Personal Cupcake Challenge

You know that feeling when you're awake at 4:30 in the morning working on a project and you just wanna quit but you're so close to finishing the excitement of seeing all your hard work pay off pushes you through?

No?

Just me?

Ok, what about when you're running, the race is almost over, you're pretty much spent and then you see the finish line and people are cheering you on and you get that one last burst of speed you didn't know you had- that feeling. Maybe a couple more people with that one.

Anyways, I got that feeling yesterday from making cupcakes. Unless you're on Cupcake Wars, I don't think people normally get an adrenaline rush from making cupcakes. But my sister gave me a challenge: make banana split cupcakes (from a recipe she gave me) with fewer calories. She's trying to loose weight but, like any sane person, doesn't wanna be stuck eat cardboard. Did I mention the recipe she gave me was 600 calories!!!! Holy crap!!!

Banana Split Cupcakes; theirs and mine

If you look really quickly, mine look like little ice creams, so that's a plus. On the downside, they look NOTHING like the originals...

However, I'd have to say, I killed this challenge! You wanna know how many calories are in these miniature little beauties? 87. EIGHTY SEVEN!!! That means you could have six of these little things and still not have taken in as many calories as only one of the original recipe!! snap, I did good.

Some notes:

-dipping didn't go well, maybe i needed more nonpareils. Or maybe I needed to let the chocolate set longer. Either way, the chocolate kept falling off into nonpareils so that only the first ones looked cute.

-the vanilla frosting that I used, while it was less caloric, fell right off the little cupcakes- I would recommend something else. 

-overall, the biggest change I made was to the batter itself, my go to cake recipe for anything and everything is Better Homes and Garden's Busy Day Cake. It never fails! 

- i ended up making 43 cupcakes instead of just 40, which is what the following numbers are for.

Here are the ingredients and calorie counts: 

Here's the original recipe if you're not on a diet and loves bananas: Banana Split Cupcakes

Maymester

So that's it! Finished my first and last Maymester class! To be honest, it was a little bitter sweet. Of all the classes I've taken for my masters and in my undergrad, this one has been one of my favorites. So it was sad to have it end so quickly... especially since I have another stupid research class to take in July... fun...

The class I just took was Social Network Analysis. Doesn't the name sound daunting and exciting at the same time?! I thought so. And, even the first couple of days in the class, I really had no idea what I was doing. My teacher was talking a mile a minute about all of the fancy calculations and analyzations you could do with this program to find out all sorts of information about social networks and it just went right over my head! Luckily, the more I played with it, the more I understood it. And now I think it's the coolest program in the world- besides Pinterest- I'd die without Pinterest. (Just kidding, but really.)

Here's an example of what kinds of things I've been looking at:

runDisney Twitter-sphere

The above graph is a visual representation of runDisney's Twitter community. Using the program NodeXL, I've been able to see the different groups of people who tweeted about runDisney. The sizes reflect their importance in the network. I also got to analyze their Facebook fan page and their YouTube presence. It was so cool!

I know this post is a little on the nerdy side but it was seriously so interesting! I think it was one of the most useful classes I've taken so far- which might be because the whole social/ digital/ interactive media thing is kinda my scene (do I even have a scene as a student?).