The Sunflower Wedding Cake

Our bride and groom wanted to have a somewhat traditional small top tier wedding cake to freeze for their first anniversary.  I struggled with the decoration - it couldn't be all fluffy and roses and pearls … all traditional wedding cake-y.  It just wouldn't have fit with the feel of the cupcakes.

I knew I needed to have sunflowers as the floral part of the cake, but at the time I was starting to plan the cake decoration I still wasn't happy with the sunflower decorations on the cupcakes.  It's great to live close enough to go to Country Kitchen (or maybe it's not!) because just browsing all the wonderful cake and candy supplies helps me come up with ideas. 

One of the reasons I wasn't happy with the cupcake sunflowers was that the centers just didn't look right.  I didn't want to use Oreos  because they were really too big and they just aren't, well … pretty.  Wandering down one aisle at CK, I found different sizes of sunflower/daisy fondant cutters and daisy center stamps.  I thought I had the answer to my problem and also I thought  the multiple sizes of the  sunflower cutters  would be helpful in decorating the cake.  Since I already had the black fondant for the lizards, all I needed was plain fondant that I could color for the sunflowers.

Work in Progress

Once I got home with my new acquisitions, I started hunting around the internet for instructions for making gumpaste sunflowers.  You Tube has several really good videos.  After a bit of trial and error I learned that using the proper equipment really does make a difference.  I tried rolling the fondant with my trusty marble rolling pin and I just couldn't get it thin enough.  When I finally broke down and got a fondant rolling pin and mat, it was a breeze.  I also had to get the veining tools.  It makes a huge difference!

Large Fondant Sunflower

Small Gumpaste Sunflower

It turned out that the daisy center stamps weren't large enough for the biggest size of the sunflower.  I ended up using a round cutter on black fondant to get the right size.  Then the light bulb came on.  I had some teeny round black sprinkles so I made a sugar glue and painted one side of the round then pressed it into a bowl of the sprinkles.  Ta da!  I was finally happy with my sunflower center!  On the cupcakes, I didn't want to use fondant so I just piped some black frosting the right size of the center then dipped the black into the sprinkles then added the yellow petals. 

I made a bunch of each size sunflower.  I used two large sunflowers "glued" together to make the large flowers for the top of the cake and put one of each size of the smaller sunflowers together for the smaller flowers.  The daisy center stamps worked fine for these.

And then … I realized the sunflowers needed leaves.  By that time, I had no more time to run to Ft. Wayne to get  any kind of leaf cutter or embosser and poking around in my box of cookie cutters didn't produce a leaf cutter.  So I just cut them out and used the veining tools.  Somehow, they came out looking ok.  Not great, but ok.

The cake was the last thing I decorated and I finished it at 4:00 the morning of the wedding.  I was having so much fun that I really never got tired.  My hands were getting sore and you can see the piped decorations on the cake - the bows and swags aren't very good.  Fortunately, the cake was so high on the stand that no one could really inspect it!  LOL

We loaded all the cupcakes into the cardboard boxes with the inserts that night as I completed them.  I left the cake until "morning" (2 1/2 hours later!) to make sure the icing had hardened a bit. 

Cleaned Hatbox

Moving the cake was horrifying but I got it on the bottom of my trusty Tupperware cake taker but when I tried to put the top on I discovered the big sunflowers on top caused the cake to be too tall.  Ho-ly c r a p.  My husband thought of a hatbox.  I'm a mild mannered owner of an online vintage clothing shop, so hatboxes I have but I needed a big one.  I thought of one particular box because it is plastic and came apart AND it was already damaged so I only use it for storage.  After washing it up thoroughly, it served its new purpose perfectly.

Cake in Hatbox

As I was cleaning up my mess a few hours earlier, I put together a little "kit" with white and pink frostings, pastry bag, the decorating tips I had used, and a few extra little sunflowers and leaves.  This was fortunate because I had to re-do the shells on the base of the cake because they all broke off while moving it.  One pink bow got a bit squished so I re-did that, too.

Honestly, I still can't believe how smoothly it all went.  Guess that 6 months of practicing and planning really paid off!

Ta Da! My Wedding Cupcakes

I'm still having a hard time believing I actually was able to make 130 wonderful cupcakes that my son and his (now) wife would be pleased with.  I'm also starting to go through withdrawal - it feels strange to not have a specific goal to bake for.  While I was searching for recipes and hints and help, I came across a LOT of yummy sounding cupcake recipes and I'm anxious to try them out now so that helps.

Before going any further with patting myself on the back, I can say with certainty that I would never have been able to pull off the wedding cupcakes without  this  blog post on Baa Baa Cupcake, Have You Any Frosting: 

http://baabaacupcake.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-bake-wedding-cupcakes-at-home.html

So … without further ado, here are my cupcakes

Sunflower Cupcakes - White Wedding Cake

 I'll post a full photo of the cake in my next post.

Lizard Cupcakes - Confetti Cake

Dinosaur Cupcakes - Lemon

Carrot Cupcakes

And finally -- The cupcakes set up at the wedding

Cupcakes for Wedded Bliss

It's over!  My baby boy is married to a wonderful girl and they are off on their honeymoon.  And I didn't embarrass them OR myself - the cupcakes were apparently a hit.  :)

There have been many times in past "projects" that I have maybe "bitten off more than I can chew" and afterward swear I will never do that again.  This is NOT one of those times.  

Despite getting only 6 hours sleep in the 48 hours prior to the wedding and having my feet and legs swell from standing for so long -- it was a TON of work, but I would SO do it again! 

The last couple of weeks were just too busy with wedding preparations, experiments, events, and baking (plus my oldest son had a surprise closing on his first house the Friday before the wedding, so we added some celebrating and moving to  all the other things necessary for the week of the wedding!)  I never really had a chance to write anything or edit any photos, so I'm getting a little caught up here.

• Lizard Confetti Cupcakes:  I found a lizard candy mold and pressed black pre-made fondant into it, then used a  fine decorating tip (#3, I think) to decorate them.  They turned out really cute!

• White Chocolate Frosting:  I made another batch of the chocolate cupcakes with the white chocolate icing and increased the amount of white chocolate.  What I found is that I still have to increase the amount of powdered sugar and it really didn't accomplish much.  I also discovered that this frosting does not travel well - particularly if it's hot outside.  And because it never really sets up, it's next to impossible to remove the cupcakes from the cardboard holders without squishing the frosting and sometimes the cupcake, too.

• FINALLY got the sunflower cupcake decorating perfected!  I'm really pleased!
• The little black and white sugar decorations I used on the white chocolate cupcakes a) weren't as large as the ones I printed and used when I was experimenting and b) because they were small, the white on white color disappeared into the frosting.

• A vintage hatbox - the clear plastic kind with a "quilted" lid and base - will work to transport a cake that is larger/taller than a typical Tupperware type cake taker.

• Purchasing cardboard boxes and cupcake inserts is the ONLY way to move 130 cupcakes from one location to another.

• Once cream cheese and buttercream frostings are WELL set up, they travel pretty well and are reasonably easy to remove from said boxes.  Squishy frosting that never really sets solidly (aka white chocolate) is a big problem.

• I learned how to use gum paste to make awesome sunflowers to decorate the 8" cake - all by myself <patting self on back> and they were delightful!

• Purchasing an 8" styrofoam dummy cake to practice is an EXCELLENT idea.  I was able to play around with colors, sizes, and ideas to see what worked without taking a chance on the real cake.  (I'll post a photo of the real cake soon!)

 

I'm still cleaning the kitchen.  There was a lovely, very fine layer of powdered sugar in my baking corner and I swear I used just about every piece of baking equipment in my kitchen.  Most of that is already clean, so today's main project is reorganizing and putting things away AND washing the cupcake stands.  The kitchen looks rather barren without all the cupcake equipment that has lived there, fairly permanently, for the last 3 months!

I'll post some photos of the finished cupcakes soon.

Is It Possible To Have Too Much Chocolate?

Well, IS it?!   It's hard for me to know - I'm defective.  I like chocolate but I don't LLLOOOOOVVVEEE  chocolate.  Hubby is a chocoholic, but me … I'm into fruity flavors, like the lemon cupcakes.

I'm working on the last batch of trial cupcakes for the wedding.  I left chocolate for last because .. hum .. let me see … I'm not sure, but it was probably because I didn't think I would be doing anything other than using a box of cake mix.  Not much trial and error involved there.

I don't want to get too far away from the cake mix because I really am concerned about time issues.  The lemon cupcakes are, by far, the most complicated and time consuming - and it shows.  They are seriously exceptional and well above  the others I've made.    BUT now, I feel like just using the chocolate cake mix would be such a blah cupcake that I started searching for something to ramp it up a bit. 

With my trusty Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix in hand, I started to do some recipe searching.  About that time I started wondering what the difference is between devil's food and chocolate cake.  What I found isn't really definitive, but it seems that devil's food may be a richer, more dense cake than plain chocolate cake because it uses butter and melted chocolate (when made from scratch). 

Some years ago, someone started putting applesauce in cakes, to replace some of the fat.  Then someone got the idea to put pudding in the cake mix to make a really moist cake.  Originally, we had to add our own pudding, but at least one of the cake mix companies now has some cupcake mixes that already have the pudding.  Oddly, I have never tried adding pudding to any cake mix (or applesauce, for that matter).  Today, I tried it.

In my recipe search, I came across a website - and I am truly sorry that I can't remember which one because I looked at so many and made a lot of notes and then I couldn't find my way back to it - that said to add a small package of instant chocolate pudding, 1 cup of sour cream, 1/2 cup water, and 1/2 cup oil with 4 eggs to the chocolate cake mix.  It is RARE that I have sour cream in the fridge.  It's another one of my quirks - WHY do I want to eat SOUR cream?  I don't drink SOUR milk?  But I did have an 8 oz tub of sour cream because I confused the ingredients of 3 different lemon frosting recipes and ended up with this stupid sour cream that I didn't know what to do with!  I shall call it 'Providence' because if I didn't have that in the fridge I would never have tried this "recipe".

Since I'm still fearing the cupcake paper fiasco, I used 1 of each kind that I will be using on the wedding cupcakes, PLUS one of the kind that peeled so terribly.  Then I finished up with using the liner I intend to use with the chocolate cupcakes.  After they had been out of the oven for an hour none were peeling.  But I'm sad.  They were all lovely with their puffy domed tops and now they're just plain FLAT.  The frosting will hide that, but still ….

 Again, soothe my need to make "special" cupcakes I decided I needed chocolate frosting on the chocolate cupcakes.  But the color of chocolate won't work with the decorations.  So I'm going with white chocolate frosting.  I hope.  I made the recipe but it is almost runny.  VERY high fat with the cocoa butter, butter, and cream.  The recipe called for 3 1/2 Cups of powdered sugar but it was still soupy, but by the time I added another cup of the sugar the chocolate flavor started to disappear.  I managed to pipe frosting on all 24 of the cupcakes and am sent them to work with hubby.

As it turns out, the devil's food / chocolate cake was fantastic!  It certainly deserves a special frosting, but since the chocolate flavor went missing I still don't know if the white chocolate frosting will be too much.  The frosting got RAVE reviews - even higher ratings than the lemon!  Sometime later this week, I'm going to have to make the cupcakes again and try to adjust the icing recipe and add more white chocolate.  Or maybe just leave well enough alone. 

As a last comment:  NONE of the cupcake liners peeled. Not even the one that peeled on every cupcake.  I made sure the batter was spread out to the sides of the liners.  There was no buttermilk in the recipe and whole eggs (vs egg whites) were used. 

Lemony Dinosaurs

The results are in!

My husband took the cupcakes to work with him.  It's a small office, consisting of 3 women and 5 men, so I figure there should be enough diverse tastes.

First, the cake.  Rave reviews!  Yay!!!  Everyone loves the taste and the texture, which is leaning toward being almost like angel food cake, but not that thick and dense.

Second, they liked the decoration and one of the girls especially liked the spiky green grass.

I talked with the June fiancée last week and we've sort of decided on the remaining decorations for the cupcakes.  And, we added a flavor - lemon. 

This son always asks for lemon cake for his birthday and this year, of course, I made cupcakes - with the usual boxed version of lemon cake, but I made buttercream frosting and flavored it with lemon flavoring.  My hubby gets awful blisters in his mouth from citrus acid and I've learned to either use flavoring or make sure it's cooked and/or with a lot of milk product to cut the acid down. 

This son is such a kid at heart.  :)  I hope he never changes.  This is the one who loved Barney, and dinosaurs - the Stegosaurus, especially.  While the other one likes weird things like alligators and sharks in the bathtub (JOKE!!) this one likes goofy things.  Like stegosaurus bathtub stickers.  You get the idea.

I'm lucky enough to live reasonably close to Country Kitchen Sweetart that a couple weeks ago, hubby took me there to scout for what kinds of things are available and to pick up some cupcake wrappers.  We also picked up a catalog that we gave to the June fiancée.  She had looked through it and showed me what she liked as decorations.  At first, she was concerned that some weren't "wedding" enough but I told her that it's HER wedding.  If she wants blue brontosauruses  swinging from trees THAT is what she should have!  (Thankfully, she doesn't because there ain't NO WAY I could pull that one off!)

Lemon cupcake with dinosaur sprinkles

So, between the two of them it has been decided that there will be lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting and hard sugar dinosaurs as decoration.  I was kind of hoping they'd decide on the decoration I did on son's birthday cupcakes - colored sanding sugar and little dinosaur sprinkles because I really thought it was cute and pretty.  But they like the dinos, so dinos it will be!

Lemon cupcake with star sprinkles

Next, I have to find a really good lemon cake and frosting.   For the fun of baking, I prefer to try not to use cake mixes but time's running out so I might not have a choice. 

For today, though, I have some blueberries that never made it into my yogurt so I'm hunting either blueberry cake recipes or blueberry muffins.  I have a blueberry muffin recipe and I hate it.  I have a blueberry bread recipe and it's really good, but I want to try something different.

Christmas Cupcake Tree

Seems weird to be writing about Christmas, but I'm trying to keep everything in order.  It's kinda fun to see my progress, now, looking back.

As soon as my son's birthday is past, Thanksgiving blows into my kitchen.  Sadly, we couldn't all get together but son had received a frozen turkey LAST year from his company and was fearing the Christmas ham that was coming, due to lack of freezer space.  Frozen turkey lasted a year because said son didn't know what to do with it, so I had him thaw the bird in his fridge and bring it over for feasting on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend with the requirement that I would show him how to cook it and all the other "required" Thanksgiving treats. 

No matter how many years I make Thanksgiving dinner, for some reason it's still slightly intimidating.  It's truly easy - we don't do anything "fancy", just stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, veggie, and pie.  Unless it's a BIG family get together, in which case there is a veritable blessed MOUNTAIN of food.  But, it was just my husband and one son and me, so we only had enough excess to make us all happy with the leftovers.

What's that got to do with cupcakes?  Not a damn thing.  That's the point … I never got to make the cupcakes with the turkey decoration that we did in my class.   Oh well, next year.

Christmas Cupcakes

But, just a couple of weeks later I went to a luncheon where everyone brought something and I volunteered (or maybe someone else volunteered me) cupcakes!  What better way to see if my skills were getting better?

They came out so pretty!  I hated to take them  anywhere and let them be eaten.  I just wanted to LOOK at them!  They were a hit at the luncheon and right before we devoured them, I realized I hadn't taken any pictures of them!  They were simply repeats of the ones I learned in my decorating class but this time they weren't as wobbly.  All together, displayed on an acrylic stand, they were the perfect decoration and I really wanted to remember them.  Here's a photo from my phone, the colors are off but at least I have something to remember them by.

Here's what I mean by seeing progress:  the first photo is a cupcake I decorated in class, the second one is the "practiced" one.

Before

After

Before

After

The Birthday Gator

Runway cake

Every year on each of my kids' birthdays, I've made their birthday cake.  I think it started because my oldest son liked airplanes since he was old enough to toddle through the house, screaming "AhBEE!  AhBEE!" when the F-4 jets from our local air guard base flew over our house.  (It took us awhile to figure out that he was actually saying "airplane")  We couldn't find a bakery who could decorate a cake with F-4 planes with cammo colors.  Taking into consideration my incredibly poor artistic abilities, I managed a cake with a chocolate runway with die cast metal planes stuck on cardboard and frosted over.  I found a picture of it in the depths of my hoard of his baby pictures. 

When this same son's birthday came around last fall, I wanted to continue practicing my decorating skills.  My dear husband , who constantly spoils me ROTTEN, surprised me with a couple of cupcake decorating books containing tons of cute cupcake ideas.  Some look almost overwhelming, but one day I'd really like to try doing some of the craziest ones.  Mostly, though, I've used them to give me some ideas.  Many of the designs are made with cupcakes grouped together and frosted as if they were one cake.  Because my kids all live over an hour away, there's no way I could transport an arrangement of cupcakes held together with frosting. 

Since my oldest enjoys asking friends and family to bring him back an alligator or a shark when vacationing, I knew which of the designs in the books I was going to do - the one where the cupcakes are arranged in the shape of an alligator.  I modified it slightly because I was short by a couple of cupcakes and because I had to be able to move them. 

Gator Eyes

Gator Claws

The book recommends using zip lock bags and cutting the corner out, but I really don't like using the zip bags -- over the years, I've never had much luck using them with tips with and without couplers, I used a #150 carnation tip, mixed up a swampy green color (mixed blue, red, and yellow paste color until it was sufficiently yukky looking) to create the overall "skin" and broke apart Hershey bars for the bumps.  While the book used marshmallows for the eyes, I couldn't justify opening an entire bag of marshmallows to use just one, so using a #12 round tip, I simply piped two round eyes and used a little blob of black frosting from that tube of black frosting.  Also, the book uses little hard candy bananas for the claws - I didn't have any, so again used a tube of yellow that I had with a leaf tip  and kind of starting out like a regular leaf then releasing the pressure on the tube and pulling away.  Not as pretty or perfect, as you can see, but it did the job. (I'm realizing now that keeping an assortment of those things that look like toothpaste tubes full of colored frosting, is probably practical for the times when all I need is a little bit of one color.)

Finished Gator

My Strange Carrot Cake

Remembering that my future daughter-in-law wants some of the wedding cupcakes to be carrot cake, I looked at a bunch of recipes.  Then I remembered I may have to make 50+ on top of the 50+ of the other flavors and thought I'd try out the Duncan Hines Carrot Cake mix.  Foolishly, I still don't know if it tastes "right" but the reports have been encouraging.  You see, I made my hubby take the uncut cake to work where I wouldn't tangle with it and it would get eaten before it could dry out.  Cupcakes have a little longer life expectancy around here.  2 pieces of cake would be BAD for me, whereas 2 cupcakes … well, they’re little, therefore I can get away with eating 2 in an EMERGENCY.  (That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!)

The point of this project was to try out the cake mix.  The kids were kind of interested in having a small cake that they could freeze, per tradition.  So, what better way to try out my newly acquired cake decorating skills? 

Under normal circumstances, carrot cake comes with a cream cheese frosting but I wanted to work on decorating so I made the regular white buttercream frosting and used that.  In my class we learned to skim coat a cake, letting it set up and then frosting over that.  It makes the cake look so much nicer!  We also learned that the skim coat helps keep the cake moist if it has to be made a day before.

Teacher's Frosting "Shells"

My "shells" around the bottom

In the class, I flunked making "shells" with the #33 tip.  Here is how my teacher made them - I kept them for reference until they fell apart.  For whatever reason, getting the proper 'poof' at the top just wasn't happening.  Practice makes perfect and I still need a LOT of practice, but the shell decoration at the bottom of the cake came out pretty well.  On the other hand, the loop decoration around the top edge left quite a bit to be desired.

Roses, rosebuds, & leaves

Next came the roses.  They're really not that hard BUT, in my opinion, if your frosting isn't the right consistency it's a lot harder.  In this case, my frosting was too soft - should have added more powdered sugar but didn't think of it in time.  I used tip #104 and made the roses on waxed paper squares stuck with a dab of frosting on a flower nail and scooched them off onto the cake before they were dry enough - haste makes waste - but they weren't too bad and  the addition of leaves helped hide some boo boos and filled in a little.

Finally … the writing.  Since I knew this cake was going to work with my hubby, I didn't want people to think I didn't know any better than to use buttercream frosting on a carrot cake instead of cream cheese.  Having written "Happy Birthday …" a gazillion times in my life, I didn't think I'd have any trouble doing it on this cake.  WRONG.  In the past, I used the cake frosting in a can - much softer - and my hands were getting tired so my writing had seen better days.

Ta DA!  Finished cake!

The report back was that everyone loved the cake and several commented that they liked it better with the buttercream frosting.  Now that we're getting down to the wire, I think I'm going to have to run it by the kids and see which they'd like. 

And, I probably SHOULD try one, too!  (Oh darn!)

Know Your Flora and Fauna

Poinsettia decorated cupcake from my class.

It's umm… a little wobbly.  Did you notice

that the frosting is a little yellow?  The only

butter flavoring I could find was yellow.

NOW I know to look in the cake decorating

section at the store!

When I was taking my cupcake decorating class, one of the decorations we learned to make was a poinsettia.  It seemed to me that it would be pretty easy to adapt the poinsettia and make it become a sunflower.  My future daughter-in-law's  bouquet will be sunflowers and her wedding colors are black and PINK.

About that time, the plan for the wedding cake became wedding cupcakes.  One reason being that no one will have to stand and cut cake - it's just grab and growl.  (Betcha don't hear THAT said very often about wedding receptions!)

The plan, so far, is to have several different cupcake flavors, each decorated differently.  Plan A is:   1) White Wedding Cake with Buttercream Frosting (I'm thinking the sunflower will go on this one).  2)  Funfetti - believe it or not, I've never made Funfetti cake/cupcakes.  3)  Chocolate, and 4) Carrot cake.

To practice the White Wedding Cake, I made cupcakes with French Vanilla Duncan Hines cake mix and added almond flavoring.  I was shocked to learn that our local "most loved" cake shop uses cake mix and everyone thinks it's the best.  If it's good enough for them it's good enough for me, especially since I'm baking 200+ cupcakes all by my lonesome.  I'm not getting the right flavor, though, so I'm going to try just plain white cake mix - I'm betting the "French Vanilla" flavoring in the cake mix is overpowering the almond.  NOTE TO SELF:  Don't forget to make more white cupcakes to try out this theory.

But, I digress.  (I know, I do that a lot.) 

Anyway, I mixed up my batch of buttercream frosting and colored it the perfect sunflower yellow.  (I'm still amazed that I don't eat half of it before anything gets decorated.)  Pondering how to make black or brown frosting, I thought about chocolate frosting, but it just isn't right somehow, and it wasn't going to take very much anyway.  I happened to have several tubes of different colored frosting and one was black, so I thought I'd try that.  It was perfect!

Unfortunately, the flower wasn't.  After making several sunflowers using a leaf decorating tip (#352) to make the petals  and a small round decorating tip (#3) to make the center "seeds", my shapes were becoming more uniform but  the flower still didn't look right.  THEN the lightbulb came on (one of the GOOD lightbulbs like they have in cartoons, not one of those stupid curly cue things!) and I got online and actually looked at a sunflower.  DUH.  The center where the seeds are is huge on sunflowers!  (Remember … by any stretch of the imagination, I have ZERO artistic skills.  My stick people can sometimes be unrecognizable.)

After using the small round tip to put a gazillion little dots in the center of the sunflower exactly one time, that lightbulb flickered on again.  Use the multiple opening tip (#233).  Ta da!  Sunflower!  Showed them to the bride-to-be and the decoration was approved!

Victim of Cupcakes

Oh lawsy mercy! WHAT has happened to me? I'm addicted to cupcakes! (Making them, thank goodness - but I sure don't mind eating them, either!)

IT'S NOT MY FAULT! My children have done this to me.

You see, it started when my youngest son and his fiancee asked me to make their wedding cake so they could save money on their wedding.

He was 21 at the time and to date, my biggest accomplishment was making a Big Bird birthday cake that was actually recognizable as being Big Bird. I think that even might have been before his time - for his older brother. Maybe not. I don't remember.

There was also the T-Rex cake and then I also made Barney from the T-Rex pan, but other than those, their annual birthday cakes have been either layer cakes or sheet cakes with "Happy #st/rd Birthday, Insert Name" decorated with the theme of their year. Had a lot of hockey, airplane, baseball, and car cakes, and in my opinion, some were barely recognizable!

So I dug out all the cake making supplies I'd accumulated over the years and made some cupcakes for a dinner party we were going to. Surprisingly, they were well received! This was followed by a cupcake decorating class. Now, I was getting cocky. I think I can do this!

Equipped with supplies, enough knowledge to get me in trouble, and very little natural artistic skill I started the adventure.

I’ve started this blog as a place to record what went right and what went wrong, fun new things to try, and even a place to work on my photography skills.