Adventures in Baking - Rainbow Cupcakes and Peanut Butter Cookies

I love baking. Something about it makes me feel so feminine- I love cooking, but I'm not very good at it, but baking is easy for me and it's such a comforting thing to do for people. I want to be the neighbor who's known for her cookies, or the woman that always brings a great pie to family dinners... I don't bake as often as I'd like, and I also don't venture far from the boxed mixes from the grocery store, but I still love it. Someday I'll have a big wonderful kitchen (with a turquoise Kitchenaid stand mixer!!) and I'll be able to bake fancy things to my heart's content. For now, it's quick mixes when I find the time.

Ever since I saw Kaylah's posts about rainbow cupcakes I've been dying to try!! She has a great tutorial up that I used to make these little pretties. I unintentionally did almost the exact same colors she did, but I used the cheapo little egg shaped food dyes from the grocery store. I mixed the colors to get teal, lavender, raspberry, and orange sherbert (their names, not mine!). It was so easy, and it made making cupcakes so much more fun! I will for sure be making more of these (probably for Thanksgiving), and I can't help but think of fun color combinations.



I bought Funfetti frosting since it came with sprinkly things already, but next time I'm going to "borrow" stuff from work to make the cupcakes prettier (I have tons of cake decorating supplies at my fingertips there, so next time they'll look much more polished!!). I also need to get a better muffin/cupcake tin. I used one I got at a garage sale for a quarter, and while it's cute and vintage, the cups are too small for modern cupcake papers. A lot of my cupcakes turned out with a little bend or fold in them, but it still tastes good!


Of course I couldn't stop at cupcakes, so I picked up a package of Betty Crocker's peanut butter cookie mix. It was an impulse buy, because I really like making cookies from scratch, but it was cheap and they did the trick.




Blogging food or cooking related stuff is a great reason to clean my kitchen, so I plan on using that to my advantage, sweet treats AND a clean kitchen makes a happy Susannah!

Do you enjoy baking? What's your favorite recipe? What websites do you use for recipes?