Browsing the blog archives for June, 2011.

Homespun Chocolate Bars, Cake, Cookies and Even a Chicken Salad

Domestic, Healthy, Kids

With just six school days left, there has been a lot of planning for end of year treats for the kids’ classes and their teachers. It’s a lot of fun to plan serious treats for their classes because there are 14 kids in Wee One #1’s class and 6 kids in Wee One #2’s class. Yup. 6 kids. More on those treats and end of school year fun in the next couple of weeks. For now, it’s catchup post time and man there are some really cute and tasty treats posted today!

The ‘homespun chocolate bars’ are 3 Musketeer bars, my Dad’s hands down favorite chocolate bar – I made a homemade version after seeing them on Beantown Baker last fall. Essentially, you make the filling, freeze it and then cut it and coat it in melted chocolate. This idea is only good in theory because the filling is made with ‘frozen whipped topping’ and we all know that stuff doesn’t actually freeze. So it’s beyond tricky to try to get them to hold their shape while either coating them or submerging them in melted chocolate. So naturally, I turned to my trusty chocolate molds to get the job done. It just occurred to me that I should have ordered some chocolate bar molds from Confectionery House when I ordered molds for the end of year treats. Oh well, next time. I think I will hold off on homemade chocolate bars until I have those molds though, they would make the job quick and painless. In my tute, I only posted instructions and photos of the filling in heart shaped molds.

 

The Wee One’s contribution to this week of playing in the kitchen was the Baking With Kids’ Chocolate Fudge Birthday Cake. I’d like to point out that it wasn’t anyone’s birthday! They passed it off as their sister’s birthday cake but that was weeks before and she had already had a cake. We don’t need an excuse to make a serious chocolate cake do we? What about a serious chocolate cake covered in sprinkles, candies and chocolate shavings? No? That’s what I thought! They had a blast making it and I really stepped back and let the two oldest ones have at it and they did a great job. It was dense but really, really moist and while there’s no denying it was chocolatey, it wasn’t too sweet. Just right for a birthday cake to be shared by little kids and grown ups!

 

This week’s cookie came from my Great Cookies cookbook – there are more than 200 cookie recipes in this book and much like a lot of my most used books, I’d love the opportunity to bake through this book. I’m trying! I’m not sure how many I’ve made from the book that I’ve posted on my blog so far since I haven’t been officially counting down but I have already made a few and a couple of them have become my most used recipe for certain types of cookies – like this one, the Double Chocolate Chip Cookie. There are a lot of double chocolate chip cookie recipes out there. Martha has a great double chocolate cookie with M&Ms and she has a really great espresso double chocolate chunk cookie (I really love adding coffee to pretty much whatever I can but I never ever ever give it to my kids – they don’t need any help at all with energy or stamina). So back to the recipe for this week’s cookie, this one has melted chocolate as well as cocoa in the dough plus of course the chocolate chips so technically you could call these triple chocolate chip cookies and get away with it!

 

After that triple shot of chocolate, I’m going to leave you with a healthier take on the traditional chicken salad. It seems chicken salad is another of those love love love or hate hate hate kind of foods. I am madly in love with chicken salad (almost as much as I love tuna salad) so I was equal parts leery and excited when it came time to try out Jessica Seinfield’s version in Deceptively Delicious. Another hit from this book for me. I’m the only one who ate it, because I’m the only one even remotely interested in chicken salad and I really liked it. I could not taste the cauliflower but knowing it’s in there I can see that it added to the creaminess of the salad and the yogurt also helped keep it all together. The celery gave it a little crunch and the eggs lent their familiar taste and texture to make this a really well rounded and tasty chicken salad (especially on ancient grain bread)!

 

I know that today is technically Work in Progress Wednesday but honestly, finishing a foot, kitchener stitching the toe and starting (and finishing) the ribbing on the second sock are all that’s happened on my Nemesis socks for my dad. I was crafty this week though – I finally made a really cute denim skirt from a very sad pair of jeans that had a serious rip up the side of one leg! I’m also starting work on a cute photo project I don’t want to say too much about until I’m done and ready to show it off. I will however say that I will be back a lot this week to post as much of the fun stuff in my cue as possible so I can get back to posting as I do stuff. This is our first summer in cottage country full time, so we’ve been walking to the beach after school and having bonfires after dinner to make legit s’mores for dessert! I smell a fun and delicious summer ahead!

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Menu Monday and Week in Review (Orange Cake, Good Housekeeping Cookies, Cute Hair and Chocolate Chili Cake)

Domestic, Kids, Pretty

What a wonderful week we all had! Right after rolling out the new site and making a couple of posts my Dad came to visit us in the woods! We’ve seen him a bunch since we moved but he hadn’t come up to hang out yet! He made the 1 hour ++ walk into town 3 times – twice with Wee One #2 and once with Wee One #1. He helped with the kids and did almost all of the cooking. I tested a few recipes out on him and we had some of those amazing late night conversations about everything and nothing at the same time. We were all sad that he had to go home this morning, but I am sure my mother and my sister are missing him! When a visitor that special comes around, blogging can wait a few days, right? šŸ˜‰ I had intended to post these recipes/how to last week. An orange cake from Baking With Kids, my favourite chocolate chip cookies from Good Housekeeping, a silly but fun hair tutorial and a chocolate-chili birthday cake I made a few months ago! Ready? Here we go!

The kids are really getting into this – picking the recipes to make themselves. Sometimes they want to bake together and sometimes, like this recipe, one of them wants to try it out while the other one isn’t into to. Wee One #3 is always into it but she’s just 2 so she’s not much help. šŸ˜‰ This time around Wee One #2 really wanted to make the Orange Cake, so away we went. By the time she was done she had a small piece and it was pretty much time for bed. When my husband got snacky late that night he tried a piece, loved it, tried another piece, loved it more and the before he knew it he had eaten most of the cake! Whoops. Instead of being annoyed with him for eating her masterpiece, she said she was happy that her Daddy loved it so much. So cute!!

It was one of the simpler recipes in the book and at 5 years old, she had no trouble putting it all together.

The best part of the recipe for her was pureeing half an orange in the blender. It reminds me a lot of the clementine cake I made for Chinese New Year 2009, where seven clementines were briefly boiled, then chopped a bit and pureed whole. It was an amazing cake and so was this one.

 

I also posted the best chocolate chip cookie recipe I use on a regular basis. It’s from Good Housekeeping and I’ve been baking it since 2001! It’s simple and fast and you probably already have all of the ingredients in your kitchen right now.

 

My last foodie mention for this post is a Chocolate Chili Cake I made for my friend Andrew’s birthday this year! It was really good, I had my doubts really but I went with it because Andrew likes spicy foods and he’s always a good sport when it comes to my kitchen adventures. I went with this recipe and it worked out beautifully. This year, we celebrated Andrew and Talea’s birthdays together since they’re only a week apart and I don’t see everyone as much now that we live in the woods. Talea loves brownies way more than cake so I cut a hole in the middle of the cake and popped in a glass bowl full of dense brownies! I’m very pleased to report that both birthday peeps were happy with their treats!

 

I’ll end on a cute note – I have been playing with my hair more than ever, the more I mess around with it the more I want to mess around with it. I used to be a little nervous about doing something ridic with it because you know, then I’m the crazy lady with the weird hair but I’ve been the crazy lady with weird hair before anyway so why do I fret? My friend Jade always reminds me that it’s not fun without the fashion risks in life and hair certainly falls in that category so away we go. This will be one of the last hair tutes with black hair – that’s right people I’m going blonde. Again. For now though, I have a little tute of a cute half pony.

 
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Work in Progress Wednesday – Socks!

Crafty

In this post, I’m participating in three WIP Wednesdays; Freshly Pieced, Tami’s Amis and Musings from the Fishbowl.

Of course it’s socks, right?! I’m about to start a few sockless projects believe it or not! For now though, I’m knitting up Nemesis socks from Knitty for my Dad for Father’s Day. I’m almost done sock one. It’s amazing how little time it actually takes to knit a sock compared to how long it takes me to physically finish one. Kids, life, going to the beach, cooking, cleaning – I know, I know. This is officially a first world problem, yes? Sorry. Anyhoo, my Dad will be here any minute to stay for a couple of days, so away we go with some pictures of his sock!

Sadly, I was a little wobbily in the pattern on the foot. :/ However, I am very happy with the rest of the sock and I still have the second one to go!

The yarn is Stroll Sock Yarn in Terrain Twist. The pattern used 450 yards, and these balls are 231 yards so I got two and am hoping to use the left overs for a sock yarn blanket because I’m a big fat copy cat and I think they look really cute. The heel on this sock is lovely, but not so dainty, it’s definitely a unisex sock!

I am in love with this pattern. I really loathe knitting from a chart, and as much as I loathe the process I think it’s especially worth it for these socks.

I am weaving in ends on a blanket that originally I had planned to post as a finished object on Friday, but I’m thinking now about knitting another carbon copy of it and then knitting (or sewing) them together. It’s been done and shelved for almost two months now but after taking it out again and taking photos of it, I think it should be bigger. Much, much bigger. It’s a wedding-turned-first-anniversary gift, so bigger is better yes? That makes it a work in progress then, doesn’t it? Here she is!

Thoughts? Big enough for the newlyweds to snuggle under at least, right? <3

WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced
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Deceptively Delicious Doughnuts and My New Canon Rebel

Healthy, Kids, Marriage, Small Town

In this post, I’m participating in Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club, and Hearth ‘n Soul.

During the construction of the new site, I was still cooking and baking up a storm in my kitchen so I have about 5 months of recipes to show you! I wont show you all of them at once, don’t worry! I’m going to stick to one or two a day until I’m caught up. Today I posted the 10th recipe I’ve made from Deceptively Delicious! They are cute and tasty mini doughnuts with sweet potato and pumpkin snuck into them! So yummy! Here is the link to the recipe – Deceptively Delicious Doughnuts and here are a couple of photos:

 

Also during the redesign, just a couple of weeks ago actually, my amazing husband and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary. I’ll spare you the painful squinting at my picture to guess how old I am (30) and I’ll save you the math (I was 19 when we got married). Recently my husband bough himself a car he has wanted for years and years and years so for my anniversary gift, he bought me the snazzy camera I have wanted for years and years and years – the Canon Rebel. Since I only got it two weeks ago, most of the upcoming recipes you’ll see photos of were taken with my point and shoot Samsung. I am so excited to share photos from the new camera but I don’t want to spoil surprises for new recipes. What’s an overexcited gal to do? Post pictures of my wee ones of course! Wee ones and silly indoor smores! I haven’t edited these photos in PS at all! They are just raw from the camera. Sooooo lovely. Best gift ever.

Wee One #1 needs a new nickname for the blog because he’s 10 now, and not so wee anymore. He is constantly taking pictures of me (trying to) take pictures of him. His iPod, by the way, he bought with his own money. I am always so proud of him for being such a great saver – but this is the most he has ever saved from allowance and he was so proud of himself when he went out with Dad to buy it. So rad!

Wee One #1

As I have mentioned over and over since we moved out here last year, there is a lake literally across the street from our house. We moved here at the beginning of the fall, and while we’ve enjoyed the outdoors and all the wide open space we have to run around and play we hadn’t been able to play in the water – you know since it’s Canada and all. It’s been nice and warm for the past few weeks though and I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that we’ve been going to the lake pretty much everyday. The kids get off the school bus, run inside for bathing suits and another hit of sunscreen and off we go! We hang out at the water till just before supper, walk back, wash up and eat.

Off to the beach!

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I have to be creative with evening meals now since I am at the beach when I’d usually be prepping. So I tend to prep in the afternoon and just assemble when we get home, or I do the whole meal the night before and just reheat when we get back. It’s no fun to have the oven on in the summer anyway. I am super excited our new house has central air conditioning, but I wont abuse it by cranking the oven on a super hot day. I’ll share some of these easy summery recipes after I’ve caught up with my back posts, I promise. Here is a fun dessert we ‘make’ with the kids! I’ll post the quick little how to this week. Indoor smores!!

Indoor Smores

Tomorrow is Work in Progress Wednesday and I have a new sock to show off! Maybe I’ll even have more of it knitted by then LOL.

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Iā€™m baaaaack!!

Crafty, Domestic, Healthy, Kids, Pretty, Small Town

I’m baaaaack!!!

I know I said I’d be back in a week four months ago and as you can see there as been a whole overhaul around here, the blog has expanded to better sort and organize all the content and the really exciting news is in the middle of all of this – we bought a house!! There are a lot of reasons we love the house we bought but for now I’ll give you a sneak peak of our favourite parts – the backyard and of course the kitchen. There’s no way we could buy a house without a serious kitchen.

There will be more pictures as we move in and get settled – which isn’t happening until August anyway. The backyard is huge and has an area already set aside for gardening, and as you may have suspected, will be growing once I get my hands on it. The other thing I adore so much about this house is that it has a pantry – an absolute necessity in my dream kitchen.


The changes to this site have been long in the making and I am so happy to finally be finished and able to show it all off. I’m still going to be posting my weeklies – I love doing them! Just now I’ll be linking to the pages instead of putting the recipe or instructions directly in the blog post – this way I can include more than one if I want to.

Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business as usual, with a few little changes. The weekly line up looks like this now:

Mondays – Menu Mondays from Kate Says Stuff

Tuesdays – Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club and Hearth ‘n Soul

Work in Progress Wednesdays – from Freshly Pieced, Tami’s Amis and Musings from the Fishbowl

Baking with Kids Thursdays – documenting the kids’ cooking and baking through Baking with Kids

Cookie Fridays – perhaps the best day of the week, check out the gallery

Super Cute Saturdays – if I have time for this, so do you!

Catchall Sundays – rando day, for things that don’t fit anywhere else

I have still been doing my self-inflicted challenges, so I’ll be posting them as often as I can to catch up. Right now, I have a lot of fun stuff to share with you!

As far as my domestic endevours go, I feel head over heels for Bakerella’s Cupshakes, which essentially is a milkshake crossed with a cupcake. I also made step by step instructions for eclairs, and chocolate fudge. As part of the Baking With Kids challenge, where the kids are baking and cooking their way through Linda Collister’s cookbook, I made a batch of puff pastry for them to use in the giant cheese straws recipe. I also added the 4th cookie of the year, the playfully pink cowgirl cookies to the gallery.

I have gotten my crafty groove back, though so far I’ve only posted about my stack of facecloths. Ahem. I did add two window shopping posts though, one on Charlene’s Supply Closet and one on The Loopy Ewe, two shops I am moderately to severely obsessed with. I’ve also added two interviews (Krissy of Krissyanne Designs and Megan of Radmegan) plus a book review of yet another new obsession – Martha Stewart’s Craft Encyclopedia. I’ve been busy!

There have been some health-concious related kitchen changes around here as well. I may as well just say it now without outing anyone, but two dear friends of mine have gone vegan. Which means two things really. First of course it means I now know way more than I ever wanted to know about being vegan and what rules there are and what different types of vegans there are which then also means I also know a whole lot about all kinds of scary stuff that even my vegan friends are not interested in. What’s that? SUGAR. Wowzers. White sugar is way worse than I thought and people let me tell you, I love me some sweet treats so what to do? I’ve been testing recipes using other kinds of natural sweeteners (because as bad as white sugar is fake sugar is even worse), and they’re working out pretty well. I mention this because while I am still cooking and baking my way through Deceptively Delicious, and while I am aware that adding veggies to pretty much anything is never a bad thing, I hesitate to call these recipes healthy knowing all that I know now. I am going to keep them in the ‘healthy’ category anyway because they are miles healthier than what used to come out of my kitchen. The second thing that happens when good friends go vegan is that I have to learn to cook and bake for them! I can’t have them coming up for the weekend to eat pasta and lettuce, can I?! I have been learning so much – expect some uber healthy additions to the healthy section in the coming weeks.

In the meantime though, here’s what I have added to that section to start with – Deceptively Delicious Stew (which adds pureed borccoli to a yummy stew), Dr Oz’s Green Smoothie (this is crazy healthy), Deceptively Delicious Mac & Cheese (with cauliflower puree and two kinds of cheese), Deceptively Delicious Applesauce Muffins (with applesauce duh and carrot puree), Deceptively Delicious Brownies (with pureed carrots and spinach), and an old school homemade Garlic, Honey & Lemon Cough Syrup recipe. Very old school, my Granny would be proud.

Aaaaad just like I said I would, I dove right into making a ‘pretty’ section. I’ve become more of a girly girl than ever in the last year so it’s been fun to write about it! I added two window shopping pieces, Body Shop and Mod Cloth, plus a 101 on Lotions, my Make Up Bag Must Haves and my first hair tutorial ever – my Puffy Bun, which literally takes 5 minutes – no more than 10 even with all three wee ones running underfoot at once.

Phew. I hope my little hanful of loyal readers are happy with the changes. Let me know what you think guys!!

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