My First Use of the Oven in 9 Months

I did it.  I broke down and finally used our oven for the first time since we bought our house.  Only took me about 9 months….that’s not too bad, right?  Well Jay’s birthday was about a week and a half ago, and I decided I should be a good girlfriend and try to bake him something.  Did I decide to bake normal vanilla cupcakes and buy icing in a container?  Nah, I figured I should bake pumpkin cupcakes which required me to make my own icing from scratch.  Why did I think that was an awesome idea?  I found the recipe on the Two Paperdolls blog, and they looked so delish I figured I’d give it a shot.

I wanted to make sure I posted this before Halloween, these cupcakes would be the PERFECT thing to bake if anyone is going to a Halloween party:)  The recipe came from the Real Simple website, so I figured it couldn’t be THAT difficult….there actually weren’t many ingredients involved:

This is why I’m not a fan of cooking/baking.  At each of these 4 stages I was thinking “is this right?  This doesn’t look right….does it?” – I never have any idea if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing!

But the end result looked pretty.  Still not sure at this point if they taste right.

Hah I’m sure Jay is going to love me for posting a picture of him shoving a cupcake in his mouth:)  I should have backed up when I took this picture, because what you can’t see is him being so excited that I actually baked him something that he didn’t even take his jacket off before he shoved this in his mouth, and it was still hanging around his waist:)  Maybe that’s a sign I should work on my kitchen skills….

Then I ended the night with a romantic card (HAH), and Season 4 of It’s Always Sunny.  Does anyone else watch that show?  SO hilarious!  I also am taking Jay to a secret destination (not as exotic as it sounds) as a birthday present in 2 weeks, so I’ll post about that after we go away:)

Happy Birthday Jay!!

PS the cupcakes were delish.  But I have to be honest I only ate one…..because once I knew what went into the icing I felt gross eating it.  All the icing consists of is 2 packages of cream cheese and 2 cups of sugar.  TWO CUPS!  That just seems like an unnecessary amount of sugar, but man was it yummy:)