DIY: TIE-DYE CUPCAKES

Welcome to my first DIY!!! Lately, I’ve become obsessed with DIY and I’ve been mad searching blogs for fantastic DIYs. As soon as I saw these cupcakes, I knew I had to make them. I love pastels. I love painting my nails pastel. I love wearing pastels (always makes you look more tanned!) So obviously I would love eating pastels. Doesn’t the inside remind you of My Little Ponies? awwwwwwwwwwe.

Anywhoo, enjoy! I hope these cupcakes will make your heart sparkle as much as they did for me.

DIY: TIE-DYED CUPCAKES…

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.  Line a muffin tin with 12 paper liners.  Set pan aside.

 2. First things first, mix up a vanilla cupcake batter (don’t you dare use Betty Crocker). I used this one from Annie’s Eats (AMAZING food blog).

3. Divide mixture into four bowls.

4. Food colour it up. We chose four pastels: mint green, pale turquoise, pink and lavender. Only add a few drops of food colouring for pastels. For more vibrant colours you’ll need to add more food colouring.

5. Slowly scoop the batter into the cupcake tins. Be careful not to mix the batter once they’re in. Have fun with how much of each batter you place in each cupcake.

 

6. Bake for 18-20 minutes.

7. Let cool for 15 minutes before you ice. (Awe, don’t they look like little scoops of ice cream?) We used basic cream cheese icing because anything with cream cheese is always best.

8. Decorate the icing. We just dropped a few drops of food colouring and used the end of the knife to make our own swirl patterns.

Voila! Aren’t they so fun? Oh, and here are some photos of the lovely chefs.

yay tie-dye!

xoxo,

s.s.♥.

MAKING HISTORY

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AMAZINGLY, TALENTED STEPHANIE CHRISTO.

There’s something incredibly powerful about a couple thousand teenagers singing and dancing their guts out. Arms raised, eyes closed, singing praises to the King of kings.

This makes my heart sparkle to the extreme…

I am seriously blessed. I serve as a youth leader at City Youth and I get to hang out with the most amazing teens. This past weekend we went to Historymaker. It was my 5th year going to this incredible conference and this year our Church took the biggest group that I have seen in the past 5 years. 86 youth and leaders ventured out for a grand adventure on May 20th at 11am.

Now taking that many people across the ocean, highways & farmlands to stinky poo town (Abbotsford) is kind of a crazy thing. Of course we had to rely on God to pull off some miracles. As of Thursday morning (less than 24 hours we were due to depart) we did not have a second bus driver…but the Lord provided in His timing a wonderfully, lovely couple to drive the girls bus. Yes, you heard right. We had a seperate girls and guys bus. At first some teens were mad, but then they got over it in thirty seconds and realized how awesome it was to have seperate buses.

 

The girls quickly realized that they could sing Justin Bieber as loud as they wanted without anyone caring and that the smell generally stayed a lot fresher than the boys bus. The boys probably realized that no girls meant they could wrestle as much as they wanted.

So away we went to the lovely land of Abbotsford…(I may be biased but I’m pretty figgin happy I live in Victoria). We slept on the floor in a classroom at Summit. We showered in limited showers (four showers for all the girls staying in the classrooms). I mastered washing my hair in the sink of the handicapped washroom. Our bowels suffered from eating mad amounts of fast food. But it was SO worth it.

Saturday night of the conference especially touched my heart. It was a time for me personally that I experienced a whole new level in worship. Leeland was leading worship. (If don’t know LEELAND, look em up, THEY’RE INCREDIBLE!) Amazing time of worship followed by great message from Phil Dooley followed by AMAZING Holy Spirit filled prayer/worship times. I had the honour of praying over my small group girls. Because I was such a mess up in high school it makes my heart sparkle immensely to see teens really rise up and live the life God has called them to.

I just want to encourage all of yall who went to Historymaker to not forget the words/promises/visions that the Lord spoke to you there. Sometimes it’s easy to experience a huge change in life and then go back to school questioning if it really happened, if you can really live a different way when you get back home. The answer is YES. It did happen. Live like you’re called because YOU ARE CALLED! Live with purpose and passion because He has placed purpose and passion in you. STAND STRONG in His strength.

Love you to the moon and back,

s.s.♥.

WISE WORDS

CADTOOL

coachella. and. disney. trip. of. our. lives. (incase you were wondering)

A year ago in April I remember watching a youtube video of Jay-Z performing Young Forever, he surprised the crowd with bringing Beyonce out to sing the chorus. My heart melted a little bit in that moment…and I knew deep down, I needed to be at coachella the following year. I then became obsessed with coachella. I read numerous blogs about the festival, drooled over all the pictures of celebrities there (oh m geee, ZAC EFRON!), I scoured the message boards on the coachella website reading about the magical adventures, and one week later when I was visiting my bestie (Rachel) in Vancouver we started to plan for next year’s festival.

When planning such a vacation a good first (IMPORTANT) question is, who the heck do we bring with us? Courtney was sitting with us, so naturally she was invited right then and there. There we began planning a beautiful adventure. Finding a fourth was difficult but thankfully Thea came to her senses and decided to come.

We decided to roadtrip it down and Rachel being the amazing planner she was, had a folder (because nothing is official unless you have a folder) set up in no time and before we knew it CADTOOL was really happening. And my apologies to those of you who we pissed off with our plastering CADTOOL everywhere (and not letting you know what it stood for), we were very obnoxious but all is fair in love and coachella? :)

So we ventured out on April 11th, 2011 in Courtney’s mama’s SUV (THANK YOU DEB!). And what an adventure did we have! Thankfully I had a new moleskine (thanks to my amazing boyfriend!) to record what I saw and heard.

All in all it was an amazing adventure packed in with oodles of goodness and magical moments with my besties (and lots and lots of driving). We ventured from Victoria to San Francisco to Santa Monica to COACHELLA to San Diego to Anaheim to LA to Anaheim to Mammoth to Portland to HOME!

I’ll be doing a COACHELLA write up soon but if you want to hear more about the trip, take me out for coffee and I’d be glad to chat you up. :)

stay gold,

s.s.♥.

SHUT UP

i’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack. In my next post I will be writing a life update about all my amazing cadtool adventures and about other new awesome things in life ;) but for now I have to share what the Lord has been teaching me this week…

My connect group started a new study last night titled, “LORD CHANGE MY ATTITUDE”. I was a little hesitant to do this study at first, because (seriously) who wants to admit that their attitude needs changing? But get this straight…having an attitude is going to seriously hinder you. It’s going to hinder your personal development, your walk with God, your relationships with others, your career, etc (the list goes on and on).

In the study James MacDonald studies the Israelites. They were meant to go in and possess the land that God had for them. The promised land. The land flowing with milk & honey (mmmmmmm). To make a long story short, the Israelites did not possess this amazeballs land. They stayed and ended up dying in the wilderness (picture a dry, desolate place). Their awful attitude prevented this from happening! UGH!

And that happens with us in life. Here are some notes I took from last night’s video (it was all about complaining)

1. Attitude controls outcome

2. Those who choose murmuring as their lifestyle will spend their lifetime in the wilderness

3. We choose our attitudes

4. An attitude is a pattern of thinking formed over a long period of time

5. Complaining is sin

6. Complaining means “to express dissatisfaction with a circumstance which is not wrong and about which I am doing nothing myself to correct”

7. God hears our complaining

8. God hates our complaining

We have the choice to complain or SHUT UP. And sadly I think a lot of us choose to complain. Just two days I was faced with the choice…

It was a beautiful Monday afternoon and me being the procrastinator I am, left it to the very last minute to use my redfish bluefish groupon ($8 for $16 worth of amazing seafood). So I went on my lunch break to discover the longest line up I had ever seen there. I waited a full hour before I got to the front of the line to order. I didn’t notice it until I was near the front of the line but they had raised their prices by a few dollars. I know that seems really petty but I found myself sooooooo mad. I had just looked up the prices online and the two piece halibut was supposed to be flipping $16.50 not $19. So there I was two people away from ordering, ready to turn on my sassy beyatch attitude and complain about the “false advertising on the website” when all of sudden the feeling came over me. Oh, you know that feeling. The conviction hit and God showed me the tired workers who had been dealing with these sassy beyatches all day. The last thing these workers needed was another one. So I repented and ordered as sweetly as I could. side note…while waiting for my food I look over at my car in the lot and see the ticket guy entering my license plate into his machine thingy. I ran over saying Oh pleeeease no!!! and something wonderful happened, he flashed me a smile and said don’t worry about it! He didn’t even mind that i didn’t put coin back into the machine while i went back to get my food! :)

But enough said, don’t complain. Choose to SHUT UP because God truly has the best life for us and he can’t take us there if we choose to complain.

over & out,

s.s.♥.