It's May

And that means it's almost two months since I last posted. But what does one say when there's no IF news and life is just going along as normal on a day to day basis? I guess one thing of note is that we decided to finalize our embryo donor choice so that we were ready to go when we had the funds after July.

What else has been happening? Not much really. It's the usual day to day stuff. With the ever increasing price of gas the commute is making me think more and more of wanting to find something closer to home. But because I'm in a somewhat specialized field, it's not so easy. Meanwhile, I continue making cakes when the opportunity presents itself. And when it doesn't I make them anyway to try out new recipes. Recently I made a family favourite from my childhood. Our birthday cakes were always the same. A chocolate cake with chocolate icing, and of course chocolate ice cream. Not for my Mum, mind you, who really doesn't like chocolate. (I know! Sacrilege!) But for my Dad, me and my brothers that was always the choice. It's been years since I've had that cake because V isn't a big fan of chocolate either. So I made that cake a couple of weeks ago along with a yellow cake I wanted to try. I then paired both of them with a new chocolate ganache filling I wanted to try. And then finally, I made a new swiss meringue butter cream to which I added some of the ganache. OMG! It was amazing. If you've never had it, swiss meringue butter cream is a silky, smooth, not overly sweet icing. Fantastic! It's unlike the typical American butter cream we usually see on bakery cakes. The final verdict for these cakes? Definitely on my cake availability list as well as the ganache. And the icing is now my go-to icing, unless I need something that will crust, in which case I have a great American butter cream recipe.

So fast forward to this past weekend. Somewhat in honour of Mothers Day but not really since my Mum doesn't like chocolate, I wanted to try something new. I've made red velvet before, but I wanted to try out another recipe. And this time I wanted a cream cheese icing that could be piped on a cake and didn't have a really strong cream cheese flavour. Did my research and made 2 dozen cupcakes. With the extra batter I made a single 8" cake layer because I'm going to make some red velvet cake balls this weekend.

Below is a picture of the cupcakes. They really turned out awesome, and the icing was soooo good and not overly sweet. Oh, and I added white chocolate to the icing too. Only thing is the recipe makes 12 cups and I forgot to cut it down. So I now have 9-10 cups of white chocolate cream cheese butter cream. At least I can freeze it. :)




There's not much else going on. We're planning for our first BBQ of the season on the Victoria Day weekend (that's the week before Memorial Day for my US readers). I'll be making some sort of cupcake or cake balls for that event.

We traded in my Grand Caravan last week. It was kind of long in the tooth and I'd racked up the miles with my commute. So I'm am now driving a peppy Do.dge Jou.rney. I liked the van, but I really like the Journey, and its back row folds flat (like the minivan) so cake deliveries will be easy too.

Oh, and finally, I decided that since we weren't going to be able to do our last FET until the latter part of the year, I was going to try and lose some of the extra weight I'd put on over the last year or so. So, I've been doing the two W's since March and I'm down 13. I wish it was more, but I'm okay with that. We're off to Vegas in June for a conference (for me) and I'm hoping I can lose another 10 by then. If I can be down by 25 by the time our cycle rolls around, I'll be very happy.

So, that's all for now. Thanks to those still reading. :)