ICE: Apples

Apples, I can do. I love apples. My great grandfather had an apple orchard where my cousins and I used to tramp about and pick apples and run through the fields and the forests, and play on the railroad tracks (shh, don't tell my mom!). Then we'd go inside for Granddaddy's apple pie that was better than my grandmother's. And yes, I made the mistake of telling her so once. It wasn't pretty.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house, and on weekends, we'd have these big huge breakfasts with sausage, bacon, and best of all, apple pancakes. I loved those more than anything else. Grandma would even warm up the syrup so that it went and soaked into the pancake quicker, and tasted so good with the hot apple chunks. I'm drooling just thinking about it.

I came up with these cupcakes a while back for another contest, but they fit so perfectly here that I wanted to enter them today. These cupcakes remind me so much of my grandmother's apple pancakes that they just taste perfect. I also added some glazed maple walnuts, just because they tasted so good.

I've been lax about entering ICE lately, but I had to enter when I saw that it was apples this time around. Plus, I knew I had the perfect recipe, too :)

Check out the sponsors for ICE, and see what they're providing for their prize pack this time around. You can also get more information about ICE here at Iron Cupcake Earth. The winner will receive this prize pack.

Now go vote for me starting this Friday, November 27th, at No One Puts Cupcake In A Corner.

Our Generous IronCupcake:Earth Prize Providers:

• The Demy™ by Key Ingredient
• Hello, Cupcake by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson
• Bella Cupcake Couture
• Cupcake Stackers by Gourmac
• The Cake Mix Doctor Returns! by Anne Byrne
• Beautiful Baking Liners by Vestli House
• Sweet Cuppin' Cakes Bakery & Cupcakey Supply

Apple Pancake Cupcakes

1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoon maple extract (this can be adjusted to your tastes, I just sort of kept adding)
1 cup buttermilk
1 apple, finely diced


Preheat oven to 300⁰F. Place liners in a 12 cup muffin tin.

In a medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together until it looks creamy. Beat in the egg and the extracts until the mixture is smooth.

Add half of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, and stir until almost combined. Add the buttermilk and stir, again, until almost combined. Add the rest of the flour and the apples and stir until all the ingredients are mixed in.

Using a cookie scoop, fill the cupcake liners just under 2/3 full. You will probably have some leftover batter, and you can either fill more liners in another muffin tin to be cooked at the same time, or save it for the next batch. (**I am going to work on some of the ratios for this recipe and hopefully finish perfecting it. I will post changes then.)

Place the muffin tin into the oven and raise the temperature to 325⁰F. Bake for about 20-25 minutes, checking frequently during the last 5 to 10 minutes. Just take a quick peek, as they are a tad difficult to judge when they're done. They are very moist.

Let the cupcakes cool for 10 minutes, and then remove from the muffin pan. Cool completely before frosting.



Vanilla Icing


2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
2 to 4 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine the ingredients with enough milk to the desired consistency.

To frost the cupcakes, place the frosting in a zip top bag, cut the tip off, and place a nice sized blob on top of the cupcake. It will spread out a bit over the next few minutes.



Maple Glazed Walnuts

2 cups walnut halves
1/3 cup maple syrup
1/8 teaspoon salt

Preheat a dry skillet over medium high heat. Add all ingredients and cook, stirring frequently, for about 3 minutes or until the walnuts are toasted and the syrup is caramelized. Spread out on waxed paper and allow to cool.

For garnishing the cupcakes, place one or two walnuts on top of the cupcakes in the center. Alternatively, you could also add some thinly sliced apples, and then top with walnuts.

Go Enter This Awesome Giveaway!

This looks like a really great giveaway, so go check it out :D

And the winner is.....

Mexmarr, aka Misty!

Congratulations, if you could contact me with your address I can forward it to the company.

Sorry for the delay in posting this, I decided a little trip down the stairs would be so much fun, and found out that it wasn't. But, nothing is broken so that's a good thing :)

About That Contest I Promised...

Here it is! We got our games in the mail a few days ago. Giraffalaff Limbo, and Scatterpillar Scramble. Now, I have to be really honest and review these games in the way that our own family interacted with them, and how we were able to play with them and whatnot.

I'll start with Scatterpillar Scramble, as that is the one we started with. We got the game set up pretty easily once I found where the baby had hid the batteries. So that part is pretty straightforward. The goal of the game is that up to four people get to use a set of tongs to place marbles on the moving hands that are stacked 7 high. They send you two extra marbles too, in case you lose some, and we lost one within the first few minutes of the game. We spent more time chasing marbles than actually playing the game. Now, some of that could be the manual dexterity of my children, or the fact that we played on a table instead of on the floor, or any number of factors. But the kids weren't too thrilled with having to spend time chasing after the flying marbles, so for us, it didn't go as well as we'd have liked. But again, that could be just our family dynamics, so don't necessarily take my word for it.

Now, Giraffalaff Limbo was pretty cute, but took a while to set up. We were able to figure it out fairly quickly, and got it set up and running. One thing I noticed though, was that even my smallest kid couldn't have possibly fit under the giraffe without knocking him down, and yet the goal is to do just that. To me, that didn't make sense. I couldn't even fit under the highest level, and I'm not that big. So it's pretty much just for the kids. The younger ones had a lot of trouble understanding that there were different ways to go under (you get a little spinner to pick which move you get to make to get under the limbo bar). The older kids thought it was alright, but it wore out quickly for us. Again though, don't just take my word for it. We don't play those types of games as often, so perhaps we're just not used to it.

All that said, the games had the potential to be a lot of fun, and you can enter to win your own set of games right here, right now! Just leave a comment and make sure that I can contact you either through your blog (if you have one), or an email, and when the contest ends on Thursday, October 22nd, (my best friend's birthday!), the winner will be notified, and then your address will be sent to MyBlogSpark so that you can receive your games. Good luck!

Feeling The Love

Thanks so much to Jacquie over at Joy Made Full for sending me this lovely award :)

And now I get to send this on to a few more blogs that I like. I don't get to do as much blog reading as I used to, so my list is a little short. I have been spending some time on a few food blogs, looking for ideas and inspiration, and lately I haven't been doing as much of that as I'd like either. Such is life with 6 littles underfoot. But, I wouldn't trade it for anything (except maybe a nap), and even though I don't get to do this as much as I'd like, I still try to get to it as often as I can :)

1. Needle N' Thread
2. Bake at 350
3. Salt and Chocolate

So I will pass this along too, and hope everyone has a great day :)

How Do You Dress Up Your Hot Cereals?

Maybe I'm the only one, but around here we make large pots of some sort of hot cereal for breakfast. Usually it's either Malto-Meal or oatmeal, but I fill my big dutch oven pretty fill with whatever I'm making that day. Since it's usually fairly plain tasting, I've found some ways to help my kids learn to love these hot cereals, with just a few additions.

Like today, to my massive pot of Malto-Meal (about 10 servings worth), I added somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice, about 1 cup of brown sugar, and roughly a cup of milk. Other days I've done plain cinnamon and brown sugar, and sometimes I add nuts and/or raisins as well, depending on what I have on hand and what the kids are in the mood for. The nice thing about cinnamon, is that it has a lot of good properties, one of which being that it helps control blood sugar to a degree, so that the kids don't go on a sugar high from all the carbs. I love that about cinnamon, among other things. And my kids love the extra flavor.

Other flavors I've done are apple pie spice, as well as just a mix of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg (sort of like ginger snaps). They really liked that one. I have also added vanilla extract in the past (homemade of course), and honey in varying amounts.

While they weren't too thrilled about the plain hot cereals at first, after a few trial and errors, they seem to love it now, especially as the weather starts growing colder. Even the baby loves it now, with all the yummy flavors.

Another Contest Is Coming, But While You're Waiting....

Check out this coupon for $4 off any Elefun & Friends game. The coupon is available for download through October 31st, and good for use until December 31st. So while you're waiting for this giveaway, you can get a really great coupon to use for some fun games for your kids. The giveaway will involve two new games from Elefun, and I will let you know as soon as I can start it :)