Halloween Tutu Wreath

I love Pinterest.  Like LOVE it.  I spend hours on it.  This is the first time that I've actually made anything inspired by things I've seen on there.  I saw this post:

http://lemontreecreations.blogspot.com/2010/10/wreath-bewitched.html

I really liked it, but thought I would make a few changes.

I started out by purchasing supplies.  And I made a MAJOR discovery.  Walmart has cheap craft supplies.  Like way cheaper than Hobby Lobby.  Seriously.  Selection is not as good, but the price is right.  Also, I hate it when blogs say, "I made this for less than $10!!!!"  but then they put together all kinds of stuff they had around the house.  But I don't necessarily have all that stuff around my house, so it would cost me WAY more than $10.  So on this project I only used one thing from home- white spray paint. I wanted to be able to tell YOU that YOU could do this for around $10!   The rest was purchased (I assume that you have a glue gun and glue sticks) for......*drum roll please*............
$10.43.  Seriously.

The first thing I bought was the wreath base.  At Hobby Lobby a styrofoam wreath base can be as much as $10.  Not good.  I went to the dollar store and bought a little wooden twig wreath they had to use as my wreath base.  $1 vs $10  = happy crafter!

Then I went to Walmart and got a few more supplies.  Here's my list and the total:

Wreath base from Dollar Store……………………….$1.08

3 yrds of Black Tulle………………………………………$2.91

Orange Ribbon………………………………………………..$1.97

1 yrd Green Ribbon………………………………………..$0.53

Black Paint…………………………………………………....$0.99

Silver Paint……………………………………………………$0.99

Black Felt……………………………………………………….$0.99

Wooden Plaque……………………………………………….$0.97

TOTAL                                                            $10.43

I started out with the Wooden plaque.  I sketched out my basic design, spiderwebs and our family name. After I had sketched it in pencil, I spray painted it white. 

I started off painting this first because I knew it would take the longest to dry.

Notice- no ribbon or spiderwebs on the right corner.  That came later.....

I started working on the tu tu.  If you don't know the tu tu technique, Google "Tu Tu Tutorial".  A good one is: http://plumtickled.typepad.com/plumtickled/2007/08/tutu-tutorial-t.html

It gives you the general idea.  Progress so far....

Find a good girly movie on and watch it.  It helps relieve the tediousness of this part.  I watched How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days on Oxygen.  It was fun.

Yay!!!! It's done!

Now for the legs.  I started working on the bottom of the legs first.  Orange Ribbon for the base of the legs, and the green polka dotted ribbon for the leg warmers.  Start by folding a side up, glue it, and then the next.  Basically, just use lots of glue gun glue.

And the end product:

Then I free handed little funny witchy shoes out of the black stiff felt.  I glued those to end of the ribbons.

Then I glued the two legs on to the Tu Tu wreath.

I was almost ready to add the sign.  But it looked too plain and boring for me.

Here it is again:

I added some ribbon....

Cute, but still not quite done.  So I added another spiderweb.

Done!

Then I glued that on to the wreath.  The finished product?

SPOOKTACULAR!!!

Carrot Cake Waffles and Cream Cheese Syrup

These turned out super yummy and weren't TOO much work for a quick breakfast.  I hate spending too much time cooking on Sunday morning.  I want to spend more time eating :)  Anyways, these turned out delicious and made the house smell really good.  I grated my carrot the night before to make it a little faster in the morning.

Carrot Cake Waffles

Yields: about 4 double waffles

Waffle Ingredients:


1 cups all-purpose flour


1/4 teaspoon salt


2 tablespoons sugar


¾ teaspoons baking soda


1/2 teaspoon cinnamon


1/2 teaspoon nutmeg


½ teaspoon allspice


½ cup sour cream

½ cup milk

1 egg

2 tablespoons butter, softened

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract


1/2 cup raisins


1 cup grated carrots


Directions:
1. Combine the flour, salt, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. 

2. Mix together the sour cream, milk, egg, butter and vanilla extract. 

3. Stir the wet and dry ingredients together.  4. Add carrots and raisins. Stir gently to combine. 

5. Spread 1/3 cup or so of batter onto the waffle iron and bake until the waffle is done, usually 3 to 5 minutes, depending on your iron. Spray iron with cooking spray between waffles as needed.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Two big scoops of ready made cream cheese frosting

Milk to taste

A dab of syrup

Powdered sugar

Heat the cream cheese frosting over medium heat.  Add a little milk and stir until completely liquid.  Stir in syrup until completely combined.  Remove from heat and stir in powdered sugar till it reaches a consistency you like.  easy! 

Whole Wheat Raisin Bread (or "Oh SNAP! This is good!" Bread)

Let me preface this by saying: I don't use a bread machine.  It may be psychological, but I really think it affects the taste of the bread.  It's kind of like using a cake mix when you can bake from scratch.  There's just something about the procees of kneading and rising that I really like.  Anywhoo, I'm sure you can do this with a bread machine.  I just didn't.

Whole Wheat Raisin Bread
2-3 cups of All Purpose Flour
1/2 cup white sugar
3 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 pckg. active dry yeast
2 cups milk
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup oil
2 tsps vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
4 cups Whole Wheat Flour (its hard to find, but you can find it.  Look hard in the baking aisle.)
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup raisins
1 cup brown sugar
2-3 tablespoons cinnamon

1.  In a medium saucepan, heat milk, water, and oil until very warm.  Like you can still put your finger in there, but its hot. 
2. While it's heating, mix together 1.5 cups all purpose flour, white sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and yeast.  Mix well. 
3.  When the milk mixture has heated up, add it to the flour mix.  Add in the vanilla and almond oil.  Blend at low speed until moistened.  Beat 3 minutes at medium spead.  (You should be smelling the yeasty goodness by now).
4. By hand, stir in whole wheat flour a 1/2 cup at a time.  Stir in the oats.  STIR IN THE RAISINS (I forgot to do this and had to add them later as I was kneading!) Keep adding an additional 1/4 cup all purpose flour till the dough pulls cleanly away from the sides.
5.On floured surface, knead remaining 1/2 to 3/4 cup flour in until dough is smooth and elastic (about 5 minutes).  Place dough in greased bowl, cover loosely and let rise in a warm place.  My dough LOVED the front porch during that rain we had this afternoon!  Nice and warm and humid!
6. Let rise in warm place until light and doubled in size (20-30 minutes).
7. Dump it back out on your floured surface.  Divide the dough into two.  Roll each section out into a rectangle.  Combine the brown sugar and cinnamon.  Sprinkle this generously all over the rectangles.  Then roll each up to make a loaf.
8.  Grease two 9x 5 or 8x4 loaf pans.  Place loaves in greased pans.  Cover and let rise in a warm place again (30-45 minutes).
9. Heat oven to 375.  Uncover dough.  Bake 40-50 minutes (my came out good at 40) or until loaves are deep golden brown.  If loaves brown to quickly, cover with foil. 
10.  When finished, remove immediatley from pan and let cool on a wire rack.

Take a bite.  Oh SNAP!  That's good.  You're welcome.

The taste tester approves:

PS - Bc Whole wheat flour is milled from the entire wheat kernel, including the germ, it contains fat (good fat! not the bad McDonalds kind.)  Because wheat germ contains fat, whole wheat flour and products baked with whole wheat flour supposedly go bad before white flour baked goods.  It just means you need to eat this bread super quick!  ;)   

THE BEAST (Or, American Flag Cake)

Okay.  So I've always loved watching those shows like Cake Boss or Ace of Cakes.  I love watching cake decorating and dream up ways to make unusual cakes. Since this experiment, I've decided its best left to the experts.

A few days ago, I came across a blog posting about an American Flag Cake.  It didn't look TOO hard, maybe on the level of the rainbow cupcakes or something.  I could do it, right????  (If only I'd known then what I know now....)

I started out about 1pm.

I had purchased one box of white cake mix***. (BTW- the little *** mean to go to the bottom of this post where I tell you all the of the things you should do to avoid the problems my cake had.  Basically, what I'm going to do next time).    I realized I would actually need about two.  So I found a quick and easy white cake recipe and added it to my cake mix.

Not bad.  So far, so good.

Now, in the original recipe, the cake was just left as plain white cake.  I thought that was boring.  So I added flavored jello.  To give it some color and a kick of flavor.  Red for the red portions and blue for the blue cake.***But I'm getting ahead of my self.

Once you've mixed up enough white cake mix for two cakes, take out two cups of the batter.  Drop some blue food coloring in there.  I also mixed in some blue raspberry jello.    When you've got it to a good blue color, put it in a cake pan.  I lined mine with wax paper.  I also don't recommend this.  I found in the end it was easier to trace the cake pan circle on wax paper, cut it out and put it in the bottom of the cake pan.  Squirt that sucker down with Pam and you're good to go.

I digress....Anyways, put the two cups of blue batter in the cake pan.

Now bake it on 350 for about 20 minutes.  When it comes out, dump it out of the pan right away to let it start cooling.

Now, while the blue cake is baking there are two very important tasks you must accomplish.  First is to get the red batter ready.  Mix the remaining batter with red food coloring until it's a violent shade of florescent red***.

Once its there, divide it into seven equal portions.   After all, our flag has 7 red stripes.

Then after you've accomplished that, go ahead and start tracing and cutting out your wax paper circles that will go in the bottom of your cake pans.  You'll need seven.

By now, the blue cake should be done.  Pop that puppy out of the pan and let it start cooling.

Totally unnatural right???  Anywhoo...

Put a wax circle in the bottom of each cake pan.  Hose those suckers down with some Pam.  Drop the pre-portioned out batter into the pan.  It would help if you had multiple cake pans.  I however, only had two so I had to bake in cycles***.  Throw the pans in the oven for about 10 minutes.  When they get done, pop 'em out of the pans and throw the next portion of batter and wax circle in and bake those for 10 minutes.  And so on...

My sous chef was very helpful at this point.

Eventually get all of the cakes baked and set out to cool.

Luckily, these suckers cool pretty quickly. Get ready to start assembling.

For the first 4 layers, straight up ice and stack.  WARNING: You will use a TON of icing on this cake.  I thought two containers of frosting would be enough.  I was wrong.  You'll probably need more like 3-4***.

Once you get to the fourth layer, give it a good solid coat of icing.  Now look around your kitchen for a circular object to trace.  You're creating the center of the cake, or the red stripes that correspond to the blue of the flag.  I found an oatmeal can was the perfect size.  Trace the circular object onto our old friend, wax paper.  Now cut the circle out of the last three red layers. Begin stacking and icing these layers like you did the last ones.

Here's what it looks like from the side when you've stacked enough (never mind the other blog post on my laptop in the background....)

Now is time to add in your blue.  Take that same circle you've been using to cut out the red layers and cut in out of the blue.  But you're going to use the OUTSIDE circle this time.  You can cut the blue cake into four pieces to make it easier to manipulate.  Put them around the outside of the red layers.

Once you've added all of the blue outside layers, put a crumb coat of frosting on it. Put it in the fridge for about 30 minutes.  Then add more frosting to the outside, creating kind of a whipped appearance.

Ideally, it should look something like this (this is not my cake.  I had to hurry up and go BECAUSE IT WAS NOW 4:30!!!! so you can pretend this is my cake.  Except that mine had patriotic sprinkles on it.)  That's right.  This cake took 4 and a half hours to make***.  Seriously.

Here's what the inside looked like:

And a piece of it...

The effect was really cool.  Lots of OOHS and AAAHs.  But once you took a bite....not so hot so. It was totally fake-y tasting.  Like gross fake-y tasting.

So here is what I would do differently next time...

1.  I would not use white cake mix.  I would use Red Velvet cake mix.  I think it will make the cake look a little more crimson and a little less florescent.  Plus I think the flavor would be better.  For the blue part I'd still use white with blue food coloring.  (Unless anyone else has any ideas?)

2. DO NOT USE JELLO.  Oh, this was a horrible idea.  The flavor was all playdoh-ey, and it made the batter super rubbery and impossible to use.  Gross.

3.  Forget all of this mini cake baking.  I would bake probably two round cake pans full of red velvet cake batter.  Let it cool.  Then using floss, I would divide them up into 6 equal layers.  I know the flag has 7, but really- who's going to count?   And hopefully this will help cut down on some of the time it takes to make this cake.

4.  Use a really good home made cream cheese frosting recipe.  This cake needs tons of frosting.  Like TONS.  And you taste a lot of it.  You can't squeak by with some store bought frosting.  No, that's gross.  You need homemade super good high qual frosting if that's going to be the main flavor of the cake.

So yeah.  There it is.  The beast.  It was definitely an adventure.

Survival Brownies

I made these yesterday for the staff a the Library, who are in the throws of Summer Reading.  We all needed a little bit of chocolate.  Many asked for the recipe.  So here it is!

Lexie’s Survival Brownies

Whether it’s summer reading, crazy schedules, or just life in general, sometimes you need a brownie just to survive.  And these are the perfect brownies for that.  These brownies are no-holds-barred brownies.  Nothing in them is low fat, low sugar, or even good for you.  They are straight up, the bad $%*&.  And sometimes you need that.

1 package chocolate cake mix (pick any kind- I tend to like to use triple fudge)

1.5 Sticks of Butter at room temp

1 can evaporated milk (I have also made these with regular milk and they turned out fine)

1 bag/45 pieces caramels, unwrapped (you can take your stress out on the caramels with all the unwrapping.  Or you can find a small child to do it for you.  I find it helps if you bribe with caramel as well.)

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350°.  Grease a 13 x 9 pan (I prefer glass- sometimes metal reacts with milk products and changes the taste).  Set the pan aside.

Mix cake mix, butter, and 1/3 cup of the evaporated milk till thick and poufy.  Spread half of the batter into the 13 x 9 pan. 

Put it in the oven for about 6 minutes- so that it puffs up but is still really soft.  Take it out of the oven but leave the oven on.

Melt the caramels in a saucepan with the remaining evaporated milk.  Keep stirring and heating until the caramels have all melted.   When they’ve melted, pour the caramel mixture over the previously baked cake layer.  Spread it out.

Dump chocolate chips all over on top of the caramel layer.

Take the remaining cake batter and drop in spoonfuls all over the chocolate chips and caramel. Don’t worry if it looks dumpy.  It’ll spread in the oven.

Put it all back into the oven.  Bake 22-24 minutes.  There should be a little crust on the edges, but still nice and soft in the center.

Let them cool, kick back, and enjoy a mini vacation in your mouth.

Haitian French Toast

I tried this recipe yesterday morning and it was FABULOUS!  Let me first of all state that when I tried it, I didn't really use the recipe.  I pretty much subbed everything.  I used oatmeal bread- it hadn't sat out all night like the recipes suggests, I subbed skim milk in for heavy cream, splenda for sugar, and pam for butter.  And it was still really good.  If it's that good with all the substitutions, imagine what it would be like FOR REAL.

Haitian French Toast

Ingredients

• 1 French baguette
• 1 cup orange juice
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 dash ground nutmeg
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar for dusting

Directions

1. Cut loaf ends off and reserve for another use. Cut remaining loaf into 1 1/2 inch slices; let stand 4 hours or overnight.
2. In a 9x13 inch baking pan, combine orange juice, cream, eggs ground cinnamon and white sugar. Place bread slices in pan and turn until liquid is absorbed, about 5 minutes.
3. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add bread slices and cook until browned on both sides, about 5 minutes. Dust generously with confectioners' sugar and serve warm.

Tie Dye Cupcakes

Okay, so I have a confession.  A lot of times I post things that I've done that have turned out well.  And most of the time, the result is pure luck.  Other times, things turn out a little....unexpected.

You see, I set out to make "Rainbow Cupcakes" for Alex's class St. Patrick's Day party on Thursday.  I've read about this rainbow cupcake phenomenon on several other blogs and was assured it was pretty straightforward and simple.  Here's what happened:

I grabbed my supplies from Target: White Cake mix and some gel food coloring

Divided the batter up into 6 bowls (about 2/3 cup did it for me)

Added food coloring to each bowl.  Some sites tell you exactly how much to put.  I just eyeballed it.

Then you start layering the colors, one on top of another.  A word of advice, start with purple/blue on the bottom and red on top.  It just looks more appetizing.  Maybe because blue food is unnatural (although trust me, there is NOTHING natural about these babies.)

Here's how they turned out.  Pretty funky!

Added some "cloud" icing to complete my rainbow.  At this point, I was still under the delusion that when I chopped this in two it would have beautiful neat orderly rainbow stripes.

Holy cow, these things look like radioactive TIE DYE!!! Where is my nice neat orderly rainbow???  After a while I stopped caring about the rainbow because hey, these are pretty cool too.

My taste tester approves.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day Y'all!