Ben's Videos!

This is what Ben has been traveling and putting in 80 hour weeks for! These beautiful videos were, for the most part, shot and edited by Ben, and I'm so proud to share them with you!

To view all the videos and the complete site, visit http://www.yamaha.com/allaccess360/. I embedded some of my favorites below.

Birthday Week!

Ben's an 8-2-82, I'm an 8-8-83. That means the first week of August is Birthday Week in our house!

I love nearly sharing a birthday with my husband, but it was a change coming from a family where everybody's birthdays are spaced throughout the year. Ashley is in January, Mom's in March, I'm in August, Dad is in November. Since we've been married, Ben and I always have a big co-birthday celebration because we know we'll have to wait a whole year before we get to celebrate again! It was actually one of the reasons we decided to get married in March instead of waiting til summer, so we would have something else to celebrate the other 359 days of the year.

I thought it would be fun to take a look back on our birthday celebrations from the past couple years...

2006 we celebrated even more things at once with a combination birthday-birthday-housewarming party. The house was as clean like it will never be clean again, since we'd just moved in about a month before. Ben got to fire up his brand new grill. There were hotdogs and brats and it was as hot as August in Nashville can be.

2007 was the year of the FIESTA! We had a rockin' good party featuring the first appearance of the Wii. There was a donkey pinata named Paco. I made fajitas to feed 50. BYOB. Good times all around.

2008 we spent birthday week in Estes Park Colorado, and I had the most magical of all birth-dates ever in the history of birthdays... 08-08-08! It was so fun we just kept chanting it! The discovery of the brookie. White water kayaking. I met Bethany Dillon. Friends and family and all the good stuff.

WILL 2009 top them all? Well, let's just put it this way. There's going to be this:


And lots of it. So bring on the festivities, it's birthday week 2009!

Blackberry Bottoms

Okay, so I tweeted that I was going to attempt these cupcakes a couple days ago. I did, and here they are for your inspection.

I had purchased some gorgeous fat blackberries from the farmers market last weekend, and I knew I wanted to use them in a dessert. I chickened out on a pie. Plus, I don't like pie. Instead, I went with cupcakes. I intended for these to be buttermilk vanilla cupcakes with blackberry centers/filling. Instead what happened is the berries were too heavy and fell through the batter as they baked, ending up on the bottom of each cupcake. So I rechristened them Blackberry Bottoms.

That's the bad news. Construction, fail.

The good news? They still tasted real delicious. Kind of muffin-esque. And all that means is that I can convincingly eat them as a breakfast food. Oh. Yes.


Plus, you can't tell there's anything awry at all... very innocent and proper looking...


Until... chomp chomp. The blackberries have been located.

Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing" and its Music Video Muses

Twitter was a-buzz today with kudos for the new Coldplay video. It IS pretty awesome, and you can see it here. (I couldn't find a good embeddable version.)

I wasn't completely overwhelmed, however, because it so reminded me of Oren Lavie's beautiful stop-motion video for the song "Her Morning Elegance."



I first saw the video in this post from Inkdryer's blog. Coldplay obviously turned it up a notch with the crazy cool chalk animation but I like the way the other video used the real items as props, like the sock fish.

And, while we're at it, someone already fought psychotic squirrels in a music video, and that someone was David Crowder. Case in point.

PS. Sorry, I fail at blogging lately. I will try not to wait two weeks between posts again!

Happy

Your turn!

Complete the sentence: "Today I will be happier than _______."

This adorable print found at Studio Mela on Etsy.

Grill Master

From the always awesome Toothpaste For Dinner:



From my backyard, yesterday, apx. 7:00 pm:


Love you, my little grill-master!

PS. Thanks Heather for the link!

Cupcakes Two Ways

Yesterday I had fun experimenting with two new frostings for cupcakes, and got some lovely results!

First up was strawberry buttercream, made with some fresh strawberries. I cut off the very edges of the berries to get rid of the seed thingies, and then smashed them up and blended them in with some vanilla buttercream. I piped that onto the dark chocolate fudge cupcakes and great googly moogly, did they turn out beautifully!


Next I made some chocolate buttercream with half semi-sweet and half dark chocolate. I figured that would cut nicely the sweetness of the sugar in the frosting. I crushed some cocoa-roasted almonds (such as these) and dusted the tops of the cupcakes to finish. YUMMY.


One of the perils of piping with buttercream frosting is that it is suceptible to heat. Since it is made with butter, it can get melty sitting at room temperature or go soft from the heat of your hand in the piping bag. But I can't bear to make frosting with shortening, which gives it this greasy sort of taste, so I just tried to keep the frosting cool at the various stages of decorating, and it seemed to work out okay. The chocolate, in fact, gave me some trouble because it wasn't very pliable after I stuck the piping bag in the fridge for a few minutes. I had to knead it around a bit to get it working. But to me the taste of real butter in the frosting is totally worth it.

Next I think I am going to make my first attempt at some sort of cake or cupcake with a filling... stay tuned!

Lemon Squirrel

I have a soft-spot in my heart for squirrel adorableness, so this video pretty much made my day.

Two things really sold it for me. One, tiny munching sounds. Two, what happens right at the end.



via BestWeekEver