Pumpkin Cream Cupcakes

Speaking of those naughty cupcakes in my last post, here's the recipe along with a no fuss recipe card!

Pumpkin Cream Cupcakes (Kraft Recipes)

1 pkg spice cake mix + oil, water, & eggs per box instructions
1 pkg instant vanilla pudding
1 C canned pumpkin
1 8oz pkg cream cheese, softened
1/4 C sugar
1 egg

Heat oven to 350. Prepare cake batter as directed on the package. Add dry pudding mix and pumpkin; mix well. Spoon into 24 paperlined muffin cups. Beat cream cheese with mixer until creamy. Blend in sugar and egg; spoon over batter. Swirl gently with small spoon. Bake 18-21 min. or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Special extras: mix 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg into 1 1/2 C coolwhip and spread over cooled cupcakes. Keep refrigerated.

Another fun recipe card of our favorite rolls. I'm keeping my cards simple and flat and I haven't decided yet if I'll be putting them into a slip in photo book or in a photo file box. Either way I want them to be flat and easy to handle ;D So far I'll just be working on our favorite recipes. We have quite a few so my goal is to keep it easy and simple, just print one sheet of recipes at a time (3) and make them into cards.

Here is a recipe we haven't used in a while and it is oh so tasty. The girls love "Green Chicken" as they call it ;) I hate how my recipes get lost like this, which is why I'm so excited about this new card thing I'm going to try out. I've had other recipe cards before, but they were usually too small. The large swap I tried was huge 6x6 cards which were cute, but way to big and bulky to be efficient. This is so much quicker and easier. Plus I can use scraps and you all know how much I love that! As we find new favorites I could make the cards and have them all handy together! It makes me want to get the recipe card stamp set from PTI but I'll make do without for now ;)

Color Challenge #44

This is a little late since I'm still doing some Christmas baking. I don't mind though as I love to bake goodies! Of course I love eating them too so it's a good thing I package them as soon as they are cooled to be given away, lol!! I want to thank everyone who has been playing in the color challenges this past year! It has been so fun for me to come up with these color combinations and see what you make with them. I get so inspired viewing all the different projects with the same colors, it really gets me thinking out of the box more often! I'm setting some new goals for next year as I want to start submitting layouts to publish so I won't be doing the color challenges come January. It's been such a fun year with everyone and it makes me sad to stop, but with all of the positive feedback I've gotten I want to try and see if my artwork is good enough for publication and that is going to be taking more of my crafting time. Anyway, I have another Christmasy color combo for you ^_~ To play use at least 3 of the colors and send me a link to your creation so I can see it and post the link to it here as well! Have fun with the colors and thanks for playing in the challenges with me ladies, it's been a blast!

Cranberry
Sorbet
Juniper
Ponderosa Pine


My Sample:

I made some super simple recipe cards to go with some of the shortbread I'm giving out. I've had a few requests for the recipe so I thought on the rest of them I would just give a recipe card to go with it as well. I used the Gratitude stamp set from CTMH for the flowers. Other than that it's just simply printing the recipe on white CS and then matting it on some ponderosa pine cardstock. There will be one more color challenge for next week. It will be the last weekly color challenge I host. I hope you have all enjoyed seeing and playing in the color challenges!

If you can't read the recipe on the card here it is, they are very yummilicious!

Cinnamon Pecan Shortbread Bars

1 C butter, softened
1 C sugar
1 egg
2 C flour
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 C chopped pecans (separated)

Heat oven to 350°F. Grease bottom only of 13x9 pan. In a large bowl, combine butter and sugar, beat until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Add flour, cinnamon, salt, and vanilla; mix well. Stir in ½ C of the pecans. Press dough in bottom of pan. Sprinkle remaining ½ C pecans over dough; press in lightly. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool completely then cut into bars.

Enjoy and have a wonderful Monday!!

My Best Friend's Kitchen

When I first started this challenge I didn't have any method set up yet. In fact I didn't even think I'd be doing more than just a couple of these color challenges! lol There was no real rhyme or reason in the beginning but isn't that how it always is ^_~ However, even 6 months later I do remember the inspiration for these colors and that was food. Dough actually. Red just seems like a 'food' type colors to me so it went in with my doughy colors :D To play use at least 3 of the colors and send me a link so I can add it here to this post. Have fun! Editted : 07/17

Vanilla Cream
Taffy
Holiday Red
Sunflower


Mary's Chilly Layout

My Sample:

Colors : Holiday Red, Taffy, Vanilla Cream

Stamps : Playful Flourishes, Fairy Dust, Amour Caps and Lowercase

Accents : Rhinestones, Ice Stickles crystal

So I pulled out the recipe to make these Fairy Rolls. A wonderful recipe given to me over a year ago by one of my best friends. And what do you know, this recipe is still on the same piece of scrap white cardstock that I had written it on at her house while we were scrappin' together. The back of this scrap piece has some stamped images that I ended up not using and I even remember which layout page they were going to be for lol. Anyway, I start making the rolls and some water gets on the little scrap. The ink from the images on the back start to bleed onto the front and I'm thinking, why in the world have I not made a cute recipe card for this yet?! So here it is, finally :D

Passing Time

My order still hasn't shipped and it's the seventh day today (working day and that's not counting the day I placed the order) so I'm a bit disappointed. With that in mind I decided I really didn't want to wait any longer to finish up the cookie swap pages. I did want to try to see if that B&T added anything to the card but after showing my hubby the layout without it he asked why it needed more. Right then I was like, well... it doesn't. And with that I put them all together. There is a ton of distressing on this and I had to make 27 of these. I love the way it turned out. The colors and distressing make it really look like yummy christmas cookies!!

Colors : Cranberry, Chocolate, Brown Bag, Cocoa, Barn Red, Desert Sand, White Daisy
Papers : Cranberry CS, Chocolate CS, Brown Bag CS, White CS
Stamps : Music of Winter
Inks : Chocolate, Cocoa, Desert Sand, Barn Red
Accents : eyelets from making memories : dark brown, taupe, and rustic copper



The background snowflakes and ink distressing on the white were done in desert sand. Punched out snowflakes are chocolate, cocoa, and barn red. Chocolate ink distressing on the brown bag cardstock. The scanner really brightened up the red, but in real life it's lighter from all the distressing. Eyelets are Making Memories. Stamp set is Music of Winter, one of my favourite winter sets :D.

Swap crazy

I must be nuts. Either that or just really bored, because I've signed up to do four swaps!! Two are pretty easy. They are 6x6 recipe cards and I've already finished all of them for one of the swaps and have everything done except the putting together part for the other one. But the other two (thank goodness they aren't due until Jan), are 12x12 swaps. One of them I'm in 2 rounds of it and one of those rounds is a 2 page layout. So yeah, I guess I went a little overboard when signing up last night and this morning. The good thing though is all of them are things I really want. Anyway, here's my finished one. It turned out so cute. I think my next project will be to decorate a box for all the 6x6 recipe cards I'm going to get :D. After Christmas though, I have way too many other projects to be finishing right now :S.

Colors : Sunflower, Outdoor Denim, White Daisy
Papers : School Zone ('06), Sunflower CS, Outdoor Denim CS, White CS
Stamps : Doodle Alpha
Inks : Sunflower, Outdoor Denim
Accents : Copper eyelets

Recipe is from a friend. She gave it to me a couple years ago and boy do we use it a LOT! It's one of our family favorites and I love it because it's sooooo easy to make. Colors are sunflower and outdoor denim. The B&T was from the back to school pack and stamp set was doodle alpha. I adore those little birds!! :D