Do y’all watch the Mandalorian? If you do, you know that Baby Yoda (who is actually not Yoda and is known as “The Child”) is absolutely adorable. So when Toby sent me a meme thing he saw on Facebook about a way to make Baby Yoda cookies, I knew I had to get on that, […]
Toby was at boot camp for his 21st birthday and in Afghanistan for his 30th birthday, so when his 40th birthday rolled around, I wanted to do something a little special to mark the occasion, even though we had only just moved to Okinawa. Luckily, because the Marine Corps is so small, some of our […]
One of the things I was most excited about when we found out we were moving to Okinawa was the purple sweet potatoes, or beni imo. Then, mainly because I am foolish and was only shopping at the commissary and the local grocery store closest to our house, instead of going to farmer’s markets, I […]
I wanted to do something extra special for Valentine’s Day this year, and since I have become pretty enamored with rose water, I thought chocolate cupcakes with pink raspberry frosting that look, smell, and even taste a bit like roses would be perfect! Can you think of a better Valentine’s gift than a dozen homemade chocolate […]
It’s almost the Marine Corps’ birthday, and that means birthday balls, special birthday messages… and, of course, baked goods. There’s always an epic cake at the birthday ball, of course, but I like to make something festive as well. In the past, I’ve made camouflage cookies and camo cupcakes, as well as “scarlet and gold” […]
Last year, I made myself a unicorn cake for my birthday. This year, I wanted something a little different. I thought about baking a hummingbird cake (one of my faves) or trying a new flavor… but then I realized that the perfect cake for a red-headed aquaholic like me was a mermaid cake. An ombre mermaid […]
When our Bahrain BFFs asked me to make a 3-shaped cake for their adorable son’s third birthday party, I had some ideas but wasn’t quite sure of the best way to build it. We had both seen 3-shaped cakes on Pinterest, of course, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of tutorials out there. […]
To really understand how important pecan pie is in my life, I need to tell you a story about the first time I went to Afghanistan, in 2008. As soon as I got off the plane at Kandahar Air Field, my friend Kelly (who was the public affairs officer for the unit I was embedding […]
Near our house in Bahrain, there’s this fabulous bakery and tea room called The Orangery, and they have a beautiful cake called the 1001 Nights cake, which is pistachio with rose buttercream. That sounded amazing to me, and I wanted to create something similar for our rug flop (sort of like a Tupperware party, but […]
I have to apologize for not sharing these cookies with you sooner. They are amazing, and I was keeping them all to myself. Well, not totally to myself. I let my family eat some. These cookies are a much-more-delicious version of those rainbow sprinkle-covered cookies they have at bakeries–the kind that are so beautiful and […]