My kitchen's a mess...and it has nothing to do with dinner

My kitchen is still a disaster, I am soaking everything that needs to soak, updating my blog, going to bed and worrying about the mess in the morning.  This is not typical of me, but I had a cupcake explosion in the kitchen today. I could have totally been on that show Cupcake Wars if I had a cute apron and staff.  Fifteen minutes until we had to leave for mutual, not sure if the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes were cool enough to frost, the lime frosting for the coconut lime cupcakes wasn't as thick as I wanted it...if you have ever watched that show you know exactly what I'm talking about.  Oh, and the minor detail that i have one small oven and limited counter space.  It's good to imagine...Anyway, somewhere in the whole cupcake creating that was happening tonight, I had to worry about dinner for my family.  This is why I LOVE freezer meals.

We have been slacking, so I don't have my dinner calendar written out the way it usually is.  This meant at 4:00 p.m. it occurred to me that I didn't know what we were having for dinner and I certainly did not have time to create something.  So, I opened the freezer, the taco meat was staring me in the face, and I decided that I didn't need to complicate things further by looking around.

I grabbed the romaine lettuce out of the fridge, tomatoes were already cut from last nights salad, opened and drained a can of kidney beans, poured some shredded cheese in a bowl and some tortilla strips.  I will admit that Craig had to make some ranch dressing for those who don't like the salsa contraption (it's just salsa and ranch mixed together) but dinner was done. This is what I consider a hybrid freezer meal, only the taco meat was frozen, but heck, who cares...I didn't have to cook anything, and honestly, from start to finish it took about ten minutes to have dinner completely on the table and ready to go...and that includes the time it took to thaw the meat and have the superstar hubby make the dressing.  I'm not posting a picture, and I'm not posting an official recipe...you can use whatever it is that makes your taco meat yours.   The point is, even if you don't want to live by freezer meals like I do, you should really have something in there as a backup plan.  It is completely worth it!

Now, as for the mess in my kitchen.  I did have someone tell me the coconut lime was the best cupcake she ever had.  I love those.  I changed the recipe up a little today, and am a firm believer I need to make it again before I post to be sure everything is measured out and recorded correctly.  So for now, I'll just tease you with pictures.

  

 
I had made cupcakes for a birthday and used birthday liners...that was a great idea except they looked very silly with these cupcakes.  I took the liner off and it looked even sillier, so the cupcake is just kind of sitting in a new liner...you get the idea though. It's a coconut cupcake with lime frosting.  These are my absolute favorite cupcake, so I was very excited to expand the fan club for these babies.

 I also made a peanut butter chocolate cupcake.  Now, I am a long time fan of peanut butter and chocolate candy, but I've always felt like there were enough chocolate peanut butter cupcakes and I didn't need to jump on the band wagon. Today, I had some of those mini reeses and thought since I was making cupcakes it wouldn't hurt to try. These cupcakes are EXTREMELY rich; after a bite of this one I was thinking milk...and I don't even like milk. These may be a good mini cupcake...hmmm...

Now, the third cupcake was a cookies and cream cupcake.  These were really good, but a bit too heavy for me.  I like a light, fluffy, cupcake, not dense and thick.  A lot of people really liked these, simply because it's a classic, comfortable flavor.  I'll look at lightening up the dough a little before we finalize the recipe, but it definitely had potential. (See what I mean about the tacky cupcake liners now?)