Butter Lambs, Glass Cupcakes and Easter Guac

This weekend was full of mishaps and successes, but most of all its was about having a great time with my family. We tried to spend as much time as possible outside enjoying the phenomenal weather.

Friday afternoon I helped my mother put together these adorable potted centerpieces for our family dinner. We used store-bought daffodils, added a few sticks of pussywillows, some moss and then used double-sided tape to adhere some beautiful fabric to cover the pots.

They looked fantastic on the tables and were a great hostess gift for the grandmothers.

As soon as I headed up to my parents place I had to sneak into the fridge to take a look in this little box. Whenever my mother heads over the border shopping around Easter she picks up one of these little guys…

…lambs made out of butter! Other years they have been molded a little more like a lamb, but I love the little flag and ribbon on this one. And his peppercorn eyes

Besides bringing the butter and some centerpieces, my family’s contribution to the family potluck dinner was dessert. My sister and I set to work making up our Great Aunt’s amazing Carrot Cake in cupcake form (complete with cream cheese icing. Yum!). However we had a few road bumps along the way…

On the first batch we burnt them 🙁

Not our fault though! The oven in our house was being used for dinner, so we thought we’d just pop over to the cottage that we rent next door and use the oven there. No one was using it right now and it wouldn’t be so bad to just pop over there in a few minutes to check on them. I remember my mother saying that it was running a bit on the high side, so we lowered the temp and the baking time and walked away. 10 minutes later she comes home, to inform us that the oven wasn’t just off by a little bit….it was off by 100 degrees! We raced over there and they were just starting to burn on the edges 🙁 Ok, we had lots of carrots and ingredients, so just make another batch right?

Wrong. As the cupcakes were cooling someone (Hi Mom!) dropped a glass on the muffin tin and it shattered all over the cupcakes 🙁

At this point we should have just called it quits and tried something different, but I wasn’t giving up. No siree. I was dreaming about deliciously spiced cupcakes with sinful cream cheese icing…there would be no substitutes.

So, Take Three. All 18 cupcakes survived. My world was at peace.

Mind you, it would have been hard to get depressed even about baking failures with all the touches of Spring around. What is it about fresh flowers that just livens up a room?

And nothing goes better with Spring flowers than…an Easter basket of Tostitos? And Guacamole? Yes, even our Tex Mex snacks got a little Easter makeover.