I Like To Take Glamour Shots of Desserts

Because they look so darn good!!

Cupcakes from my birthday - a' la my mom and Tiffani:

My New Camera Rocks

This new Nikon has some amazing features and I am loving the time I spend learning and playing with it. Just a few of the cool things that I have been able to do:

Give photos an extra POP of Color!

I snapped this picture of Jordan playing in the yard (with her toy from Brittany, which she LOVES!):


Then I played with the color settings on the camera to enhance the green in the picture:


See?! It looks like we have a frickin awesome lawn!! All through camera magic! (P.S. how cute is that dog?!)

Another cool feature is the "Sports" setting on the camera. It stills objects in motion to give the clearest action shots I have ever seen. Take for example:

A picture that was taken on a regular camera last year of Jody and Kim jumping on the bed - cool, but blurry:


NOW, check out what my bad boy did this past weekend with the same subjects:


Hooray for fun new toys!

Bachelorette Party!

We partied hearty last weekend to celebrate the upcoming (very soon!!) nuptials of Jody and Alex. Here's how the weekend went down:

Friday night after work, Jody, Claudia, Kim, Cordova, Julia and I met up at the new Talking Stick Resort & Casino in Scottsdale. Our room was awesome, with a great view of the pool and the desert in the background. We ordered out a pizza, salad and some wings from Oregano's and enjoyed our dinner in the hotel room with fancy silverware and napkins. Kim did a trial run on Jody's hair for the wedding while we cracked up to The Sweetest Thing and the Penis Song. It was a pretty casual night, which was exactly what we needed after a long day at work.

Our Fabulous Hotel

Saturday morning, we headed down to the pool to get some sun. We couldn't have asked for better weather - temperatures in the 90's with a light breeze occasionally passing through. Aside from some little boys trying to flirt with Jody by splashing and playing WAY too closely to us, it was a nice way to start the morning. Around noon, we headed upstairs to the spa to get manicures. The nice thing about spas is that you're allowed to use their facilities all day if you're receiving a treatment. So we split off into twos - Claudia and Jody got their nails done while Kim and I relaxed in the whirlpool, then we switched. (Side note: before we settled on the whirlpool, Kim and I decided to try out the steam room at the spa. We literally didn't last a minute - the humidity was too much for our Arizona lungs and we had to duck out of there while another guest laughed us on.)

After our nails were done, we headed out for lunch at Pita Jungle. The food was good, but the gelato next door was even better! We must have driven the employees crazy with how many samples we each had before settling on our respective flavors. It's just so much harder at a gelato shop versus and ice cream shop because everything tastes JUST LIKE what the tag says! Peanut Butter ice cream at Cold Stone may taste like ice cream with just a hint of buttery flavor, but Peanut Butter ice cream at Gelato Spot tastes like you just crammed a spoonful of Skippy in your mouth.

After our lunch break, it was back to the pool to relax and read magazines and further enjoy the good weather. Shannon and Tom even came out for a bit to try to build a base tan before their trip to Cabo. Then it was back up to the spa to get ready for the night. Since there are 4 showers at the spa, as well as a huge, mirrored sink area, it was easy for all of us to get ready at once versus fighting over the small bathroom space in our room. The showers there were really cool, too - they had an open-air feeling and windows that looked out over the green golf course. Maybe in our next house, I will have Matt build me a bathroom that opens up to the yard :)

Getting Ready

Once we were all primped and ready to roll, a few more girls showed up at the hotel to pre-party with us. Jody opened her gifts, which included a hilarious "Panty Line" that represented via underpants the various stages of marriage she and Alex will go through. There were funny little poems that went along with each stage and had us all cracking up. Since our dinner reservation wasn't until a little later, we headed over to Culinary Dropout for drinks. Jody started in on her list of embarrassing bridal tasks that we assigned her, which she continued throughout the night.

Dinner was at Olive & Ivy - my first time to that restaurant. The food and the sangria did not disappoint, and we had a good time with even more girls who showed up for the festivities. After dinner, it was over to Ernie's for some good-time karaoke! I had never been to Ernie's, but had heard from some of my co-workers that it was a fun dive bar with cheap drinks and a guaranteed good time for all. It definitely lived up to its word - we snagged a both towards the karaoke stage and enjoyed the various people entertaining us. Some were actually really good singers (some chick did a rendition of Alicia Keys' "If I Ain't Got You" - some guy sang a spot-on Elton John tune), but most were like us and just there to goof around. Jody and Kim rocked the mic with Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," then Claudia and Jody rapped their way through Salt N Pepa's "Shoop" to please the crowd.

After we'd had enough for the night, we headed back over to our hotel to crash. The next morning, we packed our bags, checked out, and headed over to Chompie's for a nice brunch. The omelets were fantastic, and it was a great way to end a great weekend. Next step in the wedding fun is the actual wedding itself!! We can't wait!

Cake Pops!

For Jody's wedding shower, I decided to make these adorable Cake Pops! that a girl at work introduced me to. You can find the directions on how to make them here, but I'll just share some of the tips and tricks I learned along the way to make it easier.

First of all, the recipe calls for a whole can of icing. This makes the consistency much too sticky and difficult to work with - it's more like a dough at that point when you want a moist, cakey texture. So half a can of icing turned out to be the perfect amount.

I think some people recommend using a cake baller (like a mini ice cream scoop), but I found that it was easier if Matt and I just hand-rolled the cake mixture into the sizes we wanted.

Then it got even trickier - we had cooled the cake balls over night, and in the morning we started the process of putting them on sticks and priming them for dunking in the chocolate. Our mistake was taking out the whole pan of cake balls and trying to get them all on sticks at once. That gave them time to thaw out, which led to balls crumbling apart in the hot chocolate mixture! But then again, it's not a true Pamela Baking Day if we don't have at least one disaster/meltdown. Poor Matt - he puts up with me so well :) So to solve this problem, we found that it was easier to leave the balls in the freezer and just pull them out 2 at a time to work with. That was fine, since you have to re-heat the chocolate after every 2 dunks anyways to keep it from hardening in the glass. Very Cold Balls + Very Hot Chocolate = Success

That's another good trick - using a tall glass to melt your chocolate in, rather than a bowl. On our first trial of making the Cake Pops, we used the bowl method and found it hard to swirl the Pops around to get full chocolate coverage. A lot of them fell apart or had bare sides and it did not look as pretty. By dunking the Pops straight down in a tall glass of chocolate, you get full, smooth coverage without all of the hassle.

And yet another tip - splurge for the good chocolate!! We tried just using the chocolate chip morsels that you can buy at the grocery store, but they didn't look or taste as good. So I went to a cake specialty store and bought baker's chips (someone told me you can also find them at Michael's). They had a lot of different colors to choose from - I went with purple to fit the theme of the party, and also added in some white for funsies. I bought the cute little heart sprinkles there too - I think I spent way more than I should have at that cake shop, but I was in baker's heaven!

Jordan helping out

Matt also made me this nifty Cake Pop Holder by spacing holes in a slab of styrofoam about 2 inches apart. That way, I could cool the Pops in an upright position to avoid flat sides during cooling. Plus, it looked really adorable when all of the Pops were on there - like a little field of cake :)

When I saw that they were selling Cake Pops at Starbucks for $2 a piece, I thought it was such a rip-off. But after spending a day trying to make 100 of these treats, I decided that $2 each is a more than fair price - ha!! The end result was great, though, and everybody loved the look and taste of the Pops! I will definitely be making them again, but I think it will be a special-occasion-only treat :)