So July has been nuts... There has been some fun stuff like family reunions, holidays, and new cupcakes. But this month has also been one of the most challenging. Starting with a flood and ending with an overnight hospital stay...
I know you're probably wondering, what does this have to do with PB&J but I promise it connects and we'll get there eventually. It begins with the flood...
We live in a basement apartment. One night at the beginning of July (ish) there was a pretty big rainstorm. When I woke up the next morning and walked into the main part of the house or was like walking on a sponge! It was crazy! (And not what I wanted to see at 5:30 am when I'm half asleep and my husband is going to work). Turns out the water had come in one of the two windows in our apartment and flooded our entire main living space. What drives me crazy is I woke up I'm the middle of the night, went out into the living room, heard the rain on the window that sounded like Niagra Falls against our window pane, and went over and felt around the window sill to check (I was worried because it sounded so bad) and it was totally dry so I went back to bed... Ugh! Drives me crazy!
We lived without carpet in a house that smelled like a wet dog and was loud like an airplane (cause of the fans) for a few days... Then the landlords decided they better just replace it and now we have great carpet. Luckily our furniture was fine and only one thing was damaged from the flood... Unfortunately it was my husband's MacBook Pro which was leaned up against the couch the night before...there was no saving the laptop but luckily we still have my Mac air and our ipad, so we'll be good for our last year of school hopefully...
Fast forward a few weeks... As July is winding down...To this morning...Where the next terrible, awful thing happened. My husband has chronic neck pain from an accident several years ago, but normally it's more of a discomfort and every once in a while it will hurt a little more for a day or two then go away...unfortunately when the severe pain began yesterday afternoon that was not the case. He describes this pain being worse than ever before, and with what happened today, I've never seen him in so much pain. He goes to work early, which is why our day began at 4:40 am this morning. He got up this morning with a worse neck pain than even the night before and passed out in the bathroom. I heard him calling for me and ran in got him a drink and was trying to help him (and had his mom on the phone since I had no idea what to do). Suddenly he began saying he couldn't see. His eyes were wide open and he was talking to me in a freaked out but coherent way and he said everything was black. That lasted for a couple minutes and I called 911 (first time ever). The paramedics came to our house at like 4:40. They checked him out, said he was fine to move and walk, so they let me drive him to the ER after they helped him up to the car (which I couldn't have done since he could barely move his upper body). We went into the ER and they did some tests and the the doctors announced that they wanted to admit him to the hospital where they could do more tests. The hospital where we were is brand new, so only the ER wing is open, so now we are at about 9 am when they give us an ambulance ride to a hospital further north where they can admit him (I rode shotgun).
At this hospital they've done a lot of tests to make sure it wasn't his heart that caused the fainting (so far, from what they tell us, they say his heart is fine). They've also done an MRI on his neck to see what's causing the pain, we have to wait until tomorrow to see what the doctor says about that test. They are keeping us here overnight for observation, and hopefully we can get home tomorrow. But that's where I am now... Sitting in my husband's hospital room, watching him sleep, while I'm writing this post and thinking about how I will probably get 2 hours tops sleep tonight (if I'm lucky)... But as long as I'm with him I don't care.
*The rest of this post contains affiliate links.
So... To the reason I'm sharing the PB&J cupcake recipe with this 1. Is because its the only pictures of cupcakes I have on the ipad (most of the rest are on the hard drive we rescued from the dead computer) and 2 because today when we were here Stephens brother and his cute family came up. They asked if they could bring anything up, and all Stephen wanted was a PB&J... Hence the sharing of the PB&J cupcakes...
Unfortunately this recipe isn't my own creation, and it comes from a book so I can't share the recipe online (it comes from
Your Cup of Cake which was mentioned in a
previous post) but I can tell you generally what's in it and you can give it a shot or get/borrow the book...this is a cake
Mix recipe so it would actually be pretty easy to fudge.
Peanut Butter Cupcake
Sour cream
Eggs
Then these babies have a yummy layer of peanut butter fudge ganache
To top it all off (here's the jam part) a strawberry jam buttercream
Strawberry jam
And that's the basics! Enjoy!
I made these for an extended family dinner we went to on Pioneer Day and they were a big hit! The leftovers I took to work and my coworkers loved them too! One said it was one of the best frostings she has had, and she eats a lot of frostings. :)
Anyways, I hope your July has been much better than ours! We have been so lucky to have such great friends and family looking out for us, and helping us. It's my sister's birthday today and she even came up and brought us a bunch of stuff and had dinner with us in the hospital! She is amazing! We are so blessed to have people like her helping us along. And we are so blessed to be going through all this together.
The end.
Love,
Cami
You can get a cupcake batter divider HERE on amazon (it looks like this). Or I just happened across mine at my local grocery store! 
