I've moved!

After saying I was going to do this for about three years, I finally moved my blog to a spot on my domain. You can now visit me at sarabondioli.com/blog.

To see future posts, please visit the new site. And be sure to use the new URL in the future as this one won't be updated and will eventually fade away.

Onward and upward!

Cake batter you can safely eat!

I did a little baking for a co-worker's birthday tonight. And I had an actual baking fail (which luckily doesn't seem to happen too often). Thankfully, I recovered and was able to make a successful batch of treats. (I had bought enough for two batches, but I ended up being able to make only one because of the failed batch.)

What did I make? These cake batter truffles, which have some definite cake batter flavor, from Bakers Royale. They're actually pretty simple to make, too, as long as you don't do what I did. (However, anything that involves dipping is going to take a little bit of time.)

How did I fail? The recipe calls for heating the sweetened condensed milk over low heat for 10-15 minutes. I did that and it wasn't reaching the right consistency. I noticed in the comments section that someone else had the same problem, and the blogger had suggested raising the heat to medium. So I did that. But I raised it a tad too high and stepped away for a second, and when I returned my milk had started forming a film and had little burnt brown bits in it, which I couldn't get rid of. I didn't think they'd look so appetizing in the truffles, so I ditched that can and started a new batch. This time, I did more of a medium-low heat and made sure to stir constantly. Success!

I used melted semi-sweet chocolate for the coating, but it turned out a little too thick, I think. Next time I would either try a thinner chocolate (such as the glaze perhaps) or make the truffles themselves a bit bigger so they could handle the amount of chocolate in the coating. All in all, though, I think my co-workers will be happy to eat these. And they might even wish I had made the double-batch I planned to.

My favorite fall tree

I did a very small amount of leaf photography this past weekend. But this has been my favorite fall tree for weeks. I pass it most nights on my way home. It sits on the street across from my apartment with a streetlight reaching into the branches and illuminating its yellow leaves beautifully.

The weekend wind blew down a number of the leaves, so these phone pics are probably the best photos I'll have for the season.

I could eat a bowl of this frosting

I'm on a huge pumpkin kick right now, and I had some fall decorations I want to use before the holiday season begins, so I made pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

The recipe is from my friend Erin's blog. I considered trying a cinnamon cream cheese frosting I had with it, but the cupcakes have a good amount of spice in them already, so I thought that might be too overwhelming. (I actually improvised some of the spices because I didn't have quite everything that I thought I did. The results were good, though.)

I don't have proper cupcake frosting tips, so my options were to pipe really thick or really thin frosting. I opted for some huge, thick topping because this cream cheese frosting is amazing. (I actually think most cream cheese frosting is amazing, but this one surely doesn't disappoint.)

I topped the cupcakes with candy-coated chocolate sunflower seeds (in fall colors), which I won/bought as part of a Missouri prize package at an alumni event recently.

(I realized after the fact that I used the same cupcake wrappers as Erin. From the stock I had, these seemed to match the best. I guess great minds think alike!)

A wedding!

Family photo

Finally, the purpose for our Springfield visit was upon us: Stephanie and Robert's wedding.

The Rev Kev presided over a beautiful ceremony.

Then there was eating and drinking and dancing. Nolen finally joined in dancing, too.

After it was all over, we had to celebrate my cousin Carolyn's 21st birthday at midnight!

It was a great weekend full of family!

Springfield tourism

While I was in Springfield, Mo., with the family for my cousin's wedding, we had a little extra time to kill. So we hit up Springfield's tourist attraction: the original Bass Pro Shop.

I had been to one or two before, but not this one. It's quite monstrous, and they appeared to be doing construction to add on even more! But the best part was watching Nolen.

Nolen wasn't all that interested in the fish. He much preferred looking at the big boats and four-wheelers.

The turtles were pretty cool, though. The whole family gathered 'round.

I think his favorite part was the elevator. He convinced Grandpa to take him up and down and up and down. Here they wait in anticipation as the elevator arrives.

Grandpa also brought Nolen into the roped-off area for a Peanuts photo op. Nolen leaned against a pumpkin and ... oops, they must be made of foam.

On the Bus, er, Metro: Living in a van

Awhile back when I was running across particularly interesting people each morning on my bus ride to work, I started sharing stories on here. Tonight's Metro ride is worth sharing.

A hippie guy is talking to a girl (who appears to be his friend) on the Metro about how he hasn't found the right girl yet and wouldn't want to change for a girl.

Guy: I mean, I'll change some little things maybe, but not the big things.

Girl: Yea

Guy: It's like "Stop living in your van"? No, not going to change that.

I wish the best of luck to this guy and his van.

Adorable Children

During my Midwest trip in October, I spent about half the time with small children and about half the time drinking. (Just joking, but I did go to homecoming at Mizzou.) Two very different experiences, of course.

Ben (front) and Bekah

The first cute children I saw were in Chatham: Amy and West's adorable, well-behaved, enthusiastic and not-shy son, Andrew, and Cindy and Nate's very cute, smart, also well-behaved, sweet and friendly daughter Hannah and their also-adorable 1-year-old twins, Ben and Bekah.

Andrew (left) and Hannah ride the holiday train.

We had a great time. Andrew gave me a tour of his house and introduced me to Annie the dog. We watched some Rugrats and we played some pirate ship. Hannah let me play kick with her and read her bedtime books.

Nolen lines up his trains to watch Thomas on TV.

Then, when I reached Herrin, I saw my 3-year-old nephew, Nolen. He's a huge Thomas the Tank Engine fan, and he has loads of trains. We built and rebuilt train tracks and moved trains around and watched Thomas videos.

Nolen helps make cupcakes.

We also baked cupcakes. Nolen was very helpful with dumping in ingredients. When it came time to add the flour and chocolate into the wet mixture bit by bit, we had an interesting arrangement. He was scared of the noise made by the hand mixer, so we worked out a deal. He pushed his stool up the counter, climbed up and helped me dump in some flour. Then I said, "Time for the mixer," and he would run to the other side of the kitchen and sit on Mom's lap and peer across and watch me mix it. Then, when I turned off the mixer, he'd run back over to help again. Over and back and over and back. He also helped decorate. We were putting in filling and adding frosting, and then he measured out some sprinkles and helped me put them on each one. He called them "Nolen and Sara's cupcakes."

Cooking Day

I went to the Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show today. I'll admit, I bought my ticket through Groupon because I wasn't sure it would be worth it, but it was pretty awesome. Tons of vendors had food samples, so I ate all day. (Salsa, wing sauce and barbecue sauce seemed to be the most popular foods for sale/tasting.)

My ticket included a chance to see a presentation by Paula Deen. I'm not in love with her, but I thought it would be cool nonetheless. She was pretty entertaining. However, the whole show was just her talking to the audience. She had a chef cooking in the background, and every once in a while, she would ask him how it was going. But I was hoping to see more cooking and pick up some tips. I did see some nice cooking demonstrations on the free stages, though.

I'd definitely go next year!

Halloween cupcakes

I should have posted these Sunday when I finished them. Instead, you'll just have to save the idea for next year. I ran into this post on Sweet Simple Stuff just last week and decided I wanted to try these Halloween Black Bottom Cupcakes. Mostly, I just wanted to make the spiderwebs, but then I figured they fit well with these non-frosted cupcakes so I made the whole thing.

First of all, if you haven't made black-bottom cupcakes, you're missing out. My co-worker Katie often bakes them, and they're among my favorites. It's basically half cheesecake and half chocolate cupcake. How can you not love that?

This version adds orange food coloring and tops them off with webs made of white chocolate. The webs were fairly simple to make, although my decorating tip was a little thinner than I would have liked.