Vanilla Wafer Cookies

Because I'm a chocoholic myself, I tend to gravitate for chocolate recipes when choosing someone's gift if I know they like chocolate. So for Kevin I decided to look at vanilla recipes. I eventually chose Vanilla Wafer Cookies in the Taste of Home Christmas Cookies 2012 magazine. (For some reason my thinking was "Ooh, wafers, just like in Kit-Kat bars." More like the Nilla Wafers you can get in the cookie aisle. Oops. Oh well.)

Soda Cake

As much as I like sticking with the familiar, I like to try new things when it comes to baking. Like macarons (still working on perfecting those things. Almost got it though). So when my mom asked me to bake the dessert for her and Dad's night while in Chelan, I decided what better time to bake a soda cake than vacation?

Yup, that's right. A cake baked with soda.

I've seen them throughout the internet, specifically Pinterest. All you do is take a boxed cake mix and a 12-oz. can of soda in a complementary flavor (like chocolate mix and pretty much any dark-colored soda), mix the two together in a bowl, pour the batter in a pan, and bake. Simple, right?

Well, let's find out:

Simple Neapolitan Cupcakes

Over the last few months I've been working on a bit of a project while waiting on the status of a job. You see, I've become a bit of a ... collector ... of those recipe magazines you can get from the magazine rack at stores. So I decided to create a searchable database of the recipes in these magazines that I would bake since there's not always an index and I have way more magazines than I do cookbooks.

I've also been watching a lot of Food Network lately (don't ask why the sudden change - it's a bit complicated, among other reasons). Especially after I noticed that the weekday morning Cupcake Wars episodes were ones I'd never seen before. Which just made me want to make cupcakes. And since I'm not sure how to store them just for me, I decided to make them for whatever Mom wanted to do for Mother's Day. Since I've been pinning a lot of neapolitan desserts lately, I specifically wanted to make neapolitan cupcakes. I ended up finding a recipe in my new database.

I did make one change: I replaced the strawberry with raspberry for the frosting since my dad doesn't like strawberries. I know it was for Mother's Day, but that wouldn't have stopped him from complaining that he couldn't have the dessert.