Valentine's Day

David and I aren't big on celebrating Valentine's Day. We don't do anything in particular each year, but this year, I wanted to go to dinner at Brio in Southlake on Sunday. We hadn't been back since we had our rehearsal dinner there, so I thought it would be fun to go! Before dinner, we stopped in at Three Dog Bakery. Have you ever been? I love it! We celebrated Casey's first birthday there.  And since it was Valentine's Day, I couldn't resist buying our sweet pup a treat! She got a cookie and a pupcake.

Dinner at Brio was delicious, as usual. Everything there is so good!

Earlier that day, I made strawberry cupcakes to bring to work. The recipe I found called for fresh strawberries, so I couldn't wait to try them. They turned out pretty good! Here's the recipe.

1 package (18 1/4 oz) white cake mix
1 package (3 oz) strawberry jello
1 cup finely chopped, fresh strawberries, with juice
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine the cake mix, gelatin, strawberries and juice, milk, oil and eggs in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Increase mixer speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more, scraping down sides again if needed. Spoon about 1/3 cup batter into each lined cupcake cup, filling it 3/4 full. Bake until cupcakes are lightly golden and spring back when pressed gently with a finger, 20 to 25 minutes*. Remove from oven, place pans on wire racks to cool for 5 minutes, then remove cupcakes to wire racks to cool for another 15 minutes.

*I baked mine for 16-18 minutes, so it really depends on your oven.

For the frosting, I just made a basic cream cheese frosting.
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese
1 stick regular, salted butter
1 pound powdered sugar

Combine with a mixer and frost your cupcakes after they've cooled. Enjoy!

Bang Bang!

David and I have been talking about getting a gun. With all the traveling we do, it's better to be safe than sorry. I didn't grow up around guns and have never shot one or even held one. So I'm a little hesitant since guns scare the crap out of me. But David always tells me that guns are like life insurance...you don't want to ever use it, but you'll be glad you have it if you ever need it.

Our friend, Shelby, agreed to teach me how to shoot a shotgun! So today, we met her at her family's ranch just outside of Mineral Wells. Her mom and dad also came because we wanted to try out a handgun., too Since we don't have much experience with guns, her dad wanted to be there with us.

I went first. I was so nervous. I don't think I'd even ever heard a gunshot before. Yes, I grew up in Texas. But I grew up in Arlington and went to high school in Plano, so give me a break! Tony (Shelby's dad) was so good at showing me what to do and how to hold it. We started with a .380 handgun.

Bend your knees and lean into it...

Then it was David's turn...

We had a contest on who could shoot the target the best. We both took 5 shots and guess who won! ME!

Then came the shotgun. We used Shelby's 20 gauge since I probably would have hurt myself if we used a 12 gauge. Ha!

David won the shotgun contest. The first shot I took, I did the almost-impossible and missed the target. But to be fair, shotguns are a lot heavier than you think they'd be. Or at least I thought so.

David took a turn shooting Tony's .45. I didn't think I needed to do that. I didn't want to hurt myself.

I had a lot of fun learning how to shoot! I want to see how other kinds of guns shoot, but I'm definitely more comfortable with the idea of getting one. I think for home protection we should just get a shotgun. And hopefully if anybody ever breaks into our house (knock on wood), just the sound of cocking the shotgun will be enough to scare them off and we won't actually ever have to shoot it.

One Year

Well, we made it! We survived our first year of marriage! David and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary last Sunday. We didn't have any big plans, but we had a nice dinner at Cool River Cafe in Las Colinas. It worked out really well for us that our anniversary fell on a Sunday because Cool River had half off bottles of wine on Sundays!

 When we got home, we of course had to have some of our wedding cake. We unwrapped the box, and opened it to find this...

Definitely not the prettiest looking cake, but not so bad for being a year old. David didn't want to eat any of our year old cake, but I told him he had to for good luck! So we cut into it...

And opened the bottle of champagne the venue gave us a year ago... (David really hated that I was taking all these pictures, can you tell?)

And then I went to get our champagne flutes and found this...!

I'm not sure when this glass broke because we never use champagne flutes. I was bummed because I got these from a good friend a few years ago when I got my job, but we improvised and used our regular wine glasses.

Then we ate some cake! David loved it...!

Okay, maybe not really. It wasn't terrible. But it wasn't great. And the most disappointing part about it all was that our wedding cake was supposed to have a raspberry filling in it. I guess the bakery decided that we shouldn't have raspberry filling on our anniversary. We tore through the cake thinking we'd find some, but didn't find any.

So, we threw it in the trash...you can only eat so much plain almond cake.

Although I'm sure Casey would have gladly polished off the rest of it!

Date Night No. 1

October is a crazy month for us. I'm out of town for two weeks, and then David is out of town for the other two weeks. We haven't had to travel very much this year, so now that we're starting to again, I'm remembering how much it sucks sometimes. I especially hate it when our out-of-towns are opposite - I'm out of town when he's in town and he's out of town when I'm in town. Oh well...it's part of our job. 

We recently decided that since we're only getting to spend weekends together this month, and part of next, we needed to set aside some time to spend together! So last Friday was our first official date night. We plan on alternating who plans the date each week, so last week was David's turn. We went to have dinner and drinks at Piranha at the Arlington Highlands. YUM! I was too busy eating to remember to take a picture! I actually forgot to take any pictures at all the whole night...oops!

After dinner, we went to see The Town at Studio Movie Grill. 

I had zero interest in seeing this movie. We work as bank regulators and we're almost always in a bank. So why feed my already ridiculously high paranoia level with watching a movie about bank robbers?!? But for the sake of date night, I sucked it up and went. And it turned out to be pretty good! I don't really like movies that have you cheering for the bad guy, but David says that's the sign of a good movie.

All in all, I'd say that Date Night #1 was a success!! Now it's my turn to plan our Date Night for this weekend...what to do, what to do...!