Cinnamon Sugar Apple Cake

I have been wanting to publish some new recipes, but the weather here has been anything, but pretty. The days have been switching between 70 to the 40's, raining off and on, and the last few days have been extremely foggy which is not a good thing when needing natural light for photos. My mom actually bought me a inexpensive indoor lighting set, but I need to put stronger bulbs in and I haven't really put the time into experimenting with it lately. 

The fog makes everything look a little creepy.

  Last week my spring class started, but it wasn't until Thursday that I could actually do some work since the online site was having problems and both students and teachers were locked out for several hours. I've been spending most of my time printing and going over specific instructions for each class, compiling all of my due dates into my Iphone calender, and working on a few simple first assignments. Work has been going much better thankfully and I can also start taking my laptop to work on school during my lunch break or it I finish work projects early. Since the new system is up and running, I have been organizing and scanning customer information for my mom along with helping some other coworkers organize their paperwork and help with projects.

I used my Canon 430EX II Speedlite. 

Cinnamon Swirl Banana Bread

These last few days have been busy.

 I visited the dentist, taught myself to knit, my mom and I took my car in to get checked, we tried a bowl of Mexican gumbo at Qdoba Mexican Grill which was delicious (It's like a burrito bowl + tortilla soup), I bought Oddball a cute lion costume which he thinks is a new chew toy, took Oddball, Marley, & Dusty to get some shots, did a little shopping, had some extended family come over who were visiting from out of town, went out to dinner with the whole family, and then I had another physical therapy session which has been helping my lupus.

  I had a few golden, spotted bananas left on the counter and I was wondering what to make with them. I found a lot of new recipes like banana oat cookies that are dairy, gluten, and oil free, but the recipe only said 2 bananas, but didn't tell the measurements. Normally that would be okay since the bananas we usually get are average size, but the leftover bananas we had  were really big so I didn't want to mess up a recipe by adding too little or too much banana and having a ruined creation. So I went with a newer banana bread recipe that I found on foodgawker that measured the mashed bananas.

Overnight Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal

  When I first started this blog I would have never thought that I would be so into researching, testing and making my own recipes, photographing the end result, and then submitting my photos to several sites to get traffic and feedback. It can be hectic and tiring when juggling school, home life (owning of a lot of crazy animals), having lupus, and  all the while trying to figure out what I want to really do with my life.

Cinnamon Sticks

   When I first started this blog, I was posting about 4 times per week, but recently I have been posting only about twice each week. It can be somewhat frustrating when I have a good amount of recipes that I want to share all at once, but I also don't want to be that kind blogger who will post 5 times one week and then maybe will skip a week or two (without notice) and then will just post once a week after that. I want to be as  consistent with my posting as I possibly can so I think I will go back to posting 3 times a week; that may mean I might post all food posts one week and then the next I will show some of my recent photos or DIY projects.

  I had originally found a recipe for overnight oatmeal in a food magazine, but when I looked it up on the internet I found that it had really poor reviews. I ended up going with a recipe from Monica's blog The Yummy Life. I made a few changes to fit our tastes and it came out good. I've noticed that when steel cut oatmeal gets cooked, that it can become very thick, sometimes too thick. You can easily fix that by adding some more milk into your bowl and stir until you get the consistency you want. This oatmeal is very fragrant, but isn't too sweet which is good because even though I like sweets, I don't want to have a ton of sugar in my breakfast.