Dani's Birthday Kidnapping

Tomorrow my darling Danielle turns 18. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Jake, Johnston, and I decided we should kidnap Dani. Our original plan was to make it as terrifying as possible. We were going to wear ski masks and go in her house, put something over her head, tie her up, and throw her in the car. Instead, we got to her house at 5:15 am and I went into her room to wake her up while the boys stayed downstairs. Now, Dani is my bro. We're pretty tight. I gently woke her up and told her that Johnston and Jake were downstairs and she had 30 min to get ready (how thoughtful of us, right?). She then proceeded to say "I'm going to kill you" at least 10, if not more, times. She is too sweet. She went to take a shower while I sat in the kitchen with the boys and Mrs. DiMuzio. 30 minutes later (5:45 am), she came downstairs trying to figure out what was going on. We wouldn't tell her anything. We piled in Jake's Jeep and started driving. About an hour later we were getting close to our destination and didn't want Dani to know where we were. I took her sweatshirt and put it around her head so she couldn't see.

Yeah. She was in good hands. The boys led her to a seat and when we took the sweatshirt off her head, this is what she saw.

It was breath taking, to say the least. We hung out there for a little over an hour, then got back in the car to go to our next destination. I thought we were going to eat breakfast. It was now 8:30 and we had been up for over 4 hours at this point. Because we didn't want Dani to know what we were doing next, Jake couldn't tell me where we were going, so the rest was as much of a surprise to me as it was Dani. 

We got to this little town and pulled into the college they had, Brevard College. Jake told us about these white squirrels from Australia. Like the cool kids we are, we literally chased white squirrels around the campus.

Like I said, we're pretty cool. Pictured above is Johnston, trying to catch one of the squirrels. We got some nice looks from the locals. 

Once we finished our squirrel chasing, we found a McDonalds and ate breakfast accompanied by hilarious babies, flying cups, and wacky conversation before arriving back in Clemson by 12ish.

Over all, it was a great morning. Dani got over wanting to kill me fairly early on in the day which allowed us to have a lovely bromantic day. I told Dani this is the best 18th birthday she'll ever have, and I think she agreed.

Cookie Dough Cupcake Fail

Last year at TCTC, Dani and I had an awesome English teacher. We like her a lot. Her birthday was last week and she asked that we make her muffins or cupcakes. I found this amazing recipe on pinterest for cupcakes with cookie dough in the middle.

This kind of symbolizes our attempt. 

The recipe said that all you had to do was make your normal cupcake batter, pour it into the cupcake/muffin tin, then put a frozen ball of cookie dough on top and it'll sink to the middle of the cupcake and not bake into a cookie because it is frozen. Everyone on the blog said it worked really well. 

Lies. Lies I tell you! 

This is what ours did. Nailed it.

Yes, my friends, there is a cookie nicely baked onto the top of each of our cupcakes. Thankfully, Dani and I have a good sense of humor and just stood there looking at them laughing with tears running down our faces at how much we fail at baking. 

The next batch we made we decided to pour a little bit of cake batter, put the frozen cookie dough in, then pour the rest of the batter. 

Oh. My.Word.

They came out looking like normal cupcakes and BOY did they taste amazing! I didn't take a picture of them because, well, they just looked like your average cupcakes. Even the first batch we made that didn't look pretty still tasted amazing. That's one thing I really like about baking. It's hard to screw something up beyond repare. It might not look good but its dessert. It'll taste good no matter what. Pretty sure I ate about 5 of them. 

So what is the take home lesson from this? 

Don't believe everything you read on pinterest. They lie.