Feeling Sentimental

    Today marks 10 years that Kevin and I have been together.  We have no big plans to celebrate it because our wedding anniversary has of course replaced our dating anniversary in importance, but it's still a landmark that deems mentioning.  To commemorate it, I thought I'd share few pictures from our wedding anniversary trip this past December.  We went up to Stowe, Vermont for a weekend ski trip and stayed at the beautiful Stowe Mountain Lodge. 

     {View from our hotel room}

    
     Of course, while we were there, we had to stop by the Ben and Jerry's Factory for a tour.  Please excuse the grainy cell phone photos.

{Left: Ben and Jerry's Factory Menu. We chose the Butterscotch test batch.

Right: Me with our gigantic cookie sundae. It was amazing!}

    This was our second (or cotton) anniversary.  Technically we had just bought a brand new mattress as a big cotton gift to each other, but I still wanted to do something special since we wouldn't be exchanging gifts the traditional way.  So to go along with the theme, I brought along some cotton candy (surprisingly hard to find in the middle of winter) and used it to create some cotton candy champagne cocktails.  I got this idea from Pinterest and in all honesty it wasn't all I thought it would be.  I don't know if I did something wrong or if the champagne wasn't good to begin with or this is just a terrible idea, but I wasn't a huge fan.  They were cute though!

 {Cotton candy champagne}

    I also baked some cotton candy cupcakes and packed them up for the trip.  Keeping these a secret from Kevin was nearly impossible, but it was so worth it.  He so surprised when he saw how I tied them into the cotton theme.  I used the Duncan Hines Frosting Creations line of products, and I was really impressed.  I usually try to make things from scratch, but I was on a time crunch here.  To make these at home, all I did was use boxed vanilla cake mix, stick a piece of cotton candy in the middle of each cupcake when pouring them into the muffin tin, then follow the directions for mixing the cotton candy flavor pack into the icing.  So simple but so delicious. 

 

{Cotton candy cupcakes}

    Happy Friday everyone!