Failure Cupcakes, Grape Jelly, and Scarlet Giggling

I made some cupcakes. I got an email the other day in my inbox from Skinnytaste.com. They have all sorts of healthy recipes. They had Super Moist Low-Fat Chocolate cupcakes. And they looked delicious! Here's the recipe:

• 1 cup pumpkin
• 1 box instant fat-free, sugar free chocolate pudding mix (not prepared--just the powder)
• 1 box of chocolate cake mix
• 1 1/3 cup water

Don't try it. They don't cook. You're supposed to cook them at 350 for 25 minutes. 50 minutes later, they still weren't even close to being cooked anywhere but the very outside of the cupcake. And if that was actually how they were supposed to turn out and they were cooked--then that's a very loose interpretation of the word cupcake. And they don't release from the cupcake liners because there's no fat to keep them from sticking. The taste is good. The texture makes me gag. I'm thinking I'll stick with just the regular entree recipes from SkinnyTaste and leave my desserts up to my Nestle Tollhouse book and our stellar family recipes.

Yesterday we also made grape jelly. We have yet to see if it worked out...we'll see if it's set up by this afternoon. If not, we'll be addressing the "If your jelly doesn't set up..." section of the pectin box instructions. Right now it's looking like we just have really sweet grape juice. We added the sugar before the pectin. Oops! We were supposed to add the pectin to the grape juice, get it boiling, then add the sugar. We added the sugar and then realized our mistake so we added the pectin, too. If it doesn't work, we'll fix it tonight.

My mom is here in town this week to celebrate my birthday with me and because both of our husbands are out of town. We had a Jack-o-Lantern pizza from Papa Murphy's again and we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas on Halloween. We didn't have one single trick or treater...such bad news for my waistline. All our lights were on, our pumpkins were out, our window was decorated. And I didn't even hear any trick or treaters walking around outside! Disappointing. On Tuesday we went down to Muskego to visit The Gingerbread House. It was a really cute shop! They had hens and roosters and pretty geese walking all over the grounds (I had to stop in the parking lot for two of them to cross the driveway), there was a cafe downstairs and a cute boutique upstairs. Kind of like a mini Gardner Village. I forgot to take pictures, we we'll probably head down that way again to go Wal-Mart. We're gonna go wild and put some coca-cola red streaks in our hair this week because we're both bored with our hair, and Wal-Mart is the only place around here that sells the kit, so I'll be sure to stop and take some pictures of the Gingerbread House when we head back down there. We had lunch at Applebee's afterwards.

We got a great video of Scarlet laughing last night! Here it is (for those of you receiving this blog by email, if you can't see the video, click here: Jeremy & Sara's Blog):