Rainbow(ish) Cupcakes

Normally when I get a hankering to bake - I make C4 - Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'm currently on a no caffeine order, and this includes (cry) chocolate. Off to the idea factory (Pinterest) I went. Rainbow Cakes always catches my eye, and it looked simple enough. (It was.) I usually make my cakes from scratch, but lately in favour of getting things done sooner with Tiger-monkey trying to help - I've been using pre-packaged mixes. Today's mix was Butter Cake from Aldi.

I'm loving my gel dyes.

Tiger-monkey gets so excited when I go into the kitchen area - I'm guessing because she knows I make the treats in the household. (My husband makes the sustenance. He's far better at it than I am.) It may also be because I don't chase her out of the kitchen when I am working - I'm not using sharp things, or working with fire. Just stuff that makes a lot of mess. It may also be because chasing her out wouldn't work, she's inquisitive, and we always have someone run interference at dinner time. Trying to keep her hands off the cupcake liners is trouble enough!

Some I just dropped the batter in, others I tried to smooth it around. 

The red was much more RED than the pictures show. The blue was very vibrant, and the green was just amazing. The purple was a let down - maybe I didn't use enough or this particular purple isn't the purple I thought it was.

Next time green is on top. Just cause.

The two I selected fopr snacktime had very different patterns - the one in the green bowl below I think had the purple and green evenly layered, red dropped in, and blue nicely layered on top. The blue bowl you can almost see the pattern made by the purple, green and red being added in neat layers, and the blue just dropped in. If I felt like standing for longer, I'm sure I could come up with some interesting patterns.

Snack treat time!

Om-nom-nom!

Adventures in gardening!

This is our herb garden. Parsley, oregano, basil (lots and lot of basil) and spring onion. The two large ones on either side are our first attempt at growing peas - before we decided we were going to plant a real garden. A pretty daunting feat for my husband and I - we both figure we are missing the gardening gene.

I subscribe to the critical mass theory of gardening, once there is enough plants, it's easier to care for, and grows better. Tiger-monkey has been very active in the gardening, she makes sure we check the plants every day.

We'd first started the peas in the house - in fact the planters in this image were our third planting. We'd been tricked by the early warming, planted our indoor started seedling, and then the cold snap killed everything. The second try we started everything indoors, decided the weather wasn't going to turn on us, and planted. Then the weather turned on us, and everything died again.

Third try has been slow going - night weather perhaps a bit too cold, or just plain bad luck. One of the planters has potato in it, and the potato plants are taking over that pot.

We're just glad the plants themselves have survived this long, anything they provide is a bonus. Now that Tiger-monkey has figured out there are peas (her favourite) in the garden, we may not see any more!

Fourth try we decided would go into a real honest to goodness garden. We started off with empty egg cartons, the soil, and strangely enough, the pea seeds. I'd a container saved from something we'd bought at CostCo, and I turned it into a terrarium to help the seeds germinate.

    

Hopefully destined
to become capsicum plants.

    

Left out in the sun for an hour,
our terrarium works pretty well!

We cheated a bit with the honest to goodness garden, the back row is our own seedling pea plants (fourth try). Next row is the store bought tomato plants - I'm not brave enough to try tomato seedling starting quite yet! The middle part is where we will be planting cucumber, pepper, and capsicum. The front is for strawberries. There's another area where I have planted watermelon, near the lemon tree. There is an apple tree in our tiny garden as well, last year it gave over 3 dozen apples. The lemon tree gave us nearly 2 dozen fruit last year, this year we are warily taking care of it, I'm not sure it's been cared for in a very long time.

Invasion of the coloured waffles.

Waffles were on the menu for Sunday breakfast this morning, and after I'd seen a fun thing on Pinterest this past week that I thought was just too funny not to try. (Naturally, I didn't pin it, silly me!) The husband thought I was completely mental for wanting to try this, but Tiger-monkey simply LOVED it!

The how-to is quite simple - make your waffle (or pancake) batter as you normally would. Then divide the batter into how many colours you will be making, and add food colouring. I have those awesome gel dyes that give everything brilliant colour, so we used those. 

Since this batch was more a proof of concept than anything overly fancy, we just did red, green and blue. Next time we'll make the red a bit darker, although it did turn out pretty good as a lighter shade.

Then just continue making your waffles/pancakes as you normally would. NOM!

Tiger-monkey, our quality tester.
That plate was full...

Tiger-monkey has this to say about breakfast: wwwwwd1fwfd1ff  fd fffffw wdsjfsdqw xgeedfedfs weddbhv!