Grand Canyon- yesterday

This is a perspective from where Tim and I are going to get married

I like it in color, but I think the B&W is a smidgen neater looking.

It was rather hazy yesterday. Which is the way it gets in the summer, especially during our fire season. It really makes the stair steps of the different side canyons stick out though. It's what I think of when I think of the canyon.

Historic photo from the Grand Canyon

Tried the smores again

One of my awesome sisters got me this for my B-day!

I did these the day before- so they're not as pretty as they were yesterday.

So I winged this recipe. I did graham crackers and butter on the bottom- I think it needs to be a little sweeter, and a bit moister. The chocolate cake was a triple chocolate chunk cake- I think it needs more chocolate chunks (I really don't think it'd be overkill, yes it was chocolate, but could use more chocolate!), and I did use the recipe for marshmallow frosting from the Betty Crocker book- it made a lot of frosting.
When I started torching the frosting it did a lot of oozing over the edge, which is awesome, but I think less might be more in this case. The Hersheys bars melted like crazy on top of the cupcake, but the Chocolove (because the store ran out of Hershey's bars, as well as eggs and bread!) chocolates held up fairly well. And were dang tasty.
I think if graham cracker crumbs were sprinkled on the top and then toasted, those would burn, but if the frosting wasn't torched, then it would be quite pretty.
What do y'all think?

Party time!

The Wadsworths!



Cheryl and Shawn chit chatting



L-R: Marna, Tim, Mike, Maci, Dean

Grant with the spread

Jordan with cupcake

cheers!

Brain and Maddie threw us a kickass party! It was a potluck at their house and we had a lot of fun, stayed up way too late, and got dive bombed by hummingbirds before the sun went down.

These are some "before" photos

Spent a weekend pulling weeds, amending soil, moving the compost box, planting, mulching, and watering. I haven't taken the after photos yet, that'll be this weekend, but it looks waaaay better now.

Car camping!

Tim and Pete playing Ladder Golf (Ninja Balls!)

LJ displaying some onions that were being sauteed before going into Hobo pies

This is what Tim and I did on my birthday. LJ and Pete were testing their camping equipment with a quick outing to Ten X campground and we went too. Ten X is a super nice campground, except when there are a bunch of helicopters and airplanes flying over. That got real old first thing in the morning.

Cherry Almond Vanilla= yummy!

Kinda hard to see, but there's a marachino cherry in the middle

These were super delicious. They are from scratch, so they're a little denser than from the box cakes, but that's fine with me. The recipe is from BHG- I think the frosting was just barely enough to cover my 24 cupcakes. And I had to stretch my maraschino cherry juice toward the end. But I really liked the flavor combo. My coworkers thought they were wedding worthy.


I loved the little cherry in the middle- it was only a half a cherry, I think it would probably be good to have two halves of a cherry in the cupcake.


And I would definitely put a whole cherry on top of the cupcake next time. yum. That's all.