Trip to the Zoo

Rob and I took a trip to the Reid Park Zoo this afternoon. We've been meaning to go for a long time. I have a thing for otters and as soon as we heard that the zoo has an otter exhibit, it was on the top of our to-do list.
It turns out our little Tucson zoo is completely awesome! There are way more animals there than we expected and the habitats are really nice. Some of them are smallish, but they are all laid out well and the zoo is really good about shade. I don't know how they did it but most of the habitats face east so they're much cooler and many of the viewing spots are shaded or in little tunnels so the visitors stay cool and still get a great view of all the animals. It is much more intimate than other zoos I've been to. It may not be as big or swanky, but the animals seem healthy and they were all visible.

Here I am in the aviary:


And here is our new friend:




The giraffe enclosure was fairly large, but this guy was hanging out right next to the sidewalk so that everyone could admire his pretty spots. And his weird tongue. He got so close he managed to lick the camera of a guy next to us. Nice!

We are definitely going to come back. They're building a new elephant habitat, so we look forward to seeing what that looks like. This trip we walked around the whole zoo and tried to see everything, but we've decided that next time we're going to pick out an animal or two to watch the whole time. Or maybe we'll just do one area. They have the zoo divided by continent of origin, so it would be easy to spend a lot of time looking at the South American animals or the African ones. Or just the otters. I'd be happy spending the day with the otters.

If you live in Tucson, we highly recommend the zoo, our hidden gem right in the middle of town. If you're not from Tucson, come visit and we'll take you there.

Pretty Things on my Table

I have some pictures of pretty things to share. First are these beautiful flowers that I got two weeks ago when my friends came over for book club. They started out a little bit brighter and a little bit taller. I've only changed the water twice and trimmed them once. Pretty good for $5 worth of flowers, huh? They're so fluffy and fat, I love them.

There are also these..

Oh man. Man oh man. They are cream-filled coffee cake cupcakes and I've eaten approximately a million of them. I made a batch on Wednesday and then couldn't stop eating them, so I sent them to work with Rob to get rid of them. Well, I couldn't stand it and I had to make more last night. Coffee cake is one of my favorites, not too sweet, not too fussy, perfect with coffee (duh). I made these trying to copy the TastyKake Koffee Kakes (I hate that they spell everything with K's. It's like Kwik Mart. How annoying.)
I used to write recipes on Fridays on here. Do you want the recipe for these?

Coffee Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Filling
Cupcakes:
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter (softened)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup sour cream or plain yogurt (I used yogurt. Come on, you're going to eat ten of them, make 'em a little healthier)
2 tbsp buttermilk

Topping:
1/4 cup light-brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (maybe a little more)
2 tbsp butter

Filling:
4oz cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
4-5 tbsp butter (softened)
1 cup 10x sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
milk (as needed to obtain a nice texture)

Here's what you do:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Make batter as follows: Mix butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and egg. Mix well. Mix all dry ingredients together and add to the butter mixture slowly, alternating with the sour cream and buttermilk. Scrape the bowl often to keep all the goodness in. Mix everything well. Divide equally between 12 muffin tins. It doesn't look like a lot, but it will make it. They won't be huge cupcakes.
Mix all ingredients for the topping together and blend using a fork or a pastry knife. Try to make the mixture crumby in texture. Pour the topping on top of the batter in the greased (did I say greased before? Grease them.) muffin tins (don't worry about being neat) and put them in the oven for around 15 minutes. Or golden brown.
I bake at high elevation, so I would always be cautious of my temperature or time guidelines.
When the cupcakes are out and cooled a little bit, mix together the icing ingredients until it's smooth and delicious. Add enough milk to keep it smooth, but don't let it get runny.
This is the tricky part. Getting the icing inside the cupcakes took a little creativity. I'm sure you could do it with a knife and a baster or something. Or a turkey injector. I used a cookie press with an icing attachment. I shoved the nozzle down into the cupcake and filled it with icing until the top kind of domed up. When you take the nozzle out, the icing sort of wells up through the hole and makes the perfect little white dot on top like a Tasty Kake. Incidentally, I think putting icing in the middle of cupcakes and watching it erupt out is an excellent way to illustrate the pressures of vulcanism and magma chambers under a stratovolcano. Just sayin'.
That's it! Eat them up with a glass of milk or cup of coffee. Yum!!