Birthday bash: Yogurt Veggie Dip, Cupcakes and Sangria.

I was preparing for Leela's birthday the day before and wanted to have some kind of dip for vegetables and crackers. I had plain yogurt on hand so my internet searching came up with a Garlic-Chive Greek Yogurt Dip. I had Icelandic-style skyr, which is close enough to Greek for me. It was super easy, I used chives from our backyard garden and making it the night before allowed the flavors to develop. I thought it was very tasty and many other people seemed to like it too! To go along with the dip, I cut up cauliflower, red pepper, celery, and had a package of baby carrots, along with some party crackers.

For dessert, we had strawberries, watermelon and cupcakes! Leela wanted chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting. I used the chocolate cake recipe from Ebon's Birthday in cupcake form. I made two batches. The first batch I over-filled a bit and had some spill over, it didn't matter in the end because I was using the silicone cups and a paper liner inside. The excess came off pretty cleanly. I baked them for about 20 min or so. The second batch I did a better job of filling, but I forgot about them and over baked them. They weren't burned, but were definitely much drier than the first. I got 24+ cupcakes from the batter.
Further sleuthing on the same blog I found her vanilla frosting recipe. I tripled the recipe which ended up being way too much because I used a spatula to frost instead of a piping bag which probably would have used more frosting.

Sangria I used 2L Chablis (from a box wine) 1 cup of Grand Marnier, 2 cups of blueberries, a peach, and a nectarine. It wasn't very sweet and I wasn't able to pour out the nectarines, but I thought it was pretty good. Maybe could have been a little sweeter with some kind of bubbly ginger ale or something like that.