a very hungry craft round up...part 2

I have said several times in the past week, "I sew, I do not bake and decorate cakes."  So please take that into account when you read the following post.  If you are a baker or cake decorator stop reading now, go no further, this will bore you, it will make you pity my simple mindedness! I knew exactly what I wanted to serve for Charlotte's birthday party months ahead of time.  Of course, I would serve everything short of the green leaf to our party guests.  I also knew that I wanted Jay to create placard type things that labeled each one of the foods.

Everything was fairly simple and went together pretty quickly.  I did cheat on the ice cream cones and made cupcake ice cream cones and instead of one large cherry pie we had mini cherry pies made in a mini muffin tin.  It went together so nicely and took less time than I anticipated.  The cakes took longer, but was way easier than I thought they would be.

The week before the party I spent one evening playing and experimenting with store bought fondant and gel coloring.  These are the tips and tricks that I have found to be helpful:

After you pull the fondant off of the block and before adding color, work the fondant in your hands and it easily softens.

Only make small amounts of color if you are doing small detailed work.  Dipping a toothpick in the gels is a simple way to color the fondant.  It was highly suggested to use rubber gloves while coloring the icing, but I found it washed off easily and I did not mind getting a little messy.

To create the exact shape that I needed for every piece of food that needed, I traced shapes that I downloaded off the web that was intended to be a coloring page.  The broad shapes and thick lines worked perfectly.  Before laying the paper on the fondant I covered the back with powdered sugar to avoid sticking.

Cutting the shapes was easy with a very small and sharp paring knife.

The process was fun and easy.  It reminded me of the days of long ago that my sister and I made "food" with play dough for hours at a time.  My kitchen might feel a little differently, it was a very messy process.  I was able to make the fondant pieces 36 hours in advance to the party and the pieces held up nicely.  I simply sealed them in a gallon size baggie, laid flat on a cookie sheet and kept them OUT of the refrigerator to avoid drying or them sweating.

Tomorrow, a very hungry craft round up...banners and bunting! -melissa

fire & ice

We had just got back from the grocery store and I was making some delicious corn chowder that I saw on Pioneer Woman today. Melissa and Charlotte were in the family room playing on the floor eating some awesome cheese dip we found at sams club. Melissa had asked me if we could have a fire, so I built one before heading to the kitchen to make the chowder and Melissa got some great shots of Charlotte.

All of a sudden Melissa came running into the kitchen with Charlotte letting me know that it was snowing. I didn't believe her at first because 1) this has been the warmest winter we've ever had here and 2) we had just been outside and it didn't have that about to snow feel. But sure enough it was snowing. Here's what it looked like outside our house.

Couple of shots of my girls enjoying the snow.

First, the "face of wonder"

Next, the "face of happiness"

And finally, the "face of ecstatic-ness"

Hope you had a great Saturday!

-jay

pin-ter-est

So the other day I’m heading to our local grocery store with Charlotte and like many other times Melissa needs me to pick up a few things. This time around it’s ingredients for a recipe that she found on you guessed it...Pinterest. Nowadays when Melissa is looking for a new recipe she doesn’t head to recipes.com or even food network’s site...no she heads first and foremost to Pinterest. The place to go to discover, compare and in this case, the place to go in order to find something to do on a Saturday night. Let me tell you what I mean.

So I pick up the ingredients. A little butter, light corn syrup, brown sugar and a few more odds and ends. Couple this with the fresh apples we picked last weekend and you’ve got a wife who is interested in making carmel covered apples. And not just the regular kind mind you. Melissa wants to first slice the apples insert toothpicks and make carmel apple slices, because, “everything is better when it’s miniature.” After consulting with both of our mom’s she doesn’t receive a good report. Her mom tells her to call my mom, so not a whole lot of help there. My mom says first of all, “carmel is very difficult to make.” And secondly, if you accomplish in heating it to exactly 248 degrees, “you probably won’t be able to get it stick to the apple flesh” due to something about pectin. But one thing I love about Melissa is that she’s not afraid to try and she always wants to prove people wrong (I hope Charlotte inherits some of that). So what would have been a fairly relaxing and lazy Saturday night at the Hess house suddenly turned into Willy Wonka’s candy shop.

Melissa bathed Charlotte and I put her down for the night, but before I went upstairs to put Charlotte down Melissa let me know that we needed to make the carmel apple slices tonight because tomorrow was going to be busy. Now I could have declined this candy making apple extravaganza completely, but I have to admit that after we shared a delicious carmel apple in Seattle a few months ago I was interested to see if we could really replicate something so delicious in our very own home. So I melted some butter, Melissa measured the brown sugar and corn syrup and I began to stir over medium until it boiled. While I stirred, Melissa cut apples and pierced the slices with toothpicks. Remember, “everything is better when it’s miniature.”

I stirred for a long time and that’s when Melissa broke out the white wine and man she hit it hard...just kidding, but the photo is funny. We slowly got the temperature up to 248. I kind of felt like Marty from Back to the Future trying to get the car up to 88mph while trying to produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to to make things happen. Eventually it boiled we added some sweet condensed milk and eventually some vanilla and voila, carmel.

Now for the moment of truth. Would it stick to the apple flesh? Come back next week to find out

Just kidding!!!

It did stick! Pretty well at least. It definitely stuck better to the skin than the flesh, but I think we were pretty pleased with the results. We chopped up some peanuts and sprinkled the slices with the nuts and some mini m&m’s.

Overall it was a pretty fun project. We both got a little bit of hot carmel on our hands but survived and what would have been a dull night sitting on the couch was a fun moment where once again, as much as I make fun of Pinterest, it has some great content and has produced some great food, home decor and general humor in my life. So the next time Melissa starts talking about the next big idea she found and wants to try I’ll probably respond by saying, “Yes, that sounds ‘pinteresting’ to me."

-jay

speaking of pinterest...

So pinterest is good for so many reasons, here is just one more.  

During this wonderful labor day, I have labored over my very first batch of purely from scratch cupcakes.  I saw this picture of these beautiful cupcakes on pinterest the other day and decided that I must try them.

They are Lemon Berry Cupcakes and it is easy to see why I fell in love with them at first sight.  After following a couple links I found out that they were from a blog that is written by a high school student in Seattle.  The blog is really cute and she has some great recipes up on her site.

I know that my cupcakes look nothing like hers, but they sure do taste good!  The recipe was easy to follow and it all went just like she described in the recipe.  Her icing looks ten times better than mine, mine came out very thin.  I think it was because I got too excited and did not wait the right amount of time before icing the cupcakes.

Either way, they are delicious and I am happy how they turned out.  The cake part is a very tasty lemon pound cake with raspberry and blackberry topping.  Yum!

These cupcakes are going to be shared with some friends tonight at dinner and some are going to be brought to school for my fifth grade team to start the school off right, or at leat start it off on a sugar kick...that is really what six fifth grade teachers need at 7:00 in the morning on the first day of school!

-melissa