of cupcakes, clusters and candy

Today I learned that you can make cupcakes without a cupcake pan. All you need are the foil cups and a baking sheet. The trick is to put the baking cups on the baking sheet and then fill them. If you do it the other way around, the cup will collapse and you will make a MESS.

I made cupcakes out of Paula Deen's hummingbird cake recipe. She was recently on Martha Stewart. I had seen her books but never have seen her on TV. She seems like quite the hoot. The cupcakes turned out well even though I accidentally used a 20 once can of pineapple chunks instead of an eight ounce can of chunked pineapple. I had already dumped the can into the batter when I realized it, so I fished most of them out and ran them though the mini Cuisinart. A few chunks still remained, and honestly I liked finding a chunk of pineapple in my cupcake. Maybe if you were making a cake, it would be different.

I have also discovered clusters on Flickr. Clusters are groups of tags. It sounds kind of boring at first, but think about it. Clusters let you see what other people saw and how they captured it with their cameras. It can be inspiring. It can also boost your ego a bit.

I started by looking at other people's photos tagged with Huntington Library. I was surprised at how many photos there were. Within the cluster I could look at subsets, if you will, so fountains or flowers or the Japanese gardens. The Chicago cluster was broken down so you could see cityscapes and the bean or just Sear's Tower. There were some really amazing photographs. I added a few to my favorites.

And speaking of favorites, one of mine, Daily Candy is finally adding Seattle to its lists of cities. I have never been to Seattle, but it still excites me. You can find out more, here.



on the night stand :: Everyday Sacred