Saturday Seven + Upcoming Live Tutorials

Woo-eee! It’s been awhile since I wrote one of these Saturday Sevens. My editorial calendar has been all sorts of wacky lately with different announcements and the baking challenges. That being said, we have a lot to catch up on today!

Mark Your Calendars

I have some Facebook LIVE baking demos happening in the coming weeks! Yesterday was my first. Did you catch it? (Here it is if you missed it!) I made blackberry cream cheese frosting and I also made the announcement that we are extending the pre-order bonus gift for Sally’s Cookie Addiction! I also chatted about my 1st cookbook, my 2nd cookbook, the $1 eBook I published 6 months ago, and the re-release of my 1st cookbook with 8 bonus recipes. It was a lot of ground to cover, but I’m glad we did because a lot of you didn’t realize I had so many book offerings with exclusive recipes. (Recipes not available on my blog!)

I’m going LIVE on Facebook again next week with 2 baking demos:

• Wednesday, May 17th 1pm ET


• Friday, May 19th 1pm ET

You’ll be able to catch the LIVE videos anytime during and after– that’s the wonderful thing about Facebook LIVE vs. Instagram LIVE. Facebook LIVE videos are saved, so you can always go back to watch.  I’m going to begin a regular scheduled time each week so we can bake together regularly.

Let’s Chat!

1) So what about the cupcakes at the top of this post? You should recognize the purple frosted ones. They’re my lemon cupcakes with blackberry cream cheese frosting. We also have my favorite homemade lemon cupcakes with vanilla frosting pictured too. Same cupcake recipe, two different ways. A must-have recipe for spring baking.

2) New video is up for the best banana cake I ever had. (Pictured above!) Remember that recipe from last summer?

3) Spring recipes I’m eager to try: fresh strawberry pie looks delicious, lemon poppy seed cookies, fresh mango cake— my favorite fruit, though I never bake with it, refreshing and easy creamy avocado salsa verde, lemon raspberry bars are the epitome of warm weather baking, and this beautiful pavlova layer cake.

4) We just had a few rooms painted in the house. Only took us a year after moving in! I went with a beautiful sage color in the laundry room– I remember asking for your opinion on that, so thank you. The office is a very light beige/yellow/mint hue. I spend most of my time in there so I didn’t want anything too vibrant and distracting. I also edit photos in that room– and prefer doing so in natural light– so I stuck with a lighter neutral color. We went with gray for the nursery!

5) I just picked up some new baking sheets. Previously, I really loved these calphalon baking sheets (still do!). They’re excellent, though they do tend to warp. Still usable though, of course. I started baking cookies on these USA Pan half sheet pans last week and am obsessed. Do you use USA pans? What baking sheets are your favorite?

6) What is the one food that you absolutely cannot stand? Can’t even go near it, can’t even smell it, makes you uncomfortable to look at. For me, it’s beets. I can’t. I just… cannot. A shame because they are so pretty!

7) All I’ve been drinking lately: smoothies. This berry purple power smoothie is one of my favorites. Many of you ask for no-banana smoothies and there’s no banana in this one!

Q: What are you baking for Mother’s Day?

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