Apparently, The Washington Post has an annual Peeps Show (how I love puns) where readers send in dioramas using marshmallow Peeps. I’ve always wondered what happened to all of those. I, for one, don’t eat the pink bunny ones because they taste like sugar-crusted plastic puffs. I would eat the yellow chick ones, except I think they’re too cute and worry that I’m crushing their little peep lives as I chomp down on their tiny heads.

Read more about the Peeps Show HERE, including a gallery of all the best entries. There’s even a diorama recreating that Thriller dance number by those inmates in Cebu!

This one’s my favorite:

I’ve been lurking on Wifely Steps for over three months now. Toni used to be my blockmate in college and I found her blog through Via. I like reading her blog because it reminds me that the quest for good homemaking is alive in Manila. I know that sounds corny, but I’d like to think that if I still lived there, I would be taking the steps to carve my own corner in that pocket of the world with adventures in housekeeping, experiments with recipes, Twilight movie updates and all that good stuff.

I made these to participate in her Blog Carnival for the ingredients PEACHES and CREAM, but seeing how her deadline is March 22, I’m not sure if this is going to make it! I just made these today.

These are called PEACH BE WITH YOU CUPCAKES, because I made them this morning at the crack of dawn when I got off the phone after an argument with my friend Ross. (We argue about 2 million times a year, don’t be alarmed.) I decided to make these to de-stress, which is partly the reason why I bake all the time. Nothing soothes like flour, milk and sugar, and in this case, peaches and cream!

Peach Cupcakes
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1-1/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp grated orange zest
3/4 cup milk
8 slices canned peaches, diced

1. In a small bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt.

2. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat together sugar and butter until well combined. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and orange zest, beating well. Alternately beat in flour mixture and milk, making three additions of flour mixture and two of milk, beating until smooth. Fold in peaches or nectarines.

3. Scoop batter into prepared pan. Bake in preheated over for 23-28 minutes or until golden brown and tops of cupcakes spring back when lightly touched.

Let cool in pan on rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool completely on rack.

By the way, these cupcakes don’t rise very much, so if you make them, make sure to fill the cupcake pans almost all the way to the top of the liner.

The nutmeg in these really make a big difference in the flavor! These are perhaps the yummiest cupcakes I’ve made in a long time. The peaches really help keep the cupcakes moist.

And here’s the frosting, which is a basic cream cheese one but with a cup of whipped cream folded in. Airy and sweet! Paired with the cupcakes, it’s really like a portable version of the good old peaches and cream.

Whipped Cream Cream Cheese Frosting
1 8 oz package cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream

1. In a small bowl, beat whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar, salt and vanilla. Beat until smooth, then fold in whipped cream.

I got both these ideas from the web and have been wanting to try these out. The decorating idea was all mine though. I used a gummy peach ring to top each cupcake. Whether or not this makes it to the Wifely Steps deadline, these were fun to make.

And yeah, Ross and I are going to talk eventually, like we end up doing 2 million times a year. Ross, this is a peace offering. Even if you can’t really eat them. I will eat one for you.

I was thinking, if I had to write an ad to sell these, the copy may include: “They’re peachy cupcakes you’ll be keen on!”

Ok, well, maybe not. Haha.

These Red Velvet Cake Lollipops took a lot of time to make, but they were a fun project.

Cakes on a stick, covered with white chocolate, tinted with different spring colors, in celebration of Easter.

That was a mouthful!

Made this cake last weekend for a nephew. The thing is, I was told his younger brother was the one celebrating a birthday–turns out Dondie is actually, well, 16 years old now. If I was 16, I wouldn’t really appreciate a turtle cake, but he’s a sweet kid and didn’t seem to mind.

Made with cupcakes frosted as one to look like a happy Mr. Turtle. Who would eventually be eaten.

I’ve never been good with colors. For the longest time, I was stuck in the whole matchy-matchy color mode, where I was on the eternal quest to match my shoes with my purse. Hence, I could only make quilts that were the standard white and pink, blue and white, red and white, etc. Orange and blue? WHY?!?!

But over the past three years or so, I actually started discovering colors I never considered before. I really don’t know how it happened. I guess it could be my age, or maybe by the simple scientific process of osmosis–my brother’s studying art and there’s talk of color and the fascination with it everyday.

I still have problems figuring out color value, especially for quilts, but I’m finding out that as much as anything, color is a practice. You keep at it, you get better.

I continue to be fascinated by how visual artists see color and design, which is why they’re my muses. I need to borrow their eyes, because mine are, frankly, color blind. Or maybe color deaf. Whatever this affliction is, I realize that my eyes just weren’t built to process color the way theirs do.

That’s why my blog is this strange–though wonderfully new for me–palette. It’s my way of celebrating this stunning ad for Bassetti Tessutti, the almost-mythical, labyrinthine fabric store in Rome:

And Maison Martin Margiela, whose creative genius continues to awe me with every new season.

The crafting and cooking life is a crazy life if you don’t have an outlet for it. Ideas crowd your brain like the mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert. The more obvious thing to do is to MAKE all of these ideas but there are only 24 hours in a day, and you only have two hands.

So you bide your time. You let the ideas pile up into big mounds of colored silk in your brain. You get by. But then you find yourself awake at 2 am in a foreign city (not good, because you don’t even know where you ARE when it happens.) What was that, you ask in the dark. The answer is an idea for a skirt, appearing to you from the ether, floating through the wispy levels of your sleep. On the way back home, you start seeing quilt patterns on the bathroom tiles in the airport. Finally, when you find yourself studying Japanese fabric patterns online at 6:30 am before you head off to work the day after your flight gets in, you realize you’re turning into a freak. A crafts freak.

So you decide to do something about it. Buy a notebook, write down all your ideas, flesh them out one by one. Sketch them out, even if you could never draw to save your life. And write about them, as much as you can.

You stop fighting your craftster self. You realize that you are, after all, the granddaughter of two amazing craftsters: one who could whip Swiss meringue into airy peaks by hand, and another who lived until she was 102 years old, quilting on a manual sewing machine up until she was 98.

So hello there, my craftster self. And hello to you.