baking adventures

I love to cook and bake. When I have spare time I make everything from scratch and try to cook really healthy good meals. Since I've been working full time I haven't had as much time to cook as well and healthy as I'd like but I'm still trying. After not cooking for like a week straight (birthdays created lots of leftovers and i was being lazy) I decided to start making meals again. In Brandon's family they have this tradition of eating SPAM fried rice. Despite the fact I know my mother in law is reading this I have to say when I first heard they were eating SPAM fried rice I thought it was a joke. I honestly thought no one bought SPAM and if you did it was for a joke. I didn't think anyone actually ate it. I was very skeptical when I first went to try it for myself... Its actually pretty good. I pick out 95% of the SPAM and give it to Brandon but it does add a nice flavor. Since I hadn't cooked for a week I hadn't gone shopping either so for lack of food I decided to try my hand at spam fried rice with the fixings we had gotten for our wedding (we got several meals worth of SPAM fried rice makings for our wedding from Brandon's extended family) I must say its a little scary to make something your mother in law makes thats a tradition, i mean what if its not as good and your husband pops out the dreaded "it's not quite like my moms" ACK! Anyway it was a success and even if Brandon was thinking it he at least didn't say it. However, half way through cutting the spam i realized my face hadn't stopped grimacing since i started. I've never touched the stuff in my life so I was quite nervous and lets face it, its pretty gross sliding out of that can when it retains the can shape and has bits of goopy stuff on it.

Yep pretty sure that was my face for most of this adventure. Last night I decided I wanted to make butternut squash soup. My bro-in law loves it so I invited them over to make some home made soup, plus i wanted to try out my new immersion blender that my sister in law talked me into keeping (by the way good call). We made some delicious soup which come to find out Chelsea and Brandon don't like... they ate captain crunch and Adam and I feasted on delicious soup. This isn't the one I made but I'm too lazy to get the picture off my camera so this looks similar to what we ate

Then today I had grand intentions to make a cake out of a box of halloween funfetti cake. I had the wonderful idea that I would make a yummy cake and home made frosting and decorate it something to the effect of this. Then Brandon told me he didn't want cake so I ended up taking the box of cake and making cookies out of it which were going to be decorated like pumpkins. Well after burning the first batch because our oven is about the size of a large toaster oven and it tends to burn things easily I made a good batch but seriously lacked in the decorating skills.... I got this. Oh well hopefully they will taste yummy.

So those are my latest baking adventures.... really not that exciting. I used to make these grand cakes and cookies. I would spend hours baking them and decorating them and making my own little masterpieces. I thought when I graduated I'd magically have time but I seem to have infinitely less time than when I was in school and studying all the time. Oh well, I'll just keep thinking I'll have more time when i get to the next stage of life and then when I retire I might actually have the time I've been wanting for hobbies like baking, sewing and music playing.