2010 Year in review
I’m so very happy that it’s 2011. There are so many wonderful things to come this year.
I thought it would be nice to take a look back at some of the highlights of the past year over here at Cute and Delicious.
In January I made lots of cupcakes for some bake sales, including the Homemade for Haiti fundraiser.
In February, I did lots of crafts, including reworking our book case, knitting a heart for Shawn and making coffee cozies.
In March, we celebrated St. Patrick’s day with holiday foods and I veganized my mom’s fudge recipe.
In April, I experimented with different recipes including vegan crumpets and raw sauerkraut. I also made some pies!
May was quiet, but we visited the amazing Rose Bowl Flea Market (and I made the best cherry pie, I’ve ever eaten).
In June, we went to Portland and got engaged. Biggest, best surprise of my life.
I highly suggest you read Shawn’s recap of the day as it is sweet and wonderful.
In July, I raved about Portland more and made a lot of waffles.
In August, I cooked with figs and made Star Wars cookies.
In September, I made Thank You cakes for friends and we took romantic photos in Griffith Park.
October was a busy month. We had the first screening of Brainwashed Love. We introduced our families at our engagement party. I also made lots of Halloween treats including a spiderweb cake.
November was also packed to brim with food and fun. I made savory things like tofu benedict, green bean casserole, carrot souffle and hot pockets. We celebrated with a birthday cake party and Harry Potter cupcakes. On the sweet side, I made a peanut butter coconut cream pie and Dia de los Muertos cookies. We also made our save the dates with vintage postcards and photos. That’s not even the half of it! Busy month to say the least.
In December, I made many many cookies from Martha Stewart’s recipes, except vegan of course. The most exciting was seeing what my wedding dress is going to look like and sharing a few details with you.
It was a crazy wonderful year. I think I did pretty good on my last minute year end to do list. Can’t wait to share everything with you all in the new year.
Winter vacation
Well it’s the one fabulous week of vacation Shawn and I have off together. We spent Christmas at my brother’s house with his family in Las Vegas. Though we were only there for a brief time, it was really relaxing and nice. I’m feeling very fortunate this Christmas. We made cookies, danced around like idiots playing Just Dance 2
One of the highlights was going hiking in Red Rock Canyon. Since it has been raining heavily there, there was a beautiful waterfall.
This is Wrigley, my brother’s dog. She’s so sweet and absolutely adorable. They adopted her in New York about 9 years ago.
My nephew, Dylan, particularly enjoyed running under the waterfall and jumping over streams.
Alas, I wish our vacation was pure vacation. Instead, I’ll be working on a ton of wedding projects. I can’t believe how soon till we get married. I can’t wait.
So, I now bring you my monster vacation list of things to finish by the end of the year.
(See I was just bribing you with Shawn’s lovely photos. You can see some more of our holiday photos that Shawn took if you like.)
Alix’s (mostly wedding) to do list
- Finish and mail out our invitations – This project is ending up taking quite a bit more time than I anticipated.
- Work on our guest favors – I’m hand making each one, but can’t quite share what they are yet.
- Figure out a hotel for our guests – Apparently our wedding weekend is a busy one and everywhere seems to be booked.
- Finalize our catering – Yep, our wedding is less than 2 months away and we don’t have this settled yet. Yikes!
- Plan our honeymoon – We have picked a place and booked flights, but need to figure out the details like hotels…
- Finally take our engagement photos
- Order our wedding bands
- Find someone to officiate our wedding
- Do some blog housekeeping – just a few nips and tucks here and there for the new year
So there we have it. Can’t wait to start crossing things off. I’m really hoping to have the invites done tomorrow but it’s looking a bit unlikely. Then we’ll be taking our photos on Thursday, which will be much more fun than anything else. We’ve also gotten a lot done…so I’ll share some of that, so everything isn’t so daunting.
Really awesome wedding stuff we’ve accomplished recently
- I got my shoes delivered yesterday. I love them. All thanks to you lovely readers, Jo in particular, who showed them to me.
- Shawn ordered his outfit. It’s really cool and his groomsmen are going to look great too.
- We’ve booked a photographer. This was a really hard choice and things ended up working out in an amazing way.
- I should have my dress by next week!
- We figured out a really cool plan for our rehearsal dinner which will be fun, low key and really let us spend time with our guests.
After making these lists, I’m feeling pretty good. I know there are a lot of other things I haven’t listed to be done (like a cake…), but I’m not going to worry about those right now. I should really get back to work as I have a lot of cutting and gluing to do with those lovely invites.
Weekend plans
Oh goodness it’s almost the weekend and I’m awfully excited. This weekend, we don’t have a lot of plans which means I’m extra happy. It doesn’t mean we’ll be hanging out and relaxing though. This weekend will be full of wedding planning mostly. We’re going to design our invitations for one which I’ve been dying to do. I have an idea in mind and we’ve got a few key elements to put them together.
It’s hard not to tell you all about them right now, but once they’ve gone out I’ll have tons of photos I promise (and there might be some clues in this post). They’re going to have a Victorian theme (mixed somewhat with handmade, if that’s possible). I have to say, it’s hard to balance the dark creepiness of the Victorian era that Shawn and I love with the sweet romantic feeling of a wedding. While we both love skulls and medical instruments and such, they’re not something you’d exactly want to see on a wedding invite. I think we’re going to do a good job of making it all work though. I can’t wait to get started. Right now I’m super inspired by this video of invitations being made.
We still have about a million other plans to work on for the wedding, so hopefully we’ll be able to make a dent this weekend. We have about 2 1/2 months left! We still haven’t picked a caterer yet. We found a cool hotel for our out of town guests to stay at only to have them tell us a week later that they were totally booked. I can’t even tell you how many times family members have asked me why we don’t have a registry yet. (We do now, by the way, as of last night.)
We still have official engagement photos to take, even though we’ve been engaged now for awhile, I’m not passing up this opportunity to take some awesome photos of me and Shawn. We have decorations to think of and wardrobes to finalize. Not to mention a super secret project I’m working on for our guests that is taking me a ridiculous amount of time. Not that I mind a bit. I love it, in fact.
Besides that I’ll be cooking up some holiday treats and doing some decorating…maybe even getting a tree. I think our first batch of holiday cookies will be made this weekend plus whatever else I can come up with. I am hopefully going to start testing some holiday recipes. What are your favorite holiday foods?
Also, in case you hadn’t heard, Earth Balance is holding a recipe contest where 8 lucky winners will get a $400 gift certificate to Whole Foods and a years supply of Earth Balance. How cool is that? From a girl who uses more Earth Balance than a normal person should, I totally want to win this. I’ll have to think of something really awesome to make.
Autumn fun
Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that it’s not nearly 100° here in Los Angeles. Let’s pretend this city actually has seasons and we’re in the midst of a cool, beautiful fall. It’s a perfect autumn day and we’re going on an adventure to the corn maze.
Here we are, excited about the pumpkins and fall squash a plenty.
Gorgeous pumpkins and gourds of all colors.
Squash bigger than I’ve ever seen. You could feed a whole family with one of those banana squash.
But we’re here for the corn maze, so let’s enter, shall we?
Let’s enjoy the afternoon and take some photos.
We’re surrounded by lovely lush corn. It’s an adventure for sure. Who knows where we’re going…
In fact, we might be lost and the GPS isn’t helping.
And you have to be careful of masked men in the corn.
The sun is moving lower in the sky and the corn is so tall we can’t tell which direction we’re going.
But we escaped!
Getting lost has never been so fun.
Halloween Spirit
This weekend we had our 3rd Annual Halloween Movie Marathon. It wasn’t as crazy as last year, where we went for two weekends in a row, but we still watched movies from Saturday night all the way through to Sunday night.
I made some pb cups & peppermint patties, because you have to have some Halloween candy. Some roasted pumpkin seeds for something salty. And of course, some pumpkin spice & espresso cupcakes, well, because I’m good at it. I didn’t, on the other hand, take photos. Mainly because of our spooky Halloween lighting.
Shawn also made tofurky dogs for everyone to fuel us through the night. And lots of coffee. LOTS of coffee and popcorn.
Anyway…this is just a preface to say that my post today is neither cute nor delicious. In fact, it’s creepy. Shawn and I have spent a good deal of time at the Natural History Museum lately. We are trying to take full advantage of our membership there. Not to mention they have amazingly cool stuff.
I thought this might be the only time of year when I could get away with sharing some of the awesome photos I’ve been able to get there at the museum and at special events. Get ready for a bunch of bones, insects and dead things. So if you’re squeamish, you’ve been warned.
Antlers in storage.
A walrus skull. Massive.
Shawn and a blue whale skull at the museum’s marine mammal warehouse. This whale was recovered after it was hit and killed by a commercial freight ship about 30 years ago.
The Natural History Museum is part of the network that collects dead animals that have been washed ashore for research. They have the second largest collection of sea mammals, right after the Smithsonian.
Hippo skull. I’m pretty sure this is Bubbles, but now I’m not positive.
We ended our pre-Halloween weekend by going to the museum’s haunted cave party. It was really a family thing, but it was lots of fun wandering around after hours in costumes. I’m totally obsessed with all the taxidermy they have. I am really just obsessed with everything in the museum.
Oh and in case you were wondering what we watched this weekend…here is the playlist…
