Happy Birthday to MEEEE!!!!

And, incidentally, happy birthday week to Purple House Cafe!

Yup, I will have been cooking and writing and baking and typing and tweeting and facebooking and pinning from this little corner of the internet for a year on Thursday.  So much has happened in a year.  First of all, my photography got a bit better. 

THEN:

This is a beet salad. Please, whatever you do, don’t Pin this, delicious though it may be….

NOW:

Recipe to follow later in the week!

The biggest changes to my photos happened after I took an amazing food photography class from the talented food photographer and stylist Beth Dunham.

I became a member of Halifax Food Bloggers, and entered some cool contests where I got to make these doughnuts, some nachos, and some scones and jam.

I published 138 recipes.  And recently, a lot of those have been originals.

I collaborated with Kelly Neil and Cait Redmand on this article in Eat In Eat Out Magazine.  I also contributed a couple of original recipes to an ebook, coming out soon!

I started doing some food writing for Local Connections Halifax, beginning with a really fun article on Local Tasting Tours.  And, of course, I guest blogged for Taste of Nova Scotia throughout the year.  This afforded me the opportunity to attend all kinds of fun hullabaloos, including Halifax Gold Medal Plates:

I had some pretty popular posts,  including these pumpkin spice latte popsicles that pretty much went viral:

For a while there I thought these lovely little ‘sicles were going to be the Mmmbop of Purple House Cafe – you know, the recipe that was incredibly popular and that, five years from now, I will be wishing I’d never created…

I met some pretty fab internet friends (and feel not-too-loserish for saying that I have internet friends), including Lan, at More Stomach, and Movita Beaucoup.  I got to meet some of the bloggers whose recipes, photographs and writing I drool over too, like Bryan of The Bite House, and Nicholetta, whose brilliant blog, Pepper + Paint, you must check out.

And there’s some really exciting things on the horizon, too. 

For one, I’ve been asked to be a regular contributor to The Creative Mama, a visually-stunning, photography and creativity-focused blog for likeminded mamas.  I’m really excited to be a part of this team, and I hope you will all join me over there too!

There’s this other big project I’m working on too.  It’s so exciting and terrifying and up-in-the-air and stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of that I really just can’t tell you what it is right now.  But I will.  Oh, I will.

For now, I hope you enjoy journeying through the coming year with me, starting with a solid week of celebratory recipes and round-ups!

Thank-you for reading, thank-you for commenting, and thank-you for coming back for more.