Martha Stewart Golf Cupcakes

I showed some pictures of the golf course cupcakes I made for Father's Day last week in a Wordless Wednesday. Since I feel like talking today, I figured I would let you know where the idea came from.

 

Martha Stewart Cupcakes Cookbook gave me the idea. Sue A, this girl's Mom, gave me the cookbook. Thanks go out to both. My parents live in an extremely active community and one of their favorite things to do is golf. I figured these cupcakes would be perfect for Father's Day. They could save them for Sunday when they were having game night with a bunch of their friends. 

Martha suggests using her basic recipes for the cupcakes and frosting. I made the Devil's Food Cupcakes which turned out dense and rich. I also whipped up a batch of Martha's Buttercream Frosting. It came out well but it was extremely rich (um, hello - all that butter) so it did not pair very well with the Devil's Food Cupcakes. Since I was already at my parents house by the time I got around to frosting the cupcakes, I gave up. I used....jar frosting. But, before you give me a hard time about it, the frosting had to be thick to stay on the cupcakes and I didn't have many other options at the time. Also, in the end, Duncan Hines Classic Vanilla frosting worked great with these cupcakes!

Once the cupcakes were frosted, Mom and I poured two jars of green sprinkles into a bowl, turned the cupcakes upside down and dunked. That was fun.We made the flags using long toothpicks, scrapbook paper cut into triangles (wrapping the end around the toothpick) and Thickers for the numbers. I found some little white cake decorating candies in the pantry that I decided to use as golf balls. The size is slightly off but they were still a super cute addition.
 

There was one cupcake for each hole, as well as a couple of "fairway" cupcakes. The recipe I used made 36 cupcakes. I left 12 at home and by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around, we only had a few extras left over for the fairway. Fun AND delicious!

New Page on Home Sweet Hopkins

Look up on the banner line. I've been slowly adding pages to this blog. It's been a work in progress and will continue to be as I adapt this blog to work best for me and my readers. I have added a new page that I'm pretty excited about.

111 in 2011

My goal is to read 111 books this year. As of today, I have read 58 books and am currently in progress with 2 more books. I started The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake on our car ride home from Ohio but got bored very quickly. I was having a hard time with one small detail. The author doesn't use quotation marks when the characters speak. It was throwing me off big time, so I moved to Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner and finished that before we got home. I love a good book that I can just get lost in (especially if I'm in the passenger seat of a car)! I'm currently working on a silly book - The First Husband. It's a good pool/beach read.

 

I am always looking for more book suggestions. Let me know what fantastic book you have read this year or what book you read through super quick because it was too fun to put down. Those are the types of books I'm looking forward to reading.

Forced Family Fun

Yes, I stole the line from a napkin.

source

Well, it wasn't all bad. We arrived late Thursday night and spent an hour with my folks, drinking wine and catching up. You know, since I hadn't seen them just the weekend before...

Friday morning we got up early for a golf outing. Hops played for the third time in his life. While he was disappointed in himself (hello, third time out) I thought he did great! Once he got a couple of the main ideas of the game down, keep your head down! he did so much better. We didn't get any good pictures because it was so wet! It rained on and off all morning/afternoon. We played with my cousin and her boyfriend and had a fantastic time, drinking and playing silly games throughout the day. It took us 6 hours to finish our round....oops!!

After golf, we took a quick nap and headed out to dinner. This event and the reason a lot of the family was in town was for my Uncle's retirement. He had worked for his town's police department for 34 years and spent many of those years as Chief. We had cocktails, dinner and an evening of dancing. You can say we had a good time, from the pictures.

The night started pretty tame. Those of us in our 20's and 30's were outnumbered by folks in their 50's and 60's. By a lot.

Finally about an hour and a half into the party, the DJ finally started playing some music the younger generation wanted to dance to.

This guy, my cousin's boyfriend, you can say he is the life of a party.

Why do people always end up in a circle on the dance floor?

My husband played photographer while my cousin and I danced around the slow dancers. No, we are not square dancing. I only say that becuase that's what it looks like to me...

We were pulled away from Dance Party 2011 for a few family photos. Apparently someone saw my camera and decided it would be good enough to take a family photo. I made everyone go outside so we wouldn't have the lovely yellow lighting like we had in the pictures above.

Somehow we got a photo with everyone smiling. 

The reason we were all in town. The two guys on the sides will be the reason we'll be headed back to Cleveland and Columbus in October and May. They're both getting married!

My brother, sister-in-law and a tiny baby bump.....

...making these two Grandparents for the first time!

 And then there's us. 

We just continue to be our obnoxious selves, not giving my parents grandbabies. (hehe)

We left the party at 11pm. The next morning, we headed over to my Gram's house to visit her for a while. She had been in the hospital for a few weeks in May and we weren't sure she was going to make it back to her house after her surgeries. The doctors were all very pessimistic about her recovery. The good news is she is back home, trying to get back to her old self. We spent a few hours there, just chatting with her since it had been a whole year since we had seen her last. We rounded out the day with some more family time at my Aunt's house. After a 9 hour drive on Sunday, we picked up our dogs and were so happy to sleep in our own bed again.

Seeing family is lots of fun! Coming home is fantastic.

4th of July Weekend Plans

Can you believe next weekend is already the 4th of July? It seems like the first half of the year has just flown by.

We are planning on spending some time indoors, no more yard work! I talked recently about the dining room changes we are planning. I'm looking forward to getting the majority of that project finished. We probably won't do the full job, we will wait to complete the bottom half of the wall, but we will prep it and paint it white. We also have some serious household organization and cleaning jobs to accomplish. I have a feeling I'll be doing some baking in the middle of all of this, as well. Sure sounds like a whole lot of work for what is supposed to be a relaxing long weekend, doesn't it?

On the Fourth, we'll be meeting up with some friends at Koka Booth Ampitheatre. Fireworks plus patriotic music from the North Carolina Symphony. I can't wait! I have wanted to do this since we moved to North Carolina 6 years ago. One of our favorite things about Koka Booth is you can take your own food and drink. I'll post my picnic recipes next week but here is what I'm planning:

Tortellini salad
Cheese plate with cured meats, olives and toasted baguette
Fruit salad
No bake blueberry pie
A fantastic bodriving red wine

We just got home from a 3 day trip to Cleveland, Ohio (which I'll talk about later) and it feels like we didn't have a weekend. We spent almost two full days driving and then had a lot of "Forced Family Fun." I can't take full credit for that one. We stopped by my Aunt's house on Saturday and they had napkins that said that on them. Awesome.

Anyways, after a long weekend with family, we're looking forward to a weekend to ourselves where we don't have to do anything we don't want to do. Bring it on!

Summer Vegetable Couscous

There seems to always be an abundance of amazingly fresh veggies in our house in the summer. Zucchini, tomatoes, onions and lots of fresh herbs. I had a few zucchini that needed to be eaten this week, so I came up with this quick, tasty and somewhat healthy side dish.

Summer Vegetable Couscous

1 cup couscous

1 cup water

3 large zucchini

1 sweet onion

1-2 tomatoes

2 avocados 

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

salt and pepper

1. Boil water over medium high heat. Add the couscous and stir until blended. Remove from heat, cover and set aside.

2. Slice zucchini lengthwise in approximately four slices. You want it still slightly thick to make good bite sized chunks once grilled. Chop the onion enough to separate the layers. Pour 1 tablespoon olive oil and 2 tablespoons vinegar, as well as some salt and pepper into a gallon sized ziplock bag. Add the onions and zucchini. Shake and marinate for 10 or more minutes.

3. Grill zucchini and onions over medium low heat until tender. Chop tomatoes and avocadoes into 1/2"-1" pieces and add to a serving bowl. Chop zucchini and onions into 1/2"-1" pieces and add to bowl.

6. Add the cooked couscous to the serving bowl, along with the chopped basil.

7. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to the mixture, blend together gently and add salt and pepper to taste.

Wordless Wednesday: For My Dad on Father's Day

A Taste of Sonoma - Part 2

You can see my first Sonoma recap here. After you read that, pop back over here for the rest of my Sonoma trip!

I left Silver Oak and headed down to Trione.

This was taken in the early morning hours before the sun came up.

I stepped inside and there was one just one other couple in there at the time. I sidled up to the bar and got a copy of their Tasting Menu. They had a few tasting options, Reserve, New Release, Reds or Taste All Wines. I decided on Reds. I tasted:

2007 Pinot Noir

2007 Syrah

2006 Red Wine

2006 Block 21 Cabernet Savignon

For each wine, they had a card that explained about the wine, where the grapes were grown and tasting notes from Trione's Winemaker. Those were really helpful. My favorites were their Syrah and the Red Wine. 

I had finished my tasting when the couple next to me asked if I wanted to go on their tour with them. They had joined the wine club and one of the perks was a winery tour when they visited. Of course I want to go on a tour! The two women running the shop that day filled up our glasses and we all headed out around the winery for our tasting. 

We checked out the view

Spent some time on the super comfy deck.

Enjoyed the "special" tasting room. I love the fake candle light.

The chairs and table were all made by a local artist. 

The door was crafted out of old wine barrels. 

I totally got made fun of for taking a picture of a door. I don't even care.

The fun, wavy sink.

Close-up of fun wavy, sink. Ps, husband, I want for my bathroom.

We took a trip through the barrel room. This one amused me it was so stained! The girl giving us the tour couldn't explain to me why it was like that. 

Our tour guides:

In the back of the winery, there is a huge room that is used for weddings and special events. If I was a California girl, I totally would have picked a place like this for our wedding. It was absolutely gorgeous and they had fun windows you could peek out of.

My new friends (they're such great friends that I can't remember their names) and I hung out at Trione for a while and I ended up buying a bottle of Pinot. I really wanted the Red but it was beyond my budget limits. We enjoyed the absolutely fantastic weather we had that weekend and spent some time getting to know one another. 

Happiness is obvious when one has wine in hand.

While we were there, Jessica (also our tour guide) asked if we wanted lunch. That was an interesting offer. I had planned on heading out for lunch after the tasting, so I was up for it. She made us a wild mushroom risotto that was the perfect thing to fill up our bellies after all of that wine.

Once we had our fill of Trione, I realized it was getting on in the day. It was already 3pm! I headed over to Route 128 for the next tasting. This was a tasting room in a strip mall. You don't see things like that in Raleigh, that's for sure! I only tasted a few ounces here as I was well on my way to the "you are not allowed to drive now" point. 

After Route 128, I made a quick stop back to Geyser Peak where I picked up a bottle of that fantastic Sparkling Shiraz. I ran into the same guy I had received my tasting from earlier in the day and he told me he just hadn't opened a bottle yet when I was there.  Mmmhmmm... Oh well. I brought some home with me. 

One last stop. I made the decision to go up to the Sbragia Winery to round out the day. I drove up there and just sat outside and enjoyed their view until I was ready to head back to my hotel. I had a fantastic day. It was made even better by meeting some nice folks along the way and the fantastic weather that I know I have mentioned a few times already. I had absolutely no problem going into any of the wineries by myself and really enjoyed talking to all of the people who were running the tastings. Unfortunately, I had to go to work on Monday so I went back to the hotel at 5pm and promptly fell asleep. Ha!

I found these pictures on my memory card from the end of the day. I thought they were interesting, so I decided to add them to the end of this post. They were both taken looking at the same grape vine. One was from the ground, up and the other was looking down onto the baby grapes. Both had almost the exact same settings on my camera, I just changed the shutter speed. (Don't mind me, I'm a new dslr camera user and get excited by little things).

Wedding Ring Dermatitis

Yes, that is apparently a real term. Wedding Ring Dermatitis.

I have been married for less than a year and I am no longer wearing my wedding rings. No, my husband and I are not separating. My rings and my skin do not seem to be as compatible as my husband and I are.

A few months ago, I noticed that my finger under my rings was getting red. I thought it was just irritation from the normal swelling that my hands go through when it gets hot outside. Since we were into the warmer months already, my fingers were swelling and squeezing against my rings more than normal. I showed it to my husband a couple of times and he showed me his finger where his ring had dug into his skin, leaving an impression. Mine had an impression but they were also starting to become a bit red. I dealt with it for a while until one day, it started itching. Crazy itching. I couldn't stop fiddling with my ring finger because I wanted to tear through my skin to get to the itch. I ran into this while I was out of town on business and did not want to leave my rings in the hotel. I kept them on until I got home, put them in a safe place and let my finger breathe.

This is what it looked like a few days after I got home from that trip. It had healed some by this point. There was a red ring around my finger, almost like I had taken off my ring and gotten a bad sunburn on the normally unexposed area of my finger. The area in and around the red portion was itchy and dry and scaly. There were also red bumps on the sides of my finger where it meets the other fingers. 

Yes, I know I have man hands. Insert Seinfeld jokes here.

It's been two and a half weeks since I took my rings off. I put my wedding band on for travel this past week and within a day, my finger had exploded with red bumps again. I removed it and placed it on a very secure and sturdy necklace so I wouldn't lose it while I was out of town.

When I got home last night, I did some research. This problem appears to be common and even has a name: Wedding Ring Dermatitus. The Wall Street Journal did an article on it that you can read here.  I also found out more information about it here, here and here. 

I read through this and it appears that the majority of the issues are caused by an allergy to Nickel. While I don't have a large history of my rings, I know they're not gold and I'm guessing they're not just Platinum plated, if that is even possible. They were my Grandmother's engagement and wedding ring from the 1940's. The inscription inside both rings is 10% Irid-Plat. I'm not a scientist but I don't believe there is Nickel in Platinum or Iridium.

I researched Platinum allergies and they're very rare. The only other idea I have is that I am getting water and soap stuck under the rings and that is what is causing the rash. Both rings are tighter than I would prefer. The jeweler who sized them for me sized them a half size smaller than what I asked for. Once that was done, he told me he didn't want to size them again for fear of compromising the integrity of the ring. Well yeah, they are 70 years old and were sized from a 5 to a 7 1/2 but at the same time, they're squishing my finger. The engagement ring has a hollow square that the round diamond is centered into the center of. This box-like section of the ring is hollow and could possibly be retaining soap, water or lotion. 

I decided that I'll go to a dermatologist to have her take a look. If I'm allergic to my rings, I'm going to cry. For now I'll wear them around my neck since I'm just not comfortable not having them on me at all times.

Safe and secure around my neck

Have you ever experienced this before? What did you find? Was it an allergy to the metal in the rings or just stuff getting stuck between the ring and your skin? 

Sea Glass Necklace Winner!

The winner of the "Jill" Sea Glass necklace is:

Designs by Dawn Marie said...

Hi Jill! I'm a new follower from Meg's blog. I can't wait to get to know you better!

I love all of Meg's pieces, but especially her cobalt blue earring pairs. She has several of them and I love them all!

{Hugs!}

June 13, 2011 10:36 AM 

Congratulations, Dawn Marie! I will be in touch to send you your new necklace. 

For everyone else, have a fantastic weekend. I hope you're spending it at the beach!