the baking extravaganza.

the other day my very dear friend Val came and spent the day with me.  She lives on the Marina and getting into Hollywood can be such a project so we both decided on a jammed pack girlie day.  We started with a shopping trip to the Beverly Center, where I scored black leather pants (I put them on my fall wish list: here).  We grabbed lunch but opted out for dessert because we decided we were going to designate the rest of the day to baking.
I had really fun festive spider cupcake holders, (I'm telling you, I'm totally itching for fall, I even bought a bunch of fall scented candles because I'm losing it!)  We decided on some festive pumpkin spice cupcakes to accompany the spiders.  We got the idea of pumpkin spice cupcakes from a cupcake book my sis got me, but we ended up using a Martha Stewert recipe, with a few modifications of our own. We found a recipe for cream cheese frosting but we, being us, decided to add a couple "Val + Erin" special touches which made the cupcakes pretty life changing.  I actually had quite a few of the ingredients at home but we also decided to make thumb print reese snicker doodles too.  So we headed for the store for a few ingredients & after a major search for pumpkin, we poured ourselves a glass of Malbec and had an amazing time baking and catching up!