Hey Guys!! 

So my friend Sirin's daughter, Maia just had her birthday and she is absolutely OBSESSED with the new Disney movie, Frozen! 

All I hear her talk about is.... 

"Frozen this...Frozen that....

Can you do my hair like Elsa?  

Do you want to watch Frozen with me? 

Do you want to build a snowman?" 

Geez! 

Talk about excitement! haha. I had to watch the movie myself to find out what all the excitement was. 

I do have to admit. I cried like a baby. Don't judge me. So hey.... I thought it was a perfect opportunity to surprise Maia and make her these Frozen themed cupcakes. I figured I'd record the process while doing so. I hope you guys like it. If you have been a follower of mine, then you might have already seen my 3 tier cake that I made her for her past birthday. If you missed it, then you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zq6C0SRyDQ 

As far as for the cupcakes goes.....can we just take a moment and just talk about how excited I am to share this with you. I've made so many different versions of Vanilla Cupcakes out there...but I must admit. This is my all time favorite. I had to do some tweaking to find what worked best for me by making some adjustments, but I think i finally got it! The sour cream works wonders and it really does help make the cupcake super moist and fluffy. I find that it's important to have an oven thermometer to make sure your oven reads the correct temperature...since it can really make or break your recipe. Also, the trick to a perfect cupcake is...after you finish baking your cupcakes...you don't want to leave it in the muffin pan to cool because it can continue to bake and become dry. So once they finish baking,  immediately take them out of the pan and let them cool on a wire rack. The easiest way to take them out of the muffin pan when they are still hot is I drape a kitchen towel over the cupcakes....and flip the entire pan upside down allowing the cupcakes to gently fall into the towel. While they are upside down, I just transfer them to a wire rack. Don't worry about any indentations, because if  you baked this right, the cupcake should spring back to form. 

As far as the frosting goes... I hate it when the frosting is just too darn sweet that it just overpowers the entire flavor of the cupcake. The frosting is suppose to compliment the cupcake, not overpower it.  For this reason exactly is why I add just a pinch of salt to the frosting. It's not entirely noticeable that it tastes "salty". It just helps to tone down the sweetness and give it a balance. If you on the other hand, loves the sweetness, by all means, leave the salt out. 

Ok, on with the recipe...

Vanilla Cupcake with Buttercream Frosting

(12-14 cupcakes)

Vanilla Cupcake Ingredients

1/4 cup unsalted butter (room temperature)

1 cup white sugar

3 tablespoons of vanilla extract (use the real vanilla, the the imitation)

1/4 cup vegetable oil

2 large eggs

1/3 cup of sour cream

1 3/4 cup all purpose flour (sifted)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

2/3 cup whole milk. 

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit

2. Beat the butter and sugar till crumbly. 

3. Add the vanilla, oil, eggs and sour cream till combined.

4. Slowly sift in all purpose flour, add salt, baking soda and baking powder. 

5. Mix with a spatula while slowly stirring in the milk. 

6. After incorporated, you can mix it with your hand mixer till smooth. 

7. If you prefer the classic white vanilla cake, then skip to steps 8-9 and transfer to a cupcake lined muffin pan, proceed to step 10.

8. Evenly divide the batter in 3 separate bowls and tint each bowl a different shade of blue. 

9. Take a spoon, and scoop 2 spoons of batter into cupcake lined muffin pan, starting with the darkest color first....then repeating the same steps for the medium blue, layering it over the darkest color.....then layering the lightest color on top. 

10. Bake for 15 min, 350 degrees

11. Remove immediately from the muffin pan once baked to prevent over baking and let them cool on a wire rack. 

Buttercream Frosting Ingredients

1/4 cup unsalted butter (room temperature)

1/2 cup crisco (room temperature)

1 tsp vanilla

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar (confectioner's sugar)

1/4 cup whole milk

Pinch of salt

Instructions

1. Blend the butter and crisco

2. Mix in vanilla

3. Slowly mix in sugar, salt and milk 

4. Texture should be thick and should hang on to the spatula

5. Start piping!!!

Note: If you are in a warmer area and find that your frosting is still a bit soft, easy trick to fix this is to let it sit in your refrigerator for 15-20 minutes to allow the butter and crisco to solidify a bit to make it easy to work with. 

List of items I'm using in the video:  

Elsa Miniature Frozen Doll

I used a label maker to name each container

Ta-Dah! 

I will show you an updated picture to see how this new organized pantry has been holding up...

so be sure to check back for the status. =) 



*Disclaimer: all items mentioned above were purchased with my own money. This is not a sponsored blog post. Affiliate links help fund a small amount towards my blog to continue to make content. Thank you so much for your support.

I am so loving the Container Store. I don't know why I never took any interest to go there after years of walking past the store on several occasions. If you've never been the Container Store, let me just warn you...it's like walking into a candy store. It's a place where you can find anything and everything to organize your life and make things so much easier. If you ever been to Ikea and you enjoy it every time, then you will love the Container Store. Every week I've been tackling a new project around the house. I started doing this regimen of mine since the New Years resolution that I blogged about was to be more organized. So last week I organized my pots & pans.


Yes, I know. My before picture looked atrocious. I had my baking pans on the top shelf along with other baking essentials and my pots and pans on the bottom. I gutted everything out. Donated a few unused pots and pans to a friend who just moved to their new apartment the day before I took this picture. Made the decision to designate this cupboard for only pots and pans and moved my baking pans to a new home.


I picked up a lid organizer from the Container Store for only $4.99 and put the lids on the top shelf and the pots and pans on the bottom. Putting the more frequent used pieces in the front and the remainder in the back.
I picked up some self-adhesive hooks and stuck them to the inside of the door to hang my oven mits and cutting board. The green cutting board is a thin flexible plastic cutting board. It didn't have any holes for me to hang on to the hooks, so I cut a small square into it with a utility blade. Perfect! Now I don't have to scramble anymore looking for a cutting board and the oven mits no longer have to take up drawer space.

As much as I love baking cupcakes, the collection of cupcake liners can get a bit excessive if you're collection begins to grow throughout the Holidays. Luckily for me, I just baked over 4 dozen cupcakes within the past 2 weeks so my collection is starting to dwindle away (but not for long). I came across an amazing idea thanks to pinterest. Blogger Torie Jayne came up with a brilliant idea to organize her cupcake liners in a spaghetti jar. I had enlisted this idea in my previous blog post: "Happy New Organized Year"


Here are the steps:

You'll need a 1 liter size bottle for this project.

Step 1:
Peel off the wrapper from the bottle

Step 2:
Clean any excess goo stuck on the bottle

Step 3:
Use masking tape as your guide to where you will cut.
You can skip this step and just eyeball it.
But I preferred to make sure it was as even as possible
since my eyeballing skills for cutting is like a 4th grader.
I lied.
A 3rd grader.
haha.

Step 4:
Cut. Cut. Cut.

Step 5:
Remove the tape.

Step 6:
File any sharp edges.
I didn't have any sand paper
(remember it was 2am)
so I just used an extra nail file that I have.
After this process, be sure to wash and dry the bottle.
Step 7:
Decorate!
Don't worry, the glue is dried now.
I was just too excited to take the picture to wait for the glue to dry.






Hope you enjoy it! If you do plan on doing this or anything similar to this...please let me know. I'd love to see it!

I didn't want to do the generic gingerbread house so I decided to be different and make a Hawaiian gingerbread house since I love Hawaiian dancing. Here's a couple pictures of my take on it. Check out the video below of the process of it being made. click here to see video

I had an interview the day of Fashion Night out at Sephora and after my interview had the opportunity to meet with celebrities such as Kat Von D and YouTube Gurus JulieG713, Fafinettex3, KorenMakeup, WhatStyleIsToNickel, MamiChula8153, NatyMidnight.


There were other celebrities at Fashion Night also at Sephora such as my favorite....Gwen Stefani. She is so fabulous and after 2 kids, let's not forget...beautiful!

If you want to see a video from Fashion Night Out I uploaded a video of my experience on my YouTube channel or you can watch the video below.
Click here to see the video.



Ontop of it all...I ended up getting hired as a makeup artist for Sephora. Woohoo! Yay! With permission from my store director/manager I will definitely let you know if thereis anything new and popping I'll be sure to spread the word.

Working at Sephora has definitely been fun and all the people that work there are amazing. I get asked this question often, "do you get paid commission?" So let me clear the record....the answer is "NO." Sephora employees do not get commission, everything is 100% customer service. So when you get an employee giving you that extra service and you think to yourself "hmm..I wonder if they are getting commission" you can stop right there, because they are commission free. I've always been treated with great quality customer service as a consumer so I was extremely happy when I joined the Sephora team.

If you can't see the images, click here

If you have seen my Valentines video on my YouTube channel, I made a DIY (Do it Yourself) on
"How to make a Cookie Cutter." I made a variety of cookie cutters such as: hearts, stars and even our most loved Disney character, Mickey Mouse (which I made for my best friend Joann).

I was able to make some really adorable cookies with my cookie cutter. I provided the recipe and the steps on how I created my cookies (picture above). Click here to the original blog post for the recipe. The original tutorial video for the cookie cutters is below.




Well one of my YouTube subscribers TheIvyAuthor sent me a message about how she was having a Hollywood theme tea party and used my tutorial video to make her very own cookie cutters. She was kind enough to share her video with me and I thought I would show you what she made. Check out her video below. She made Hollywood sunglasses and I have to say...they are so adorable! Thanks girl for sharing your creation with me. =)

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp milk
1 cup of powdered sugar
Piping bag for frosting (or use a ziplock bag and just cut a tiny hole at the tip)
Food coloring
Jolly Ranchers (or any hard candy)

To learn how to make these cookies, you can watch the tutorial video.