These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things: Italian Cream Cake with Strawberries

Horray for Friday!! We hope everyone had an efficient and successful work week. My German relatives are spending their last weekend in America so I thought I would make a delicious cake for the weekend. I logged onto Pinterest and found this delectable Pin: 

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It's an Italian cream cake with strawberries. Obviously I had to try this cake. This recipe wasn't too difficult, but I was very happy to have my Grandmother's (we call her Nomie) help. The recipe calls for the basic ingredients, butter, sugar, flour, but you have to separate the egg whites for one of the 3 mixtures you have to make. Here's how our cake turned out:

Man oh man was it good! Personally, it's the best cake recipe I've tried! I think the trick is folding the egg whites into the butter, buttermilk, and flour mixture. 

A little advice before making this cake:

1. If you want the strawberries to really stand out in this cake be sure to buy enough strawberries (we almost ran out).

2. Be sure to have the eggs & butter at room temperature, this really makes a difference!

3. Use 3 separate round cake pans, if you only have two don't try and bake two layers and wait to bake the third layer when the other two have cooled, the cake batter will go bad!

4. Make sure you have greased and floured the round cake pans.

Seriously people, you gotta try this recipe! Enjoy!

Blueberry Lemon Cupcakes!

TGIF! We both had extra busy work weeks so we are looking forward to sleeping in, laying out by the pool, and having fun!

A little more than a week ago, one of our best friends moved to China to teach English, so before she left we gathered our group of friends together for one last hoora. While plans we're made, we decided to make something extra delicious for our soon to be foreign friend. When we couldn't think of anything new and exciting to try, we ventured to our dear friend Pinterest. After about 2mins of searching we discovered this Pin:

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And we knew exactly what we were going to make! This recipe was very easy. The cupcake batter called for the essentials; sugar, butter, flour etc. and of course blueberries and lemon zest. The cream cheese frosting was also very simple; butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar and, you guessed it...more lemon.

We did however, have a few notes about this recipe. The cupcake batter calls for the zest of 1 lemon...I think we eventually used the zest of 2 lemons (we like a more distinct lemon flavor). But the interesting part was getting the frosting right. The recipe called for 3 cups of powdered sugar, 1tbsp of lemon juice and the zest of 1 lemon. I think we used the juice of one lemon, the zest of 2 lemons and about 6 cups of sugar. It was a little difficult to get the right consistency for the frosting, but after experimenting a little, we got it just right!

Here's how ours turned out:

They were excellent! We would definitely recommend this recipe. Let us know if you try it! Happy Weekend & Enjoy!

Summer Days, Drifting Away

We have both had quite a week and we believe that all we could possibly muster up the energy for this weekend is to lay in the pool, drink some sweet tea and try to get a tan! Enjoy your weekends!

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Happy Friday Everyone!

TGIF...Seriously

Happy Friday everyone! We will be spending Saturday cooking up and styling up some fun "Inspired by Pinterest" treats for next week's posts. We will also be working on the format of the site to make it a little more "inspiring" looking itself.

We are off to a wine bar here in a minute to celebrate a successful first week of work for Lindsey and several work related accomplishments for Kelsey as well!

Being the newly "working women" that we are, we are having our first official post-work drinks tonight! Wahoo!

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