Craft Stick Puzzles

I've been working with Ronan on counting to 20 (He only makes it to 13 most of the time), and on letter sounds. Today I decided to look on Pinterest for hands-on ideas. Amazingly, I found NOTHING, but somehow looking through other preschool ideas gave me an idea. Ronan loves puzzles, so I made a puzzle to help him with his numbers. I printed out some Cars coloring pages and colored them. Then I painted the back of the pictures with glue and stuck popsicle sticks to them. I cut the popsicle sticks apart with an exacto knife and labelled them with numbers 1 through 20. Then, I wrapped them with packing tape to make them more durable. Now, he can practice placing the numbers in order to form a picture, and when I do it with him, we can also say the numbers aloud. He can't complete the puzzle by himself yet, but I do think he'll get it soon.

If you decide to do this, I used the large popsicle sticks, and no, twenty sticks do not fit on one page. I used two coloring pages, used "Paint" to connect the ground between them, and then split it onto two pages (Well, actually the top and bottom of one page). The seam is on stick #11, but its not overly obvious.

It was easier than I expected and turned out exactly as I planned, so I decided to make a few more puzzles. I will probably make a few other number puzzles later, but today I decided to start on some basic spelling puzzles. They are much easier than the number puzzle, but I wanted it that way. I figure he will probably need to learn his numbers in order to be able to complete the picture, but on the word puzzles he will have to be able to complete the picture in order to reveal the word. These are the word puzzles I made. I plan on doing "cat", "dog", etc later, but for now I just used family pictures.

Cornbread from scratch

Cornbread is a staple in our house. We always have a couple boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix in the cupboard because my husband LOVES cornbread. I've always found it to be too dry and not worth eating, but hey, if he doesn't say anything about the massive amounts of chocolate I eat, I'll let him have the cornbread. So one day last week I went to make cornbread... and we didn't have any! I was confused. I looked through every cupboard. How could we be OUT of cornbread??? I'll make some from scratch, I thought. It couldn't be too hard, and I know I've got cornmeal around here somewhere because I bought it for one of those kids sensory exercises you find all over Pinterest. Nope. I had corn starch. Not really the same thing.

So the next time I went shopping I bought a big bag of corn meal plus two boxes of Jiffy just in case I was an idiot and couldn't make good cornbread from scratch. A few days later I made "Homesteader Cornbread" from Allrecipes.com, and now I'm seriously considering giving away the Jiffy. It was easy. It was cheap. It used only ingredients that I already had (plus the cornmeal). And I actually liked it. Not enough to choose it over sweet rolls or croissants, but enough to choose it over nothing, which is a huge step for me. Unlike cornbread from a box, you don't feel like all of the moisture has been sucked out of your mouth when you're eating it. My husband said that cornbread was the kind of cake he wanted for his next birthday (weirdo). So for anyone curious enough to try it, but too lazy to look it up themselves, here is the recipe:

1 1/2 C cornmeal
2 1/2 C milk
2 C all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2/3 C sugar
2 eggs
1/2 C vegetable oil (I used olive oil)

In a large bowl, mix together cornmeal and milk. Let stand 5 minutes. Add all other ingredients and stir until smooth. Pour batter into a greased and floured 9x13 pan. bake at 400 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

QUICK. EASY. CHEAP. DONE. How did Jiffy convince us all to keep buying those stupid little boxes?

Alex's 3rd birthday cake - Lightning McQueen

I decided to make a birthday cake for my neighbor's son, Alex. He's really into cars right now, so I decided to make him a Lightning McQueen cake. I also wanted to try a technique I found on Pinterest that allows you to make coloring pages into buttercream images. You can find the link to the post I followed here.

First you need to find a picture that you want to copy and print it out in the correct size. If it has any text on it, you will want to flip the image before you print it. I realized that my image was going to be a mirror image but didn'tcare which direction the car faced. I didn't think about the fact that the numbers on the side of the car and the word "Rusteze" on the hood would be backwords until I put it on the cake. Go me.

You are going to place your printed image on a flat surface such as a piece of glass or the underside of a cake pan and tape a piece of wax paper over it. Then make your frosting. I suggest using a fairly thick buttercream for the outlines and then thinning it a bit for the fill. I used a fairly thick buttercream for the whole thing and it didn't end up being completely flat. Do your outlines first. If you have a very detailed picture like I did and you want to use a thin outline tip, that's fine, but use a thicker line for the outside line. I used a thin line all over and you could see under it on the final cake. Then fill in everything else, starting with the smallest, most intricate area first. When you are doing the larger areas later, you will want to frost right over the small lines and intricate areas with your main color of frosting. When you finish, you will want your entire picture to be about 3/16" thick.

Then put it in the freezer for about 15 minutes Longer is fine- you just want to make sure you give it enough time to freeze. When you remove it from the freezer, untape it and flip it onto your cake quickly, then (also quickly) peel off the wax paper. Your image will stick to the wax paper when it is frozen, so you don't have to worry about doing the actual flipping quickly, you just need to peel the wax paper off while it's still frozen. I imagine if you move too slowly you can probably put the entire cake in the freezer with the image and wax paper attached for 15-20 minutes, and then take it out and peel it then. My image did not turn out as good as I was hoping but it's still much better than I could have done freehand. I will try it again some other time using the tips I've posted here and see if I have a better experience. Please let me know if you try it and how it works for you!

Raising tadpoles - part 1

Like most kids, my son has a fascination with animals. The problem is that while we used to have a ton of pets, we got rid of most of them before he turned a year old because with a baby in the house, we just didn't have time for snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc. We still have a dog and two cats, but he wants a turtle. Or a horse. Or the bird at the pet shop. Or the squirrel climbing a tree. Mainly he wants a turtle, and oddly enough I've seen two turtles crossing the road in the past week that I could have taken home with me instead of just moving them away from traffic. The problem is that I don't want a turtle or any other animal that I have to feed and house and possibly even buy.

A few weeks ago our tomato plants got attacked by tobacco worms, which are fairly attractive, very destructive caterpillars that turn into plain-looking brown moths. They reeked havoc on my plants but also provided me with a unique opportunity- a  completely free pet. I saved one of them from being a skid mark on the bottom of my shoe and put it in a plastic jar. My husband found a stick and some moss and drilled holes in the lid, and we dropped in a few of the already half-eaten green tomatoes. For almost a week, Ronan was ecstatic. he talked about his caterpillar (which he called a crap-pillar), all the time. He walked around with his jar showing it to anyone that would look. Then the darn thing cocooned and it was back to "Mommy! Mommy! Turtle. Hold it?" Even when there were no turtles anywhere nearby. (My son just turned 2 last month, so his vocabulary and sentence structure are understandably limited) I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do about Ronan's recent pet fascination when the answer forced itself on me.

Now for anyone that doesn't know me, I am a tree-hugger. Not literally, but I am more of an animal/nature lover than anyone else I know. I still go outside sometimes after it rains to save the worms from drying up and dying on the sidewalk. So when I went to clean my son's swimming pool and found hundreds of tiny tadpoles, there was no choice to make other than what I was going to put them in and where they were going to go. I think I ended up with about 300 miniature tadpoles, each approximately the size of a flea. Trust me, it was fun trying to separate them from the -even more plentiful- mosquito larvae. I put 200 of them in a ten gallon aquarium and the rest in a large fishbowl. I went to two of the local boat ramps but couldn't find any suitable pond plants, so I ended up adding some sphagnum moss instead. Now if you haven't used sphagnum moss before, let me just say that it is a good staple to have around if you are the sort of person that takes in random creatures from outside. It is very versatile. It can live in water or on land and if it doesn't get enough water, it will just dry up until it gets more and then quickly become lush and green again. It available at most pet stores, though I would recommend a reptile store if you have one nearby. We bought a block of it (It came in a cube shaped bundle, tied together and covered in plastic) at least 5 years ago, and even though we have used it for many things, we still have most of it left. it lasts a long time for three reasons: 1- It EXPANDS when you get it wet. (You should soak it for at least 20 minutes before you use it so that it reaches its full size and becomes more pliable) 2- You can reuse it. I soaked WAY too much for my tadpole tanks, so now the portion I'm not going to use is drying in sun and will be put back away later. 3- You can't kill it. I mean I'm sure you could burn it or poison it or something, but you can't accidentally kill it because of its completely flexible water and lighting needs. So:

aTank

aPlants (to hide in)

aNon-chlorinated water (We have well water, but if you don't, you can just let some sit uncovered for a few days)

rFood

What the heck do you feed a tadpole? In the wild they eat pond scum, but I didn't have a good way to bring any of that inside. And it's gross. So my husband did some research and found out that they love boiled letuce. He chopped a couple of leaves and boiled them for 10 minutes. Then he froze it in icecube trays so that I would have single servings. After it was frozen, I popped them out and moved them to a ziplock.  If I have to make more later, I will probably just spread it out on some wax paper so that I can break it all up and have more more control over how much food they get at a time. Anyway, they love the lettuce. I've had them for about a week now and they've grown a lot off of it. They still attack the lettuce with tenacity every time I drop some in, which is once every few days. I haven't read anything about tadpoles and iceburg lettuce (the kind that comes in a round head like cabbage), but iceburg lettuce has basically no nutritional value and you should never feed it to turtles, iguanas, or other animals that live off mainly greens. I gave my tadpoles Romaine lettuce, but I assume they would also enjoy other types of greens. If you don't have lettuce, you could even try using chickweed or dandelion greens, both of which are non-toxic.

Ronan doesn't seem very excited about the tadpoles. I don't think he understands what they are and they are too small to catch his eye. I'm not sure how big they will get since the full-grown tree-frogs are only a little over an inch long, but he loves seeing frogs no matter how small they are, and with 300 tadpoles, I think we're going to get a LOT of frogs.

Garden Chicken Bake

I have a confession to make - I can't cook. I mean, most of my friends would say that I can -in fact most people would probably say that I can- but that's just because sometimes I do. I can read and follow directions, so if I have a recipe in front of me, it tends to turn out pretty well. When I say I can't cook, what I mean is that I absolutely NEED a recipe. If I'm baking junk food, I can just kinda make stuff up and it turns out good. I rarely follow a dessert recipe to the letter. If I use a recipe at all, it's more of a guide or an inspiration. I usually end up changing at least half of the ingredients. And I've always wanted to be able to do that with real food. But I can't. Even with simple stuff like chicken, I need a recipe. I don't know how long to cook it, or at what temperature, or if I need to turn it, baste it, season it, etc. And don't even ask me to add, remove, or substitute ingredients.

I know there are a lot of people that are like me when it comes to cooking. Being able to "make dinner" without the help of frozen entrees has become a dying art. Now that most women work, making dinner from scratch has become too much of a hassle and no one does it anymore. Which means that we aren't learning how. A little over a year ago, I became a stay-at-home mom. I quickly fell in love with Pinterest, taught my son sign language and myself crochet, and started spending time outside. This year I have a garden, and we are already having trouble eating everything it produces. I decided that we are going to eat or preserve everything that comes out of the garden. We are not letting anything go to waste and we are not giving anything away. Now I realize not giving ANYTHING away sounds kind of selfish, but I am doing it to force myself to learn how to make the most of my garden instead of just giving away everything that doesn't conveniently fit into my meal plan. To reach my goal, I will have to dehydrate, freeze, and learn how to can. I will also have to find recipes that use whatever vegetable I happen to have large amounts of or  *gasp* I'll have make to some up. Today I created my first recipe, and amazingly enough it tasted good.

Garden Chicken Bake

1 zucchini, thinly sliced
4 banana peppers, sliced in rings (mine taste more like bell peppers though every once in a while you get a bite with a little bit of kick)
2 chicken thighs, cooked, deboned, and chopped
barbeque sauce (I used Jack Daniels Steakhouse)
parmesan cheese
mozzarella cheese, shredded

In an 8x8 pan, make a layer of zucchini, then a layer of peppers. Next sprinkle on a layer of Parmesan cheese. Add a layer of chicken and another layer of zucchini. Then put the barbeque sauce on. I didn't use much barbeque sauce, but my chicken had also been grilled with barbeque sauce, so if your chicken is plain you may want to be more generous. Then add the rest of the peppers and the rest of the chicken and cover with mozzarella. bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

It turned out great and used up zucchini and peppers from the garden AND leftover chicken without me having to add a bunch of new ingredients, so I call it a success! And now I'll be less worried making up dishes in the future :-)

Update: My zucchini are doing terrible this year, but the peppers are still going strong so I ended up making this recipe again, but layering it with cooked yellow rice instead of zucchini. It was also very good.

birthday cakes

I adapted this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker's chocolate buttercream recipe, which can be found here. My husband and I do not generally like whipped frosting. In fact, we don't like whipped food at all. Eating flavored air kinda makes me want to gag. I don't know why I thought this recipe would be worth trying- aside from the fact that pretty much all the other recipes I could find call for heavy cream, which I have never purchased in my life. But I tried it, and it wasn't good. Now if you like whipped frosting, I would recommend it. I could almost taste it, and for flavored air that's pretty high praise. I added an extra cup of powdered sugar, which made it thick enough for me to eat, though another cup or two probably would have been even better. It tasted very sweet but not very chocolaty, so I added some unsweetened cocoa powder, and I think the resulting frosting is delicious. In the future, I may try adding more powdered sugar and chocolate. I'll have to see how it tastes with the cake and how it stands up to the heat. Our party is outside and it's supposed to be in the 80's that day. Anyway, here is the recipe as I made it:

Whipped Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1 C butter or margarine, at room temp
3 1/2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 C semisweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled slightly
1 Tbsp special dark cocoa powder

Whip the butter with the whisk attachment on your mixer for 5 minutes on medium. Slowly add the other ingredients, starting with the powdered sugar, mixing the whole time. (While adding the powdered sugar you will want to mix on low speed) You will need to stop occasionally to scrape the sides of the bowl. Once everything has been incorporated, mix for another minute or two. Enjoy!

The white cake (which is actually confetti cake) also got buttercream frosting, but I just used this recipe from my homemade Oreos:

1/2 C (1 stick) of butter (or margarine), softened
4 Tbsp half and half (or milk)
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
7 C powdered sugar

Mix everything except the powdered sugar together. Then add the powdered sugar one cup at a time.

I made both cakes from boxed mixes because I don't feel making cake from scratch is worth it unless it is a  flavor you can't get in a box (like Apple Dabble Cake - YUM!)

update: I wasn't really thrilled with how plain my cakes turned out, but they ended up sagging in the heat so I'm kind of glad I didn't spent too much time on them. Luckily, Ronan is only 2 years old so he didn't know the difference. Maybe next year I'll learn my lesson and have an indoor party. I didn't take a picture before we left because I was going to put toy trains on my son's cake before we served it, but after sitting in the heat so long it wasn't stable enough to put the trains on, so this picture was taken right before we cut them.

Our Built-in DVD shelf with TV mount

In December, we remodeled part of our house. In our entire 3 bedroom house, we had one tiny hall closet in addition to our standard bedroom closets. There was no where to store anything, but all of our rooms were enormous. We decided to rip out our closet wall and build a large walk-in closet, stealing the space from the adjacent bedroom. In addition to the wall we built to separate the closet from the second bedroom, we also had to build a wall where the front of our closet had been since we were putting in a standard door where the 7 foot closet opening had been. When you first walk into the room, there is a wall directly to your right. If you follow that wall to the back of the room, you reach the door to our new closet. I don't feel like my post so far is making much sense, so if you are confused, maybe these pictures will help:

View from the second bedroom:
Here the closet has been ripped out and the new door and wall have been added to fill in the space from the old closet opening. The brown walls are part of the second bedroom. The blue walls are the inside of the master bedroom's old closet. After this picture was taken, we added another wall separating the new closet from the second bedroom between the door and the vent in the ceiling.

This is the same wall from the other side, after all of the work has been finished and our new DVD rack has been built. The door on the left goes into the closet. The door on the right is the entrance from the hallway.
 Someday, my husband will get around to finishing the trim around the closet door.

Anyway, we didn't want to put anything between the two doors that would stick out into the isle because then you would have to walk around it to get to the closet. More importantly, it would become an obstacle any time you were moving anything large in or out of the closet. So, we decided a DVD shelf and TV mount would be perfect. It would only stick out about 6" and we could still get good use out of the wall space. The only problem is that DVD players never fit on a 6" shelf, and since we're cheap and don't pay for cable, the TV is useless without a DVD player. 

Luckily, we realized all of this before we finished building the wall. We noted where the cross-braces were, and my husband ran the electrical wires to where we were going to want an outlet before we put up the drywall. Then when he built the DVD shelf, he made a cubby in the wall so the DVD player would fit and he put an outlet into the ceiling of the cubby so we could plug in the DVD player and TV. This would have been much more difficult if the wall had already been finished, and I'm not sure we would've attempted it. We plan to divide another room in about a year and I will definitely spend a long time thinking about what we may want against the new wall before we finish building it.

New Fire Pit - Part 2 of 2

About 2 months ago, I wrote a post about the beginning of my latest project: turning my trash heap of a burn pit into a pretty, stone-lined fire pit. You can read about the early stages of my project here. I have finally completed it, and it is everything I had hoped it would be. To recap, this is what it started out looking like:

Technically, this is what it looked like after many hours of digging. It started out shallower on the right side, which is where we decided we wanted our burn area to be. So, in this picture I have already started digging the hole on the right side, using the dirt to help fill in the left side. We knew before we even started that we would need to buy dirt to fill in the old hole, and we were right. It ended up taking 5 pickup truckloads of dirt and we probably should have used 6.

I'm cheap, and patio bricks are expensive, so I spent a long time thinking about what to line my new burn pit with. When I thought up the answer, I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. Broken concrete! I've seen it listed free on Craigslist a lot (usually as fill) and always wondered why anyone would voluntarily put a big pile of concrete in their yard, even if they did need to fill in a hole. I still would never use it as fill, but for wall-building, I'm in. I looked through the free ads and did a search for "broken concrete". I got a few results, but they were all about an hour and a half away. I decided to wait for something closer. 

After about a month of waiting and religiously checking Craigslist, I gave in. Not only had there been no ads posted closer to me, there had been no ads posted, period. I e-mailed a guy that had posted an ad for broken concrete a month earlier, fully expecting it to be gone. It wasn't, and he seemed relieved that someone finally wanted the pile of rubble that had become a permanent addition to his front yard. He said that it had been put there with a loader and we would need to bring a sledgehammer to break up some of the bigger pieces. Perfect. I had been worried that all of the concrete would be broken too small to use as bricks, since apparently the only known use for broken concrete is filling in holes. We took the truck and utility trailer and loaded up all the concrete he had. I wasn't sure it was going to be enough, but it ended up being EXACTLY what I needed with nothing left over. 

After I dug out the new hole, I used a 3 foot level and a garden rake to make the whole circle even and level. Then I put my shovel in the middle of the circle and used a stick on a string to mark out a circle. Once I placed the first layer of concrete, the circle looked like this:

I added dirt to the outside of the circle after every layer and sometimes had to pack it in under the outside of the concrete pieces to keep them from leaning or wobbling. I saved the biggest pieces for the top layer to help stabilize the wall and because I think it looks better that way. Once I finished the wall, it suddenly became clear how uneven the rest of the yard was. In some places the wall stopped a foot and a half below the level of the grass, in others it was 6 inches higher than the ground around it. My husband tilled all of the ground within 3-4 feet of the wall, and I used a shovel and garden rake to smooth it as much as I could. I tried to keep the top of the concrete level with the ground around it so that mowing would be simple. Now we just need  to plant some grass! 

Final cost breakdown for this project: $60 for dirt, about $150 for gas to go get it and the concrete, ? for the grass seed.

Fruit Leather

Today I decided to try making fruit leather. I don't actually like fruit leather, but my husband thinks it's awesome. He was purchasing it regularly for a while, but then the novelty wore off and the stores stopped putting it in high-traffic areas. I think he pretty much forgot about it's existence, which I thought was great because the crap is expensive and I don't understand the draw. Anyway, I ran across a recipe on Pinterest a while ago, and it sounded insanely easy to make. We just went strawberry picking yesterday and came home with 18 lbs of strawberries, so it sounded like a good day to try it out. I looked up the recipe on Pinterest again, and also found a few recipes for fruit leather on the cooking apps on my phone. Everybody listed different amounts and different fruits, but the gist was the same: Puree whatever fruit you want, add a splash of lemon juice and enough sugar to make it taste good. Spread the mixture on a baking sheet covered in Saran Wrap. Dehydrate.

I put strawberries in my blender until it was pretty much full and included 3 apples that have been sitting in my fridge since God-knows-when. I added some lemon juice and spooned in a random amount of sugar, tasted it and added more. I ended up with about 6 1/2 C of pureed fruit and I think I put about 6 Tbsp of sugar in it. That was the easy part. I was a bit concerned about putting Saran Wrap in the oven, but every recipe I found said to do it, so I lined my cookie sheet. Did the Saran Wrap have to go up the sides? Would the puree get more liquid when it was heated and end up getting under the Saran Wrap? How big of a problem would that be? What was the point of the Saran Wrap anyway?

Sadly, my questions were the wrong ones. No, the Saran wrap does not have to go up the sides, in fact it's probably better if it doesn't. No, the puree never got more liquid. I doubt it would have been much of a problem if it had. I still don't know the point of the Saran Wrap. But the question I didn't ask - should I secure the Saran Wrap with anything? - YES, Tape. Once you put the puree on and start spreading it around, the sides of the Saran Wrap start trying to fold over. Quickly. And they don't stop or take turns. You need to tape that sucker down in several places on each side before you put the fruit on it.

I found three ways to dehydrate the leather. The most obvious was a food dehydrator with solid trays. Since I already told you I put it on cookie sheets, you've probably figured out that I don't have one of those. The second was in the oven with the door cracked for 6-8 hours at 150 or 170 or the lowest setting on your oven, depending on who wrote the recipe. The third was in your car with the windows cracked. Now I live in the middle of nowhere in Florida, so I figured the car idea sounded great. No electricity used, my oven would be available if I wanted to make something else, and hey, it's Florida, of course it's hot enough! No. The sun didn't come out today. It only got to about 80 degrees outside, and not much hotter than that in the car. I took one of my cookie sheets out and left it in the car for a few hours figuring that it was still morning and it would heat up later in the day. The second cookie sheet didn't have anywhere flat to sit so I put it in the oven and turned it to 200 degrees. My oven goes down to 170, but I've dried a lot of things at 200 and I'm not a patient person. Besides, I don't like running air conditioning with the oven cracked open. I checked in two hours, and it looked exactly the same. And the oven was cold. I don't know what happened, but it didn't make me smile. So I turned the oven on again to 200 and ended up baking it for 4 hours. I got my tray out of the barely warm car around 1:30 in the afternoon and put it in the oven too. I baked that one for about 4 1/2 hours.

In the end it tasted good (if you like that sort of thing), but the edges got crispy before the middles were done. Maybe that's because I was bad and baked them at 200. Maybe not. Either way, I don't suggest baking Saran Wrap at 200 degrees. For the most part, it did fine. However, Some the the edges got holes melted in them, even in areas where it was covered with fruit puree. I threw away all of the fruit puree that came in contact with melted Saran Wrap, but next time I think I will make this without the Saran Wrap. The fruit leather peels off of the Saran Wrap easily enough that I don't think I will have trouble removing it from my cookie sheets either. And next time, I will make sure it's sunny before I start throwing stuff in the blender :-)

Bathroom flower arrangements

My bathroom has been about halfway decorated for three years. I decided maybe today was a good day to finish -or at least continue- decorating it. So I pulled out my baskets and some fake flowers and greenery that I bought when I was maybe 15 to decorate a shelf along the ceiling of my bedroom. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it looked good. I can't find a picture, so I guess you'll just have to trust me.  Anyway, it took about 5 minutes to make these two baskets...

...which look great with the one other set of wall hangings we already had.  

I still want to hang a couple of pictures or something  on the other walls to finish off the look, but no ideas yet.

If you have never played around with flower arranging before, but would like to try your hand at it, I do have a few tips. If you are working with fake flowers, buy more than you will need and plan to take some back or keep the leftovers for a later project. Try to make sure that at least most of what you buy (especially the greenery) has wired stems so that you can bend them into just the right position. Try not to cut anything you don't have to. If a stem is too long, try folding it first. That way if you want it to be longer later, you can still adjust it. You will notice that I used a lot of greenery and very few flowers. Using too many flowers tends to make the arrangement look gaudy and unnatural. I could have used a few more flowers without making these arrangements look bad, but they would have needed to be small flowers placed in the background. You may have noticed that while I didn't use many flowers, I did use a lot of variegated greenery. Using greenery with different color patterns keeps the arrangement from looking boring which makes the flowers unnecessary. If you can make an arrangement with only greenery that looks good enough to display, then when you add a few flowers it will look amazing. When you add your flowers, please note that flowers should not always be placed in the front of an arrangement. Often people don't want to "hide" the flowers in the back, but placing bits of color toward the rear of an arrangement can help give it depth, and again, make it look more natural.

The hardest part is starting. I don't talk to people about flower arranging often, but when I do, they usually ask how to start. Which foam should they buy? How big should it be? Do you start in the center and work out, or start from the edges and work in? Answer: whatever you feel most comfortable with. Honestly, I don't like foam. So I don't use it. Sometimes, with certain arrangements in certain vases (usually fresh flowers in a shallow vase- think something you would see at a funeral) you do need to use foam. But I don't work for a florist anymore, so I can just avoid those particular arrangements.

When I did the basket that is hanging on the wall, I started from the outside and worked in. I knew I was going to want the big split leaves to be placed in a way that would give the arrangement character. They had wire running through the stems, so I just folded the stems so that they pinched the basket and held themselves in place. After that, I really had no idea, so I picked out a sprig of variegated leaves and put it in the basket. Too small. I needed something that would fill up all that empty space. So I grabbed a bouquet of fake pothos leaves and jammed that in there. After fluffing and repositioning most of the leaves, it looked pretty good, and there was an obvious spot for a flower. I tried putting two there, but it looked dumb. I think some wispy springs of tiny yellow or purple flowers on the left side of the arrangement would make it look a little better, but since I don't have any of that laying around, we may never know. I did this arrangement while it was hanging on the wall so that I could see how it looked with the other wall hangings, and so my three carefully placed leaves didn't get bumped or bent out of place.

When I did the small basket in the right picture, I didn't know what I wanted, so I figured I'd start with the base. I cut a loop of ivy big enough to fill the basket and jammed it in there. The leaves poking over the front of the basket just did that on their own. It looked good, but boring. So I decided to use some variegated leaves and since the speckly ones were just little sprigs, it seemed natural to have the leaves travel up the basket handle. Once that was twined into place, it looked kind of out of place, and I knew I would need to add a bit more of it on the other side of the basket. There wasn't much room left and I didn't figure I needed to add much of it anyway, so I stripped two leaves off of another sprig and pushed them into the ivy. That did the trick, but I wanted to add a splash of color, so I got two small bunches of flowers off of another vine and arranged them in the basket. And we're done! See, when you listen to my thought process it seems simple. And I don't sound like I know what I'm doing any more than you do. So stop planning (or staring at an empty basket and calling it planning) and just do the first step. The rest will fall into place before you know it.

I was going to do a step-by-step on how to arrange a vase of fresh flowers so it looks like it came from a florist, but I don't have any fresh flowers and I think that tutorial is going to need a lot of pictures... maybe some other day :-)

Update: My husband doesn't like the spotted foliage. He says it looks diseased. I don't have many other options lying around, so until I get around to buying something else, the baskets have been changed to crotons:

The Dish Graveyard

Yesterday my mother-in-law asked me to take her to some thrift stores around town and to the "dish graveyard," our name for a permanent yard sale/trash heap that is about 30 minutes south of where she lives. My husband and I have driven past the place a hundred times and never stopped. We've pointed it out, made fun of it, and talked about how we can't believe its still there, but never once considered stopping. I wasn't looking forward to going at all, but she wanted to get some chairs and a cedar chest she had seen there previously that wouldn't fit in her car. I wasn't expecting to find anything for myself at any of the thrift shops- I was just going because she asked me to (and I don't like letting people borrow our truck.) I figured while we were out, I would look for little figurines for next year's panoramic Easter eggs. I've looked at all of the retail stores and found NOTHING, so I wasn't expecting much. We went to four thrift stores in town and I got one 1/2" tall figurine of a watering can that looked like it came off of the top of a bottle or something. The cashier couldn't figure out what it was, so I got it for free. I also picked up a couple of 50 cent baskets, a pair of kids shoes, an organizer/carrying case for spools of thread, and some tissue paper for gift wrapping or pinata making. My mother-in-law got some toys for my son's upcoming birthday. Not overly eventful. Then we went to the dish graveyard, where I planned to do a lot of "I can't believe you're considering purchasing that" eye-rolling.  It started out about as I had planned. The cedar chest that she had found before was gone, and the chairs that she had wanted were creaky and stained and she decided she didn't want them after all. So we started looking through the tables of dishes, old Christmas ornaments, broken figurines, McDonald's toys, etc. I think we were there for about 3 hours, and amazingly, I loved every minute of it. I got a lot of adorable figurines, and couple of pots and baskets. Many of the figurines will be set aside for panoramic eggs, but I did get a bunch that were to large or for different holidays too. Of course, they all needed a good scrubbing with baking soda and bleach, but I only spent $7, and I'm not afraid of dirt. This is about half of what I got after it had been cleaned up. The other half has been scrubbed and is currently soaking in a bleach solution.

Anyway, one of the things I like most about looking at piles and piles of trash (and by trash I mean dirty, old, possibly broken, practically free crap that might be able to be cleaned up and re-purposed into something that no longer resembles anything that would be described as trash) is that it makes me start looking at things differently and thinking about making stuff. Unfortunately, nothing incredibly creative has come from our adventure yet, but it did get me in a crafting mood... and I had bought all those baskets.

Continue...

Homemade Oreos, Take 2

So today I decided to try a homemade Oreos recipe from  My Kitchen Addiction. It uses dutch process cocoa, and it produces flatter, more Oreo-like cookies than the  last recipe, which were more like Oreo Cakesters. I couldn't find dutch process cocoa at Wal-mart, so I got "Hershey's Special Dark blend of natural and dutched cocoas" instead. Anyway, here is the recipe as I made it:

1 C margarine, softened
1 C sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (imitation, because I'm cheap)
2 C flour
3/4 C special dark cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Combine margarine (or butter) and sugar in mixing bowl and beat until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat until well-mixed.

At this point, the original recipe tells you to "whisk together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt. Gradually add the dry mixture to the creamed mixture, beating on the lowest speed.  Continue to mix on the lowest setting until the dry ingredients are just incorporated."  This is a pet peeve of mine. While mixing all of the dry ingredients separately made sense when my grandma was growing up, it rarely serves a purpose now that everyone has electric mixers. If the recipe assumes that you have an electric mixer, WHY do we still need to use that extra bowl? I have run across one recipe where it actually did matter and I had to make a note on my recipe so that I wouldn't skip that step again. But because it is apparently widely believed that you do need to mix your wet and dry ingredients separately, I always have a moment of worry that this will be the second recipe where it actually does matter. Guess what? This recipe isn't it.

Add all of the dry ingredients and mix well on a low speed. I reserved one cup of flour, mixed everything else in, and then added the last cup of flour to try to keep the dust at a minimum. Once everything is wet you can pick it up to medium speed to get it all mixed together quicker.

Next, the recipe said to divide your dough into two disks, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for one hour. I seriously considered skipping this step as well and just putting the lid on my mixing bowl and putting the whole thing in the refrigerator, but I decided to be good. After they have refrigerated for an hour, take out one disk, place it on a floured surface (I use a pillow case taped to my table), roll it to 1/16" - 1/8" thickness, and cut with cookie cutters. Once that disk has been cut up and moved to a cookie sheet, remove other disk from fridge and repeat. After having done all of this, I can honestly say that this dough is as easy to work with warm as it is cold. And it is very easy to work with. If I ever make them again, I will probably try rolling them out without refrigerating them at all.

Bake at 350 for 12 minutes. Let cool completely before filling.

The recipe on My Kitchen Addiction has a simple buttercream frosting recipe to use as the filling. You can use any buttercream recipe you like, but I don't have a favorite buttercream recipe, so I decided to use theirs. It made about twice as much as I needed, so I have halved it for you:

1/4 C (1/2 stick) of butter (or margarine), softened
2 Tbsp half and half (or milk)
1 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
3 1/2 C powdered sugar

Mix together everything except the powdered sugar. Then mix the powdered sugar in a cup at a time (to reduce dust). When finished, put in a frosting bag  (or plastic bag with one corner cut off) and pipe onto half of the cookies. Top with the remaining cookies.

I'm not sure about this recipe yet. The cookies are even more bitter than actual Oreos, and I don't know if the filling will be enough to counteract that. Right now the cookies are crunchy and the frosting is still really soft, so they are almost impossible to eat. I will post and update once the frosting firms up and I try them again.

Home-made Oreos, Take 1

Today I decided to make homemade Oreos. There are tons of Oreo recipes on the internet and my husband is kind of an Oreo addict. After looking at a LOT of recipes I noticed that there are basically two recipes that have been tweaked a bit in a thousand different ways. For the cookie, there are recipes that use devil's food cake mix and recipes that use dutch process cocoa. The ones that use dutch process cocoa tend to have more ingredients and form a dough that you roll out and cut with a cookie cutter. The ones that use cake mix form a dough that you roll into balls and plop on the cookie sheet. They end up looking more like whoopie pies than Oreos, but I chose to start with them anyway. I've never bought dutch process cocoa before and my baking cabinets are already overflowing with the junk food ingredients I do keep on hand. Plus, they were easy and I already had all of the ingredients. If you keep cake mixes on hand like I do, you probably have all the ingredients too. Ready?

1 box devil's food cake mix
2 eggs
3/4 C shortening

That's it. Mix together until smooth. Roll into 1" balls. The recipe I used did not say to flatten the balls, but you really should. Then bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Let cookies cool on baking sheet.

This is how the cookies turn out if you flatten them halfway.

Left pic: The left 6 cookies I flattened to about 3/16" before baking. The 6 on the right I didn't flatten at all.
Right pic: Finished "Oreo" made from the flattened cookies.

These cookies look nothing like Oreos and don't have the same crunchy texture either. They are very yummy and ridiculously easy though, so I will probably make them again. Now, for the filling:

Again, there are basically two filling recipes, and  again I chose the easier one that I didn't have to buy ingredients for. The filling I used is basically buttercream frosting. I'd give you the recipe, but frankly, it was a flop. I didn't use as much condensed milk as the recipe called for and I still needed to add a cup and a half more powdered sugar to keep it from being soup, so just use your favorite buttercream frosting recipe (or look one up) and you'll probably end up with about the same cookies I have. They are awesome. And simple. They are not Oreos. My husband may like them, but he will still make me buy Oreos. So once this batch has been eaten, I will buy dutch process cocoa and the ingredients for the other type of filling and we will try Home-made Oreos, Take 2.

Update: I ended up making them open-faced since they were so thick. I was worried that they would not be stackable, but after a few hours of letting the frosting harden, they did just fine. When my husband tried them, he said they tasted exactly like Oreo Cakesters. I think they are close, but better.

Crochet blankets

I've been fairly busy lately, but unfortunately not doing anything worth blogging about. Yesterday I planted my garden and today I worked on digging out our burn pit a little more. I was just about to sit back and relax with some crocheting (which isn't really far enough along to be exciting), when I realized that I could talk about my last crochet project, which is my favorite so far. I'm pretty new to crochet so baby blankets are my favorite thing to make. They are quicker than regular sized blankets and much easier than anything that has a specific shape or size. Plus, they make excellent gifts. I got this pattern through Pinterest and you can get it here for free. It looks a bit complicated at first, but after you do all of the steps once, you'll have it memorized. It's pretty much the same row over and over and you just shift it a few stitches every three rows.

Anyway, it's lightweight, which makes it go fairly quickly and use very little yarn. Also, it's perfect here in Florida where you need to swaddle your baby without overheating him or her. I used Loops and Threads Snuggly Wuggly Big! baby yarn from Michaels. It sells for about $10 per skein. I always go to their website on my phone and use the 40% off coupon (They will scan it right off your phone so you don't need to plan ahead and remember to print it) This blanket took about half of one skein, so this blanket only cost me about $3 to make. I will definitely make many more of these for future gifts.

Right now I am working on a granny square throw blanket for my son's bed. He loves bright colors, so I think this will be perfect when I'm done. I haven't been crocheting much lately, so who knows how long that will take though...

Easter party dishes

We had an Easter party and egg hunt yesterday at our house. As usual, we had a very small turnout. I invited  over 80 people plus six families of neighbors who I've never met before. 13 people showed up. And only 7 of those were invited by me. The others only came because I told the people I invited to PLEASE bring any friends they knew with kids. If someone is writing a blog about how to get people to show up at your party, I need to read that. If someone is writing a blog about how to get people to RSVP for a party, I need to read that  next.

Anyway, since I had no idea how many people were coming, I bought way too much food and candy just in case. The party cost us maybe $120, and we have about 15 lbs of chicken, tons of drinks and lots of snacks left over. Luckily, since we are used to throwing parties where no one shows up, we did it smart, so all of our leftovers can be used later. If you are going to throw a party where you are unsure about the turnout, I have a few tips.

First, only make things that you personally will eat later. I love deviled eggs, and they are always a hit at parties. They were the first thing I decided to make- partially because it's Easter and partially because I knew I wouldn't have a bunch of leftovers to throw away. After I cut the eggs in half, I put them in water with a few drops of food coloring for a minute to make them more festive. I used yellow, pink, blue, and green, and left about a third of the eggs white. The yellow didn't show up very well, and the green and blue look about the same, so I think next time I will only do pink and blue. I deviled 18 eggs (36 pieces) and only had 2 pieces left over.

I made a vegetable tray because vegetables are cheap and they are something I will eat as a snack in the evenings (and should eat more often instead of cookies and ice cream). I also made chocolate covered strawberries with white chocolate dyed orange so that they looked like carrots. They were kind of cute, but white chocolate isn't as well-liked as regular chocolate, so ended up with more leftovers than I expected, but again, they are something I will have no problem finishing off by myself. Also, nobody is really used to orange chocolate, so most people asked what they were before trying them and a lot of the kids didn't like them. Next time I will just do regular chocolate and they won't be as cute. If you decide to make these -especially for a large party- I suggest making some kind of label for them.

Lastly, I made cupcakes, because what event is complete without some sort of cake? I used a chocolate buttercream recipe that I found on the internet, and I thought it was a little bitter. I will have to try another recipe next time. I used the frosting to make birds nests for my jelly bean "eggs" and as a base for my marshmallow flowers (cut a marshmallow into 4 slices with scissors and dip the cut end in colored sugar for the petals). I also frosted some and put pre-made frosting flowers or carrots on them. If you've read my blog before, these are the frosting flowers and carrots I had leftover from the panoramic sugar eggs I made last week. At the end of the party, we had 11 cupcakes left. I'm not sure if I will eat all of those before they go bad (My husband won't help- he hates chocolate), but if a few of them go bad, at least cupcakes are cheap.

We bought canned soda because we rarely drink soda, so this way we wouldn't have a bunch of partial 2-liters going to waste. Cans are more expensive, but will store for a long time and we can drink them slowly or use them for my sons birthday party in two months. 

We grilled chicken for lunch. I bought about 20 lbs of chicken just in case we did have a big turnout. I checked around and found chicken quarters for $1.49/lb and drumsticks for $1.00/lb. We waited until after everyone had arrived to start up the grill so that more of the appetizers would get eaten. Then my husband grilled enough food to feed everyone times three. After the party, I cut up all of the cooked chicken and put it in Ziploc bags in approximately 1 lb portions. Then I froze it for future use in chicken alfredo, chicken salad, and other dishes calling for cooked chicken pieces. The uncooked chicken was also split into single serving bags and frozen for later use. I like buying my meat in bulk, but unless I portion it up before I freeze it, it never gets used. After all, if you are cooking for a family of three, what do you do with a frozen block of 20 drumsticks or 4 chicken quarters, or a 5 lb roast?

Anyway, I had a party planned for at least 50 people. Even though only 13 came, I will be throwing out no more than a few cupcakes, I have plenty of meat stored for future meals, and everyone had a good time. To me, that is a success. 

Panoramic Easter Eggs - Part 3 of 3 - Putting it all together

In case you missed parts 1 and 2:
Panoramic Easter Eggs - Part 1 of 3 - Making frosting flowers
Panoramic Easter Eggs - Part 2 of 3 - Making the sugar eggs

We finished making our panoramic Easter eggs yesterday. I was very impressed with how well my son did with his. He's not quite 2 years old, so I wasn't sure if he'd really get it or if I'd basically just be making them myself while constantly trying to keep him from eating the frosting flowers. Anyhow... I started out by figuring out what scenes I was going to make inside the eggs. My husband helped since I have very little imagination. This one was his idea:

When I was growing up, we always used plastic Easter grass and just glued it down with white frosting. I don't buy plastic Easter grass because I'm afraid my cat will eat it, so we just used green frosting. I actually liked doing it this way much better. It wasn't unruly like the plastic grass, and the frosting grass can be used to hold the figurines in place. Just pipe it in (I used a #4 tip), and then press the figurines down where you want them. I did have to put a little bit of extra frosting behind the chicks in the top photo to hold them in place, but everything else just stuck where I set it.

After your scenes are finished, it's time to glue the top half of the egg on. You want to use a fairly thick line of frosting. I used a #7 tip to squeeze a wide line. Then press the top of egg on. It probably won't line up perfectly, but as long as they are close you won't be able to tell once you put the flowers on.

 



Your next step is to pipe frosting around the seam and opening and press your frosting flowers and leaves into place. Once this is done, you can decorate the top of your eggs, again piping on frosting and pressing on your pre-made frosting flowers.

This is a very fun Easter activity for kids, though it is a lot of work for Mom. I feel it is worth it because the eggs make a good Easter decoration and can be eaten or stored to display next year. My mom has 20 year old sugar eggs that she displays every year and they still look the same as they did when we made them as kids. If you decide to make them with your kids, make sure you don't expect too much, and (especially if you let them hold the frosting bag) don't expect everything to stay clean. If your child isn't old enough to help make the frosting flowers, he probably shouldn't be expected to pipe on his own frosting. Even young children can place frosting flowers on the eggs if you put the frosting on the egg first. My son will be two years old in two months and he told me what color flowers he wanted and pressed them into place. For the top of the egg, he also pointed to where he wanted me to put the dots of frosting that he would press his flowers into. He did try to eat a few of the flowers, but after I stopped him he started asking "eat?" every time he picked up a flower. When I told him no, he would put it in place instead. After he was done, I let him eat a couple of flowers since he was so good.