I swear, it’s merely a coincidence that my first blog post as a born-again California girl is a green smoothie.
Cross my heart. I made this bad boy when it was the middle of dreary, cold February in Chicago, when it seemed like everyone around me was sneezing and sniffling and I was like, “GREEN SMOOTHIE, HAAAAAALP!” I promise you, my bacon consumption will not decrease one single bit after moving to The Juicing State.
But can’t we have our bacon and our green smoothies, too?
Are we ready for some real talk today? Some happy/sad/nervous/excited real-life real talk? I hope so, because I am basically in a glass case of emotion.
This right here is my last post as a Chicagoan. Brad and I are packin’ up and doing the whole move-across-the-country thing, because in just a few short weeks he’ll start grad school at UC Berkeley. While so many parts of me are incredibly thrilled and excited for this next chapter in our lives (and, uh, 75-degree winters), thinking about leaving the people I love, this city I call home in every sense of the word, and the wonderful life we have here makes me feel super squeamy inside. Technical term.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve never really been much of a cake person. To me, the best desserts are ooey-gooey and rich and dense, not light and fluffy and dry, which is too often the case with cake. I’ll eat it (I mean, who do you think I am?) but I would rather celebrate my birthday and other important events in life with cheesecake, pie, brownies, cookies, or a big ol’ bowl of ice cream.
So, you ask, why am I starting off a post on cupcakes with a rant on how lame-o cake can be? Honestly, it’s to emphasize that when I say these apple cupcakes are incredible, I mean they are super duper insanely incredible. They’ve shot to the top of my short list of The Exceptions to my meh-cake rule, which prior to trying these included only carrot cake, flourless chocolate cake, pumpkin cake, and these blue moon cupcakes. It’s a short but mighty list, these kings of my cake world, and these apple cupcakes with brown sugar frosting have nestled themselves riiiiiight up in the middle of it all. They’re SO good.
So it’s Labor Day weekend and we deserve to celebrate the unofficial end of summer with a bang.
And by bang I mean hot-out-of-the-oven vanilla bean peach crisp topped with a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream. That’s cool, right?
