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

 

xoxo, 

  Arlene

If you can see the video, click here to view.

I was inspired from Tim Burton's movie "Nightmare Before Christmas" so I carved up one of his character, good old Jack! Who doesn't love a Tim Burton movie. His movies are exceptional!

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 got a new Waterproof Camera as a surprise gift from Tricky for summer. It's a Sony Bloggie HD Waterproof camera and I decided to make an awesome video with my family while testing it out for the first time. I love this camera. It's shock proof and dust proof. Check out the video that I made with my family below. Hope you're enjoying your summer! =)

Family Adventures Underwater (Plus BLOOPERS!!) from Most Amazing Family on Vimeo.

I love my customized shoe rack that Tricky and his brother Mikey helped me make. Living in New York, apartments are known for being small and not having enough closet space. So you really have to be crafty on your storage space. You have to utilize wall space and build up. Generally, people would put them in the closet: on the floor beneath the clothes or top shelf. Or sometimes even invest in furniture, cubby holes, etc to store shoes which just takes up valuable floor space. Either case, shoes take up so much space! I love my shoes, but hate how cumbersome it can be when I don't have enough space for them. It was a love hate relationship that I have had with them for quite a while...up until now. 

Tricky picked up some wood from Home Depot, took some measurements based on the width and height of our bedroom wall. 

Mikey cutting the wood based off Tricky's measurements.

 Painted the wood with some leftover paint that we already had. 

After a few nails and screws in the wall...VOILA! 

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!

If you find these compartments in TJ Maxx or anywhere else, GRAB THEM! You can even try your local dollar stores as well. However, if you can't find them...I found these organizers just as handy at the Container Store.
It has the ability to interlock and change the arrangement.
($2.99-$3.49)

If you have deep drawers, you can even try these also found at the
Container Store
($3.49-$5.99)

When it came down to actually organizing this drawer...I knew that I would get a little overwhelmed when I realized how much junk I had. So to make things a little easier and fun, I took 2 empty shoe boxes and labeled one "YES" for items to keep and the other box "NO" for items to throw or donate. You won't believe how many dead pens are lurking in a junk drawer. It made the task not only easier but fun.

At the end of it all....it was totally worth it! At first the drawer looked so full that I didn't think I would have enough compartments to hold the amount of junk I had. But to be honest....I didn't really throw that many items away other than pens, broken light bulbs, etc and even after all that I had more than enough space for everything and a home for everything now.

There was a huge anticipation as well as a preparation for Hurricane Irene in NYC. The city that never sleeps actually was shut down. All the subways, buses and transit were shut down which has only been shut down 2 other times in history...once during the 9/11 tragedy of World Trade Center and the second time was during the MTA Strike.

I woke up the next day to take some footage around the city (shown above). However, the next day most of the water had subsided and all that Irene left was fallen trees. Based on my video some people who do not live in New York made comments such as "oh that wasn't that bad."
So I thought I would show you pictures as well "during" the Hurricane as well as "after." It might have not been "that bad" as some might say, but to be honest, I'm glad it wasn't. I'm glad that New York was as prepared or over prepared because it's better to be safe than sorry.

Besides, Hurricane Irene did not devastate anything but our patience. We are New Yorkers. We are resilient, so we move on with life.