We cheated on our spooktacular cupcakes....

After a busy weekend, we decided to cheat a little and use boxed cupcake mix. Horror! We assure you though that all of the decorations were done by hand and with lots of love!

We were inspired by pictures of cupcakes that we saw online and decided to go for a Halloween theme!

Check them out!

We started by baking some chocolate fudge cupcakes and practicing our decorations on a plate.

Using vanilla icing, food colouring, Pull-n-Peels, marshmallows, chocolate chips and Jumbo Gums (yum, right?), we created these:

They turned out way better than we thought they would (and by "we" we mean "Emma" ... no faith!) and were pretty quick to make! Including baking, set-up, planning and a little song and dance, we spent about 2 hours working on these masterpieces. Our friend Megan joined us this week and played the role of "supervisor" to keep us on track because too many dance parties would mean burnt cupcakes! Thanks Meg!

We had a great Halloween and hope you did too!

xoxo Emma and Rachael

 

Thanks Melissa!

We wanted to take a minute to thank our very first guest blogger for helping us bake our ... umm.... lovely ballet slippers last week! We've come up with a mini survey for all of our guests to fill in! It will change a little bit every week but hopefully it will help us get to know them better!

1. What is your first name?

     Melissa
2. What do you do for a living?

     I do the law.
3. Did you have a nickname growing up? What was it?

     'Missy' (I know, it's ridiculously original...)
4. If we say “we are here to help others”, what are ‘the others’ here for?

     Fellowship.
5. Tell us a funny story about you.

     I once ate an entire crate of clementines in one sitting. I felt really sick after.
6.  Who inspires you and why?
     Jesus because he is hypocrisy-free and loves me despite all of my bullsh*t.
7. Do you dance like crazy when no one is watching?
     Of course! In elevators and parking lots especially.
8. What is one place you would love to visit?
    Atlantis. The real one, not the resort. Or the island of Santorini, which is probably a more realistic choice...
9. What was your experience like with The Brunettes?
     Vivacious, as always.

Thanks again Missy! Your bows really made those shoes...

xoxo Rachael and Emma

Success... ish.

After a crazy busy week (did we mention we both work three jobs, Emma's in school full time and Rachael plans parties?) we got together on Saturday to start our first baking adventure!

In honour of our friend Nathon's birthday, we decided to bake some ballet slipper cookies. Nathon is the definition of a guy's guy. For his birthday, we went to a bar to watch the UFC fight and the mere thought of anything sparkly is enough to send the guy running! We're slightly on the girly side - but don't let that fool you! We are better campers than most men we know (and by "we" we mean "Rachael").

We began the night at Sobey's where what was supposed to be a quick shopping trip, turned into quite a mission! Who knew cartons of egg whites were kept right above the actual eggs!? When we got home, we took out our brand spankin' new cookbook, Simply Spectacular Cakes by Peggy Porschen and got to work! Step one: create pastry bags to pipe our frosting. Epic fail. The instructions (cut a rectangle corner to corner to create two triangles) left Rachael baffled! Her piping bag ended up crumpled in the garbage covered in tear drops before we even made our cookie dough. Emma's turned out alright but in the end we decided to pitch them and free-hand it. Big mistake!!

On to mixing frosting. Three ingredients. Infinite problems. Instead of turning into the smooth creamy frosting in the cookbook's photos we ended up with little sugar balls! Luckily with the addition of water things smoothed out... until the next crisis struck! Rachael thought we forgot white food colouring! Horror!! As soon as Emma recovered from laughing, she calmed Rach down by pointing out that the icing was already white. Crisis averted.

 

The cookie dough was next. Considering all of the icing drama, the dough went well! Until we realised we had to chill it for AN ENTIRE HOUR before rolling it out into our slipper shapes. It was 8:00, the party started at 7:00 and we still weren't ready. Our amazing multi-tasking skills kicked in and we threw the dough in the freezer for 20 minutes (approximately 5 minutes too long, FYI) while we got ourselves beautiful.

Once we (the Brunettes and the dough) were ready, we carefully cut out 24 slippers to bake. Easy peasy! Decorating on the other hand, didn't go quite as smoothly. Our friend Melissa had arrived while the cookies were baking and she was a great help in decorating. Emma iced the main colour, Rachael iced the toes and Melissa did the bows. In the end the cookies looked more like multi coloured blobs with small polka dots than ballet slippers. Of the 24 cookies we baked, only 17 survived the decorating process.

In the end the cookies were a hit. We give them an 8/10 for taste and a 10/10 for decorating because they made people laugh.

This weeks tally: "Rachael moments": 1, "Emma moments": 1, the look on Nathon's face when he saw his "party girl" cookie: priceless.

For this week's recipes, leave a message in the comment box!

xoxo Emma and Rachael

Welcome to the blog of two brunettes!

So this is a blog about... well... we're not sure.

We'll be blogging about the random happenings of the lives of two best friends. Our plan is to try new things and share our experiences. We're really similar in some ways... like our hair colour... but couldn't be more different in others! Rachael is crafty and likes things just so! Emma is useless with a glue gun but always gets the job done!
Starting this weekend, we plan to forge through new territory by baking and cooking our way through some amazing new cookbooks. No recipe will be left behind!

We also plan on trying new things throughout the year. Jazzercise anyone?

Future entries will be coming to you in three voices - Emma's, Rachael's and both of us together.

We will go it alone this week but hope that future Sunday blogs will involve friends and family members who have helped us with our cooking! We look forward to the coming weeks of sharing our most excellent adventures with you! Up first - ballet slipper cookies. For our friend Nathon's birthday - go figure.

Happy baking!

xoxo Emma and Rachael