Happy Friday! I’m pretty pumped about my plans tonight.I’m heading to the Lady Antebellum concert, and opening is Thompson Square and Darius Rucker. I love all three of the groups and can’t wait to sing my heart out. I’ll be sure to update the blog next week with how the concert was. Now onto a few things I’m loving lately.

 Blue/Green Ocean Glasses From Pier 1

My parents bought me these glasses for my birthday two weeks ago. Love them! They add some flair to my yellow dish ware. I also like that they are dishwasher safe. I feel like all pretty glasses are hand wash only. I know this sounds lazy but I hate hand washing things, it’s why I have a dishwasher. If you looking for any drink ware Pier 1 is the place to go, so many great options.

 Love/Hate Shaun T

Yes I have jumped on the Insanity bandwagon. A few friends got some amazing results from it, so I had to give it a try. I won’t lie it is a tough workout, possibly the hardest workouts I’ve done. I think the thing that gets me the most is it being everyday. Im use to taking breaks, thats not how you get results though. I dread doing the workouts everyday, but am so glad I did when it’s over. Ill be posting a review after the first month. With possible before/after pics, well see how brave I am.

Kindle

The Amazon Kindle. Now I don’t actually own the Kindle, but I really want to buy one. I am having an internal fight in my head over whether I need it or not. It’s so compact, and pretty cheap to rent/buy books. However, I already have a bunch of books at home I’ve never touched. I really need to decide whether I will read more, or if it is a waste of money. Ugggh…decisions decisions, I’m going to think about it for another week before deciding.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!!

I love fruit! Seriously anything with fruit in it and I’m intrigued. Easter weekend I was asked to bring the dessert and immediately knew where to find a recipe. I browsed over to cookinglight.com and began searching. The hardest part of finding a recipe is deciding which to use. I obviously found about ten I wanted to make and needed to choose one. So which did I choose?!? The one with the most fruit.

 Banana-Raspberry Cake with Lemon Frosting

Okay so maybe mine didn’t turn out as good looking as this one, but I promise you it tasted just as good.  I’m a sucker for anything lemon. I would have settle for a cake with lemon frost, but these cooking light people wanted to add raspberries and bananas. Why not? I grabbed all the ingredients and headed over to my parents. The only thing I changed about the recipe for the cake was using full fat buttermilk. The only reason was because I already had regular buttermilk, so why buy more.

The cakes were really easy to make and didn’t take long at all. Next onto the frosting which was a little tougher. The only reason I say this is because of having to grate the rind of a lemon. Have you ever had to do this?? It takes forever and isn’t that easy. Either that or I bought the wrong kind of tool to grate the lemon. Regardless though, it is worth it. The frosting recipe for this cake is amazing. By far the best tasting frosting I have ever made. I also used full fat cream cheese. I know I made a healthy cake fattening, whatever I’m okay with it.

Once the cake and frosting is made you begin frosting the bottom layer. You then want to layer the top of the cake with fresh raspberries. Luckily when I was making this cake raspberries were on sale at public, Score! You then add the second layer on top and frost the rest. I had extra raspberries so decided to layer the top with more. Once the cake is finished set in the fridge until you are ready to eat. The cake tasted more like a sugar cookie than an actual cake. I’m not complaining it was good, the family agreed. I will for sure be making this again in the future.

Check out the full recipe here.

For the past two years I have been meaning to take part in the Urban Dare Race. I finally found a teammate and remembered to sign up this year. For those of you not familiar with Urban Dare it is a scavenger hunt/race. The race starts with 12 clues and you can use your smart phone to look up information or call a friend. Each clue takes you somewhere within 6-7 miles of the starting point. This past Saturday was the race and it was a blast! This was the first year they allowed you to dress in costume. Obviously I will always dress in costume if it is an option, its a great reason to wear obnoxious clothes.

My friend and I were nerds in neon. Neon is in right now and I’m loving it. The nerd part….well any reason to wear a fanny pack and suspenders. There were about 20 teams that dressed in costume. We figured there was no way we would lose the costume contest but we did. Oh well next year! The winners were two guys dressed as neanderthals. Their costumes were pretty great, so bravo to them.

 I luckily had a partner who knows her way around Tampa, and knows how to push me when I feel like giving up. We started the race by figuring out most of the clues and mapping out our route. Believe me this is the best strategy. If we had not figured out our route before hand we would have been running back and forth, all over Tampa.

Only two of our clues consisted of us doing an actual activity. One was a wheelbarrow race, and the other a 3 legged race. The rest of the checkpoints consisted of us figuring out where we needed to be and getting a picture in front.

Amber was by far the best choice for a partner. She kept me motivated and forced me to run even when I didn’t feel like it. Boy did that pay off.

 3rd place out of over 330 teams!!! Seriously no idea how this happened….maybe because were awesome! When we arrived at the finish line and there were only 2 other teams there, I was shocked. This race was so much fun even if we hadn’t placed. I will be back next year for sure. If there is an Urban Dare by you, I suggest you try it out.

See you next year Urban Dare!!

Cheers to the freakin weekend!! I just caught up on the current episode of Smash. I now have the Rhianna “Cheers” song stuck in my head. For the first time in a long time I have absolutely no plans this weekend, and I’m pretty excited about it. Here are a few things I’m loving lately.

I love the look of Mason Jars as everyday glasses. They have a country/vintage look that I’m a fan of. There are a few cute ones at Pottery Barn right now. Check these out! I also really like this set as well, World Market Mason Jars. I’m still trying to decide which to buy. Along with loving the look, the prices for either of these sets is pretty awesome.

Oh Emm Gee!! Banana, Raspberry, and Lemon. Whats not to love!?!? I found this recipe on Cooking Light. I’m trying out this recipe on Sunday for Easter dinner. Check back next week to see how it turned out. Have a great weekend!

A while back I when I first heard about clean eating I was very intrigued and wanting to try it out. I obviously do not eat clean all the time, however I have tried out a few recipes and gained some knowledge on this way of eating. Dr. Axe’s The Real Food Diet is my go to for finding clean recipes. If your looking for a good cookbook I highly recommend this one.

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I had plans to go out Friday evening for a few drinks at Ocean Prime. Lets just say a few drinks turned into a few more and Saturday morning was a little rough. I needed some tasty food ASAP and convinced a friend that breakfast was the cure. There are a ton of great breakfast places around but I had a recipe in mind that I have been dying to try out. I found this recipe a few weeks ago on Eat, Live, Run and I’ve been waiting for the right time to make it. My friend and I headed to Publix for the ingredients and started baking. You begin by making the strawberry sauce to go on top.

This sauce includes frozen or fresh strawberries, sugar, and vanilla extract. I decided to use fresh strawberries since they are on sale at Publix right now. I also added two extra ingredients. I had a little Amaretto left from my last baking extravaganza and figured you can never go wrong with that. I added about a tablespoon of the Amaretto. I also added in two small pinches of cinnamon. The ingredients were left in a sauce pan for about 30 minutes while I prepared the pancakes.

This mix included cornmeal, buttermilk, lemon zest and a few other ingredients. I am a huge fan of anything lemon flavored so I was very excited to try these out. I have learned over the years that I am absolutely horrible at flipping pancakes, I always mess the first few up, so I put my friend in charge. She said my spatula was no good and decided to work on her flipping skills. I must say I was extremely impressed.

Its a little tough to take a picture of a pancake flipping so this was the best I could get.

Man oh man were these pancakes good!! The cornmeal gave them a much different texture than normal pancakes and I was a fan. The lemon zest added such a great taste to these. They were much thicker than a normal pancake which was perfect because I only needed to eat one to be completely stuffed. The sauce on the top was the icing on the cake. I love strawberries on pancakes but anytime I order them at a restaurant it’s jut cut up strawberries. Having a strawberry sauce though made it so much better. I was able to taste a hint of the amaretto and cinnamon so they were good additions to the sauce.

The pancake and strawberry sauce were awesome by themselves. However I am a huge fan of maple syrup and whipped cream and just happened to have some in my fridge. Soooo good!

 I will definitely be making this recipe again. Here is a link to the full recipe so make sure to try it out! Eat, Live, Run Lemon Cornmeal Pancakes.

Happy Friday!!! This week seemed to fly by which is awesome! Here are a few things I’m loving lately.

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I have had these last 5 pounds that I have wanted to lose for a while yet they never seem to come. Maybe it’s because I have decided it is okay to eat out way to often and go out way to much. Surprise surprise this lifestyle hasn’t helped me lose this weight. At the beginning of this week I decided I was going to do Atkins for 2 weeks to get a jumpstart on dieting and losing these final pounds. I know Atkins is not healthy I’m well aware of this. However I am the type of person who needs to see results quick or I fall off the wagon pretty easily. Now if you know me you know I don’t actually eat eggs and I’m not really a fan of eating cheese on it’s own. So to do a diet that consists of meat, cheese and eggs I have to get pretty creative to find things to eat the don’t totally suck. I figured I would share a few of my low carb snacks to help you get through a low carb diet a little easier.

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This past weekend my friend Anne invited me to a flip cup party her friend Meredith was having. It brought me back to the good ole days of college. Who doesn’t love a good game of flip cup and if I must say so myself I am pretty awesome at this game. I said I would bring a dessert and I was excited to try out a new recipe. My sister called me earlier in the day and told me she had found a great recipe in a magazine and figured I would be interested. It consisted of cocoa krispies, dried cherries, amaretto and few other ingredients. All of which I love and anything to buy a bottle of amaretto and I’m in.

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My dad makes this caesar dressing that I absolutely love. The dressing has been on my mind a lot lately. Yesterday I decided to finally get the ingredients and make it. I headed to my parents house because there are no specific measurements for this recipe so I need help.

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