At The Picket Fence with Vanessa Hunt

Where Ideas for your Home Meet Inspiration for your Heart

Welcome to Inspiration Friday N0. 28!

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Whew! It’s been a busy couple of weeks At The Picket Fence.  Heather made a whirlwind trip to Arizona to visit our parents in their new home and Vanessa is taking some time with her family enjoying a few more days of summer before school starts.  We’ve been preparing for a new school year where Vanessa’s two rascals will both be heading off to the classroom for the first time; and Heather will be homeschooling a middle-schooler and a SENIOR! Yikes!
We can tell you all have been busy as well with “back to school” preparation, wrapping up summer projects and bringing in the harvests from your gardens.  Speaking of gardens… Heather promised on Facebook to share some of her zucchini recipes and we though what a better time to do that than at Inspiration Friday!
This recipe is a perfect way to use up that extra zucchini you have hanging around, and a great way to sneak in some veggies into a child who wouldn’t normally touch zucchini with a ten foot pole!
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I promise you kids will never know they are eating their veggies when you serve them these cupcakes! Of course, the oh so yummy cream cheese frosting might offset the healthy vegetables slightly…but a little frosting is a great tradeoff to say you got your kid to eat zucchini, right? grin.
I found this great recipe at Buttermilk Bakes.  It’s an adaptation of John Barricelli’s recipe in the The Sono Baking Company Cookbook.  You can print this delicious recipe by clicking on the link below:
I did use a different cream cheese frosting recipe.  I L.O.V.E.  i am baker. Every recipe she creates is fabulous and her cream cheese frosting is no exception and it couldn’t be easier!
The combination of these two recipes made for a delicious treat! I doubled the cupcake recipe and ended up with 36 cupcakes! These can be frozen.  I used a single batch of the frosting.
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By the way, did you know you can also freeze your shredded zucchini?! I did not know this until I was stuck with blessed with 18 cups of shredded zucchini! I froze the zucchini in 2 cup portions and I can pull out what I need when I’m ready to use it! I hope you’ll give this yummy recipe a try! I know you won’t be disappointed! I’ll be sharing a few more zucchini recipes in some upcoming posts. ~Heather
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Now onto this week’s Inspiration Friday Features!
We fell in love with Petie at Inspired Nestings’s adorable DIY Antipasto Servers!
Petie saw similar ones in the Napa Style Catalog for…well let’s just say way more than she wanted to spend! She didn’t let that stop her from having some of her own though! Head over to Inspired Nesting to see her great tutorial on how to make some of these cute servers yourself!
We are not quite ready to give up summer yet and either is Amanda from Girl In Pink!  Amanda  restyled her kitchen corner cabinet to help her remember a lovely beach vacation she took with her beautiful family.
You can see all of the details of Amanda’s lovely cabinet as well as gorgeous photos of her family’s time at the coast by visiting her at Girl In Pink!
We just love the ingenuity of our Inspiration Friday friends and we love all of the great frugal ideas we come across each week! This next feature is a tutorial we all could unfortunately use because it deals with laundry…the never ending chore. But Kadie at Seven Alive shares a way for us to do that laundry just a little cheaper!
Kadie makes her own laundry soap and she makes it look easy-peasy! You’ll be amazed at the cost savings! Visit Kadie at Seven Alive to learn how you too can make your own.
Kate from Everything Reconsidered always shares the most lovely recipes with us at Inspiration Friday and this next one was no exception. 
Her Dilled Carrot Soup would be such a lovely recipe to have as we transition from Summer to Fall! Isn’t the color just divine?! It’s also gluten and dairy free as our most of Kate’s recipes. We invite you to pay Kate a visit to get the recipe for this beautiful soup!
This last feature epitomizes what we love about Inspiration Friday and why we make it so encompassing! Lauren from My Wonderfully Made blessed us with her beautiful post on God’s goodness!
To the casual observer this may just look like a lovely photograph of Lauren and her husband at their son’s wedding but when you read Lauren’s post you will realize what a true miracle this picture is! Lauren’s husband suffered a heart attack the week of the wedding…and she gives us a glimpse in her post at My Wonderfully Made how God’s grace touched their lives that week. Thank you for sharing this special post with us Lauren!
And thank you to all of our features this week as well as to all of you who share your amazing ideas, projects and inspiration with us this week!
If you were featured today (or have been featured in the past) please grab the featured at button located in our sidebar!
Are you following At The Picket Fence on Facebook?  Don’t forget we feature many of your links during the week on our Facebook Page! If you’ve been featured there, grab a button as well! Thank you to everyone who shared so many fabulous posts with us last week!  We appreciate you!
Now it’s time to share with us what has inspired you this week!
Thank you so much for joining us for Inspiration Friday at the Fence,
When you are done linking up head over and party with the other Friday Party Friends
The lovely Courtney at French Country Cottage

Our beautiful friend Alison from Stuff and Nonsense

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And the gracious Debra from Common Ground

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Now all ya PARTY PEOPLE it’s time to link on up…here’s the rules!

  • Friend At The Picket Fence in some capacity
  • Link Up any post you’ve written that has Inspired You and will Inspire Others-it can be a home improvement project, craft, recipe, story, devotional…if it inspires link it up!
  • Be sure to link back to your original post and not just your url (main blog address)
  • Please post our button (code in the sidebar) or a text link on your blog so others can join in the fun! (MANDATORY)
  • Visit another guest. Please try and visit at least the link directly above and below you! We try to visit as many posts as we can but as Inspiration Friday grows and especially during the busy summer months, sometimes we miss some and for that we apologize.  It makes us feed good knowing others are visiting people as well!  Thank you..it truly means a lot to us!

We would love to recommend this fabulous post over at Crafter Minds for a quick tutorial on partying at a linky party! We couldn’t say it better ourselves! “Linky Party Like a Dinner Party?”


This week’s Inspiration Friday is sponsored by

Simple Stencil 
 “If your walls could talk…what would they say?”

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Comments

  3. Hi Heather and Vanessa!

    Oh, zucchini cupcakes–now that’s a great idea! Don’t cupcakes sound so much more exciting than zucchini bread? 🙂

    Thanks for hosting this fun party. Hope all your back-to-school activities work out well!

    Reply

  13. I’m loving this zucchini cupcake recipe… I still have zucchini left from my garden and my kids will love these cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Thanks for sharing this yummy recipe and for the tip about freezing shredded zucchini…very helpful! Thanks for having us each week. Have a nice evening!~Poppy

    http://withadashofcolor.blogspot.com/

    Reply

  19. I didn’t know that you could freeze shredded zucchini either until blog land. The things you learn…
    Your features all look wonderful. I’m so glad to have things slowing down around here so I can visit inspirations.

    Reply

  23. Hi girls:) Heather those zucchini cupcakes look so yummy especially the cream cheese icing LOL!! I know what you mean about being busy, I’m so not ready for back to school yet! This summer went way to fast! Have a great weekend, Martina

    Reply

  24. Thanks so so much for hosting, girls! Can’t believe school’s starting already…where does the time go??? Those cupcakes look so amazing…carrot cake is my absolute favorite…guess I know what I’ll be doing when the kids go back to school Monday…:)
    Thanks, again & have a great weekend!

    Reply

  27. I had to laugh about your abundance (and everyone ELSE’s!) of zucchini. This year I planted my own. They grew. And grew. And were filled with flowers. I got TWO squash. TWO. I’m told there weren’t enough female flowers so they couldn’t “mate” and have babies. Sheesh! I thought ANYONE could grow these things. So if anyone wants to leave some zucchini on my porch, I’ll gladly take them — yes, I shred and freeze it every year! And thanks so much for featuring our story!

    Reply

  29. Hi Vanessa & Heather,

    Those treats look so sweet and fresh…love carrot and zucchini such comfort food!! My Mother always grew zucchini in her garden when we were all at home. She used to make zucchini bread and freeze them and we would enjoy them all the way to into Christmas!!
    Thank you for hosting!!
    All the Best,
    Christine

    Reply

  31. Thanks so much for hosting.
    I am sorry but I linked up twice..not the same post, tho. I forgot that I had one for your meme and did another. Hope it’s ok and I won’t be banished from Blogland. 🙂
    hugs, bj

    Reply

  33. Heather~ The cupcakes look beautiful and delicious! Gorgeous pictures! I will be making these promptly.

    Vanessa~ Enjoy these last days with your babies…

    Have a beautiful weekend….
    Both of you!
    XO

    Reply

  36. Gosh, everything looks so good, especially those zucchini carrot cupcakes! I use to cook and bake alot but with the RA & Fibro that does not happen as much. Everything here is making me so hungry! I am a new follower thru GFC and Facebook. I would love a follow back on both when you take a break from all that cooking! Thanks so very much and have a wonderful weekend.

    Mary@http://www.mmbearcupoftea.com

    Reply

  41. Hi! I need to apologize for posting twice… my computer crashed in the middle of my photo upload, and when I signed back in, I thought I was finishing what I had started, but apparently I’ve duplicated what I already did. Not sure how to delete the second post??

    In any case, I hope my summer berries are inspiring 🙂

    Thanks,
    Lisa

    Reply

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