Almost Perfect Cake

I was attempting this yummy sounding cream cheese pound cake 

and wrote down the directions wrong. It says to bake the cake for 1 hour and 40 minutes. I wrote down 1 hour. However, even 1 hour is too long for a cake recipie, even a big one made in a bundt pan. You might end up with this: 

which as you might note, is blacker than my very messy counter-top. On the upside however, if you ignore the blackened crust, the inside actually tastes pretty good!  

Le Sabbat

Our church dose a special youth meal once a year that I had the joy of planning for this year. So of course I used Pininterest to find recipes to use. It was Asian themed so I had quite a bit of fodder to choose from.

On the Table
First up was a recipe to make flat crispy wantons like you would use to dip or break into soup. This recipe basically had you cut up wanton wrappers, salt and pepper them, and then bake them. They turned out pretty well as long as you don't layer them too thick on the cookie sheet. Then they burned on the outside and didn't crisp at all on the inside. Repeatability: Probably will sometime when my hubby is craving Chinese.

Appetizers
Secondly was a crab rangoon recipe from here. This was possibly the best recipe of the night. They puffed up nicely and had just the right amount of filling. It was one of the few things that had nothing left afterwords. We cheated and bought store egg rolls to be the alternative to these but they were the item of choice. Repeatability: Will most definitely repeat. Over and over again.


Soups
We did a choice of soups as well. The first choice was from my own personal recipes of Egg Drop soup. It's a good recipe but I cannot figure out how to make it yellow like you see in restaurants. It just turns a sickly green/grey that is not appetizing to look at. But anyhow, our other choice was a Wanton Soup. It seemed to be pretty good, if time consuming. It smelled awesome. However we had a hard time getting the wantons to look as pretty as they do in the picture. Repeatablity: If we do an Asian themed one again I will use it, but not for my family, We're not a big wanton soup fan.

Main Dish
Like the soups we did one new recipe, a General Tso's Chicken; and one of my recipes a Honey Sesame Chicken.  The General's didn't turn out very well, I think we might have skipped a few steps in it. It seemed to taste the same as the Honey Chicken did which should most definitely not be the case. Repeatability: Yes, but if it tastes the same I'm going to loose it. The only real reason I want to try it again is because my husband loves General Tso's.

Dessert
Dessert was sugar cookies from a mix and pre-bought fortune cookies. I figured we had enough work to do as it was!

Discoveries:

1. I should make the recipes before hand if possible to make sure they are actually good!
2. We could have made a lot of the ingredients for these recipes a head of time. I will look for recipes in the future that will make this more possible. 

Baby Leg Warmers from Adult Knee Socks

The other day I found a project that I just had to do right away. I personally love leg warmers because I am perpetually cold, and wear them even though they haven't been in style for quite a while now. However, it has become fairly popular to stick your little one in them. I've been disappointed to have to pass over them since you can't seem to find baby leg warmers cheaper than $10 anywhere. So when I came across this brilliant idea to make them, I just had to try it right away.

Basically you take adult knee socks, cut them off and sew a hem. Easy, cheap and super cute! So I sent my very loving and humoring husband out to get socks that very night. (Mostly because I wouldn't part with any of my own socks!) And he came back with two two packs of socks. They were actually kid socks meant for sizes 10-4, but they seem to have worked out just fine.

So Discoveries:

1. It is much easier to change a baby with leg warmers on than pants
2. Kid socks work just fine for now, but may not be long enough for very long
3. When I tried my knee socks on The Cheerio Monster to see if the project would work I found out I would have to cut some of the length down. So if you are making this for your own little one to be, make them just a little shorter, or plan on letting them bunch like traditional leg warmers.
4. Just like adult leg warmers these tend to fall down and bunch anyways. 
5. I actually ended up turning these socks around and using the ankle area of the sock up on her tubby little thighs because the ankle part was too tight. 
6. I think I'll try sports knee socks next. My pair of purple softball ones clung to her legs pretty well and have always been extra warm. 
7. These are particularly nice for cold linoleum, tile, or wood floors. Warm yet still thin and clingy enough that Baby can move around. 

Hand Soap Recipe

Actually the first Pininterest project I tried, this recipe to make hand soap was fairly easy. As an added plus it uses up bar soap, that doesn't seem to leave our house fast enough. I love the smell of Ivory soap (and we happen to have a ton of it) so I used an Ivory soap bar for this batch. But I'm getting a head of myself. Here is where I found the link, and here is what I ended with:

Not as pretty as their picture but oh well. So...

Discoveries:

1. The glycerin was right where she said it was. I found it in Wal-Mart.
2. Be careful when grating the soap. It is fast (and that makes it gratifyingly fun), but make sure not to grate your knuckles like I did.
3. The soap doesn't smell as strong as the original bar, but still smells like Ivory soap.
4. I let it cool in the container and it seemed to pretty much congeal. Not having a funnel meant I lost a good deal of soap to the counter and sink. So I would advise you to not be lazy like me and just buy a funnel.
5. After sitting for a while in the hand pump, the soap has separated some. It's watery when I pump it out, but I think that a little bit of shaking every now and then will help. It also still works just fine a little waterier.

I will probably try the next batch without glycerin, to see if that takes care of issue 4 and 5, but it will be a while before we go through this much soap.

Roses Part 1: Rolled with Glue Gun

I've been working on several different types of fabric flower for a friend of mine, and she sent me this blog for a how-to on rolled roses. There are lots of different instructions on how to do rolled roses online, but so far her's have been the clearest I've found. Here is her rose:

And here are mine:

(I found the leaves idea somewhere else... still looking for that link)
I did the left one by cutting the piece and the right one by tearing the piece. You can't tell it in the picture but there is not really all that much difference, they both frayed a bit.
I'm fairly happy with them. I used the same length piece for both of them but you can see how the right one is tighter and smaller. It also caves upwards.

Discoveries:

1. What she says about the low-temp glue gun? Follow it please. Don't be me, I'm not always the smartest cookie in the box.
2. Apparently Jo-Ann's sells a glue stick that is clear but drys white. Another tally off the rapidly decreasing Jo-Ann scoreboard.
3. I think I'm going to try a sewn version of these next. Gluing was messy and the roses won't "bloom" as they might if they were sewn.

Hand Drawing Via Sharpie

We just moved and so I have been on the lookout for sunflower decor to put in our kitchen. Today I came across this blog that showed how to sharpie over a picture you printed out from your computer and then to re-trace it on the back. (Making the back the final picture) It really was easy and fairly fool proof! I have little to no drawing ability myself, but I think it turned out pretty ok.

So I did a search on google and the above picture is the one I settled on. I didn't even bother to download it, just ignored the iStockphoto stuff and printed it off. However, I forgot to do a print preview and when I printed it from the internet it was much smaller than I wanted. Nevertheless, I decided to make the small one my trial run and this is how it turned out:

Not too shabby for a 'free-hand' sharpie picture!

Since I was busy procrastinating from doing the dishes or any other sort of cleaning, I decided to save the picture on my computer and print it off in a 5x8 size. After tracing, re-tracing, cropping, and framing, my final result is:

He is looking great, but slightly lonely so I'll probably add a few more of these later.

Discoveries:

1. The bigger picture was harder to re-trace and cover all of the black lines that seeped through. Maybe this was because I was tired or maybe because it was bigger.
2. Be sure to put an extra scrap of paper behind the one you are working on, it is meant to bleed through, and will probably go through more than one sheet.
3. Pick a picture without a lot of tiny details. Sharpies tend to ink and then spread out (can't remember what that's called... any ideas?) so it's harder to do the fine details. You can see that I skipped the tiny white dots on the edges of the butterflies wings in a few places, and altogether on the smaller one.
4. You might also try this with a felt or super inky pen. However, I would think that it might be harder to re-trace fine lines. Sharpies can (and did!) cover a multiplicity of errors.  

And on a side note... I'm not sure why blogger decided that this last section needed a different color text background.... anyone know how to fix it? Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Horray! A Way Around the Facebook Issue.

So I've completed several projects that I found the instructions/helps for through pictures on Pininterest. However some of them are great, and some... not so much. I want to be able to pin my results/opinions back onto Pininterest, but the usual path (facebook) is one of the only exceptions to places you can't 'pin' from. So here is a review of the ones I've done, most with pictures of my version of the project.