and decided to do a a recipe from The Idea Room for a brown sugar scrub that I like. Well, I had seen some various sugar scrub recipes and decided why not try making one of my own? So I did just that! As per usual I lay it out with nice big pictures just in case (mainly because I get bored and love playing with the camera). I used an old salsa jar that we seem to be getting a lot of lately and simply used my label removing technique to get that pesky label off for a perfectly good jar.

Recipe:
1 cup white/brown sugar (whichever you want really. I have used both before and I find white is a bit more aggressive than brown is, but both feel great).
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tsp honey
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla

I threw in the cinnamon and vanilla because (1 I have heard that cinnamon is great for your skin and (2 because they smell great and (3 Why not?

Alright let's get started!

Our supplies

 Step 1: pour in the one cup of sugar into your jar, making sure that you have a jar large enough

 Step 2: Pour in the 1/3 cup of oil and kind of move the jar side to side a bit to get the oil to sink in easier

Step 3: Pour in 2 tsps of honey. This part tends to get kind of messy and sticky, but you have to kind of scoop out the excess honey from your teaspoon. So as long as you don't mind having a little fun while you're making this, it should go fine!

Step 4: Pour in the 2 tsps of cinnamon. This may vary, depending on how much you like the smell of cinnamon. I personally love it so I wanted an extra good dosing of it. 

Step 5: Add in your 1 tsp of vanilla. Again this can really vary on your preference. I love the smell so I wanted to cover up the smell of oil with it. But you can add until you feel comfortable. 

Step 6: Mix all of your ingredients together with a spoon, making sure to get all of your sugar mixed with 

Step 6: Go forth and enjoy your new baby dancing awesome feeling skin! Or if you love giving homemade nifty gifts like I do, throw a bow on it and give it to someone you want to experience the amazingness.