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.