This is how everyone should cut out sugar cookies and dye Easter eggs.  In your socks, diaper (or underwear…whatever you prefer to wear), and a fire truck apron!  Notice that where we are standing you can see the game on tv, because you can’t cut out bunny cookies during March Madness without knowing whats going on.  Which by the way, if anybody cares for an update, my bracket has been getting crushed by Royal’s in all but the east region.  I guess schools with cool names just aren’t good at basketball this year.

Jayden and I delivered some valentines around town today.  We made heart cookies and pink meringue kisses earlier in the week, then found some cute valentine boxes, and we took some to our friends Erin and Brady, Heather, Aunt Jojee, Great Aunt Nancy, Great Grandma Leona, and Uncle Willie (or Lilly as Jayden calls him).  And then we left a HUGE plate of heart sugar cookies at the funeral home for all the boys and girls.  I mean lets face it, either I start giving away all the crap delicious holiday food we keep making, or I am going to have to seriously invest in bigger clothing.  At our house I still have heart sugar cookies, meringue kisses, oatmeal scotchies, and heart shaped brownies, and that’s just the stuff I made this week.  This is not counting all the other stuff that is in the cupboard to snack on.  It’s just not a good thing.  Well it’s a good thing when all I want to do is eat sugar, but really it’s just not a good thing.  I guess I could eat it all in one day, make myself really sick, and then I won’t want it again for probably a good 2-3 days.

Today, besides being Singles Awareness Day (as Willie and I always call it), was the 10 month anniversary of Willie’s death.  So, since it wasn’t rainy outside, Jayden and I went to Shelton to go visit Willie at the cemetary.  It was nice to go in the daylight, as most of the trips I make are in the dark after Royal has come home to take care of Jayden (very sneakily of course since the cemetary is closed - refer back to our month 1 visit).  We brought him a cookie that Jayden worked so hard on.  Jayden did all the mixing, and then cut out heart shapes inbetween eating all the dough off the counter.  But Jayden loved his cookie just a little too much, so much so that he decided to show Willie just how delicious it was before he left it.

“Mmmmm….cookie”

When I saw Jessica Seinfeld on the Today show with her new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, I was totally hooked.  I am always on the prowl for healthier and better ways of making things.  I am not a huge vegetable eater, it’s totally not my favorite part of the meal, but I fix them and eat them because I know they are good of me and my family.  So, when I saw Jessica’s cookbook about using vegetables purees in your food, I thought, ‘why the heck didn’t I think of that?’.   It’s just like making babyfood.  I wanted to go out and get the cookbook, but since Christmas was a couple months away, Royal had banned me from going out and buying anything.  So, until I had the cookbook in my hands, I figured I could improvise.  I puree’d up a bunch of stuff and have been sneaking it into a bunch of our meals.  But then Christmas finally rolled around and I finally got the cookbook, and now I had a ton more ideas for how and where to put vegetables.  The one thing that I was extremely disappointed about with the recipes, is that they use margarine.  Margarine is nothing but a tub full of toxins, and I refuse to use it.  I obviously subsitute in butter, but I was still sad that this now extremely popular cookbook is getting people to use margarine under the pretense that it’s “healthy” food.  The vegetables are healthy, the margarine not so much….  Anyways… in the cookbook there was a recipe for chocolate cupcakes, and I figured if they could put vegetables in chocolate and make it taste good, I was sold.  So, Jayden and I set out this morning to make some deceptively delicious cupcakes.  The recipe didn’t use butter at all, it had strange ingredients like avocado and balsamic vinegar.  When my batter started out looking like this, I was a little worried. (Jayden looks a little worried too)

But thank goodness after adding the cocoa powder, it started looking more like normal chocolate cake batter.

We baked ‘em up and let ‘em cool and I figured since they smelled pretty good, I would at least try the frosting that was with the recipe as well.  The frosting called for cream cheese and cauliflower.  I mixed it up and frosted the cupcakes and we tried it out.  The cupcake was really good.  It was more dense like a made from scratch cupcake usually is, it wasn’t as sugary tasting, but I still thought they were delicious.  I would make them again.  The frosting on the other hand, it was ok.  It just tasted kinda off, as I imagined frosting made from cauliflower would.  I think next time I’ll add more powdered sugar and some milk to make it sweeter, or maybe next time I’ll skip the “healthier” frosting and make some good stuff.  After all, these are cupcakes.