New Year's Mimosa Cupcakes

For Christmas I got the Betty Crocker "The Big Book of Cupcakes" - I have already gone through the book and bookmarked all the recipes I HAVE to try out this year. I made a promise to myself that by the time 2015 ends that I would try all of the recipes I marked off in the book. I figure, what's a better way to start my new year baking adventures than with the New Year's Mimosa Cucpakes?! This cupcake embodies everything that is good about ringing in the new year... cupcakes and a little bit of booze!

Makes - 
28 regular-sized cupcakes or 60 mini-sized cupcakes 

Cupcake:
- 2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour 
- 3 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- ¾ cup melted unsalted butter 
- 1 2/3 cups sugar
- 5 egg whites
- 2 ½ tsp vanilla 
- ¾ cup champagne
- ½ cup orange juice
- 1 tsp orange zest 

1. Heat oven to 350^o degree and line cupcake pan with liners. 
2. Mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
3. In a separate big bowl mix together the butter with the sugar, egg whites, and vanilla.
4. Next, alternately add the flour mixture along with the champagne and orange juice into the big bowl of butter, sugar, egg whites, and vanilla.
5. Using an ice cream scooper, scoop the batter into the cupcake liners to 2/3 full. 
6. Bake 16 minutes for mini-cupcakes or 18-20 minutes for regular-sized cupcakes. 

Frosting:

- 5 cups of powdered sugar

- ½ cup of unsalted butter

- 1 tsp orange zest 

- 3 tbsp champagne

- 2 tbsp orange juice

1. Beat the butter until creamy.
2. Add in the orange zest, champagne, and orange juice and mix it all together.
3. Slowly add in the powdered sugar, feel free to stop when you feel as if the frosting is sweet enough to your liking. The original recipe called for 6 cups of powdered sugar... but it is a new year and some of us are trying to keep our resolutions and not get diabetes.

A page-view of the "The Big Book of Cupcakes". You can see all my bunny page-markers in the back, there are way more of them than the pictures show so look out for all of those exciting cupcake posts!

  

Sooo much mini-cucakes! Just the sight of them makes me happy :)

Here's the final product! My frosting was a little runny even after being in the freezer... the champagne did me in (there was too much of it!).

New Year Resolution!

It's been a whole year already?! Geez time flies too fast. 2014 has been a great year - getting my MCAT over with, interning and shadowing at the Mayo Clinic while still enjoying life in the meanwhile. However, in 2014 I have admittedly given up a lot of the things I like to do in the pursuit of doing well on my MCAT and in classes. So, here are some resolutions I have made in hope of making 2015 even better!

1. Bake/cook once a week (and blog about it!).

I used to constantly bake... not like once a week, but at least twice a day if I can help it. Anyways, since I've entered college I have lost my passion for cooking and baking. But now that I have a kitchen right next to my room at my own disposal, I really don't have an excuse for this. I will hopefully document my successful adventures in the kitchen on the blog for everyone :) 

2. Read a book per month. 

This resolution explains itself, now with a little more free time I really want to spend it expanding my book reservoir!

3. Eat at a new restaurant per month. 

This goes with the whole "Eat, Pray, Love" theme I attempt to have for my life. For those who have not seen the movie with Julia Roberts, long story short it's about a middle-aged woman exploring herself by doing those 3 things and in the end she found herself. I try to be adventurous in all aspects of my life and trying out new food is never dull. 

4. Become a a better person holistically. 

Hmm... I'm really not even sure what this means but it's been something that I've been wanting to accomplish for forever now. I want to be more positive, more physically active, more fun, and more adventurous. From this point forth, I want to only do things that help me be more of all those things.

Visiting the City of Angels

It is winter break! Which means endless days to do whatever my little heart desires. What's the first thing I want to do with my free time? Visit L.A. of course! The City of Angels (and delicious food!). While others will document the place they visit by the sights they see, I usually document the places I visit by the food I eat. Is that bad? I don't think so :) Hope you enjoy my adventures in L.A. through the interesting meals I had and a little bit of the sights I saw ;)

Started my L.A. adventures by hiking and attempting to get close to the Hollywood Sign. 

We hiked up the trail next to the Griffith Observatory, the scenery was so serene! 

No explanation needed, we had to make a stop at ... Georgetown Cupcake! 

These adorable Rudolphs on the cupcakes more than make up for the horrible L.A. traffic!

I have no regrets about the amount of cupcakes I bought at all... It was so worth it! I have been mesmerized by their taste since my visit in Georgetown a couple of years ago. 

In Irvine, CA lies a wonderful little restaurant called Boiling Point. They serve mouth-watering individual hot-pots of various different flavor. I, of course, ordered Thai Flavor Hot Soup in flaming spicy. It was soo good!

Here's the Fishball Curry Hot Soup! 

The restaurant also served these delicious macaroon/macaron ice cream sandwiches! It was my first time and it was definitely worth the wait all these years.

Another one of my favorite places in California that I always go whenever I visit my family there. Tebo Tebo - the hipster lounge for boba-drinkers. All their drinks are served in the coolest glass and bottles and their menu is so diverse every time I visit I always get the opportunity to try something new. 

This weird-looking spiral on the stick is actually potato, can you believe that?! Ponado is this  strange dish's even stranger name. Paired with sweet and sour sauce, it was the best late night snack. 

Outfit of The Night

[On me]

Top: H&M

Skirt: Tobi

Shoes: Gianni Bini

Cross-body Bag: Steve Madden

Watch: DKNY

Day Trip To Sedona, AZ

Recently, I got the chance to get away to Sedona for the day and it was so good to be one with nature for the day. We hiked up to the Devil's Bridge, where there is a little piece of rock walk way with nothing under it. It was super scary! I wish I had better pictures to show you... but my boyfriend and I got our pictures taken by an older lady so she ended up taking selfies in burst. Yeah that is definitely the ultimate fail, but it was so much fun and adrenaline filled nonetheless!

Here is me at the end of our hike! Even though it is December, Arizona is still boiling even in Sedona so the hike was so tiring I was just glad to finally reach the end of the trail. 

And of course the classic pondering life shot.

Sedona is famous for their red rocks. It is such a beautiful contrast between the red of the rocks and the greenery all around. 

After hiking, we visited the Tlaquepaque Center to walk around, visit all the art galleries and cute shops. Here is a picture of me with the cutest bench statue. 

This is Alexi attempting to be cool at the end of the walkway tunnel. The Tlaquepaque Center was like being transported to Rome or Spain with the romantic structures of the building. 

We had lunch at the Oak Creek Brewery & Grill. Yummiest burger and onion rings I have ever had! We ordered the Mushroom Brie Burger... sooo good! I would highly recommend this place and Sedona in general. Definitely worth the 4 hour total car ride to and from Sedona :)

My Obsession of The Moment - Planners

Even though my room is messy, my mind is organized I swear! One of my favorite things in life are planners. It has been a recently developed obsession stemming from watching too many Youtube videos of everyone and their mamas talking about their planners. But I have gotten into decorating my planners as a way to motivate myself to get my shiz  together. Washi tapes, stickers, the whole nine yards! As the year is coming to a close, I am sooo very excited to be switching from my current planner to a Day Designer by Whitney English.

In earlier posts, I have showed you guys my current planner. It is a Blue Sky Planner from Target. What I love about it is the size, it is the standard paper size so I usually stuff any loose papers I have into my planner, which I carry with me everywhere... literally! It has a monthly view as well as a weekly view, which I love. Over the summer I used it religiously everyday in order to help me plan out my study schedule for the MCAT. I did not have a pre-made schedule I was following nor was I taking a class so I really had to keep myself motivated and keep myself on track. I was literally making up my schedule as I was going through the summer, so writing every thing down and keeping track of my score progress was very important to me. 

This is my current planner back when I really took my time decorating it. 

This is during the midst of my MCAT studying, each subject was color-coded a certain color. 

For 2015, I got the Day Designer as a present for taking my MCAT (I am dramatic... I know). But it has been something that I was literally spending all my free-time researching for - a good planner that will help me be even more organized. I love my current planner, but it was really hard to keep track of my schedule as well as my to-do list in the same space. In the Day Designer, there are a month-at-a-glance page and daily pages. I love that each page is designed for each day (except on the weekend). On one side of the page is your schedule for the day and on the other side of the page is a list of to-dos for that day. I am so excited for the start of the New Year so I could use my new planner!! 

 This is the daily-page view. I have already started putting my class schedule into it, that's how excited I am!

This is one-side of the month-at-a-glance page.

This is the color-coding system for my Day Designer, I taped on the inside of the planner with cute washi tape. 

This is how beautiful it is <3 The pink band is an old glitter-headband I found that goes perfectly with the planner (the inside cover is the exact same color). 

Another action shot, I can't get over how beautiful and sophisticated it looks still!

I got my Day Designer from this really cool website called The Grommet, where they have other "Unique gifts and innovative products by makers" as well. It is such a cool and authentic site helping to spread the ingenious ideas of individuals. Here is the link for it, usually the Day Designer is sold out on the official Etsy account but they seem to always be available at The Grommet. Hope you guys love the Day Designer as much as I love mine already :)!

Outfit of the Night

This weekend was one of my friend's 21st birthday, so we all dressed up and went to this really nice, bougie restaurant in Scottsdale (where the rich people are!). The restaurant Az88 was super fancy and the chairs were supposedly the same chairs that were at Kanye West's wedding... I'm not sure how believable that was but it was a super cool place to be overall. 

As you guys can see... I have a favorite night-out outfit combination. My Tobi twisted-front skirt combined with a black crop-top never fails me. Because it is "winter" time here in Arizona, I added a leather jacket to keep warm and pointed-toe pumps for some night-time fun. Also, the gold-hoops for that bad-ass vibe!

Leather Jacket: H&M

Purse: Michael Kors

Crop-top: Q

Skirt: Tobi.com

Shoes: Gianni Bini

Earrings: Forever 21

Struggling to take the photo...

Finally getting it right :)