musings from the middle

The end to another week finds me feeling better, but not great. I really hate having a cold, but as it is the first one I've had in a long time I shall not complain to bitterly.

So I hope to return next week showing off some of the layouts I've completed for Stacy's class over on BPC. I need to get a bit of a move on with getting them all done, as the goal is twelve layouts a month for the whole year - a total of 144 by the end of December. That is a lot of layouts for me, but I have a lot of kits laying around and this might help me put a dent in my stash.

My drink for this week end matches the weather and the way I feel, so it is a warm comforting elixir of coffee and spices. And comes to us courtesy of Country Living magazine.

White Spiced Coffee

 

• 3 cup(s) whole milk
• 1 cup(s) whole coffee beans, lightly cracked
• 1 1/2 stick(s) (3 inches long) cinnamon sticks
• 4 whole(s) green cardamom pods
• 1/4 cup(s) honey
• 2 tablespoon(s) dark rum, such as Mount Gay, optional

 

Directions

1. Place the milk and crushed coffee beans in a saucepan. Heat the mixture to a simmer over medium-high heat, about 7 minutes. Immediately remove from the heat and let the beans steep in the milk for 15 minutes.
2. Strain the coffee mixture and transfer to the jar of a blender. Discard the crushed coffee beans. Add the cinnamon sticks, cardamom, and honey to the steeped milk and blend on high speed until the spices are coarsely ground, about 30 seconds.
3. Strain the liquid back into the saucepan and discard the ground spices. Rewarm the spiced coffee over medium-high heat until the liquid is hot and steaming. Add rum, if desired. Pour into warmed coffee mugs, and serve hot.

To simplify this recipe for real people - use an equal coffee and milk heated together, and add ground spices and the honey to coffee and whisk and enjoy. This is a great cozy afternoon pick me up. Very tasty after dinner drink with the addition of the rum, just use decaf coffee if your worried about the caffeine too late at night keeping you awake.

Cold medicine and Pinterest

I've been struck by a cold and too many mornings at the ice rink, so I feel really tired and sick. All I was able to do today in a cold medicine haze - that no amount of coffee could help, was tend to my long neglected pinterest boards. 

Now that it is the third week of January I suddenly felt the need to shake off the metaphoric last bit of the holidays and all things winter, and look for some fresh imagery. So I started thinking about Valentines day, and all the white, red, and pink goodness.  It felt so nice to dive into the clean clear lines, and color of the celebration of love (and all things chocolate)

 

I guess I'm not the only one hungry for the holiday of love and chocolate, because within minutes of creating my new pinterest board there was a flurry of repins, and likes. Here is a link to the board if you would like to go see all the goodness for yourself. my pinterest boards

 

52 lists in 52 weeks - week 1

week 1: " Today I will"

• Finally get over to Michaels crafts to get the spray paint for the muffin tin for my BPC class Twelve
• Remember to dvr 'wild krafts' for Dashiell, because he's at school late this afternoon
• Go to the grocery store for food, I'm tired of standing in front of cupboard/ refrigerator looking in vain for something to through together for dinner.
• Blog

As soon as I hit publish, one item will be crossed of my list! The rest call for me to put on make-up/and real clothes, so they will have to wait for a bit.

What is on your list today?

 

Cupcake Monday

Another week started and that must mean an over flowing laundry bin is calling my name in a whisper, " Krista if you don't do me today the kids won't have clean uniforms for school tomorrow" Normally the laundry beckons me on Sunday, but I ignored it's siren's song because today is a school holiday. So I'm glad it's a cold rainy day, because out door activity is off the schedule - only inside play.

I was going to share the giant cupcake cake I made Harper for her birthday on Saturday, but everything went sideways with her cake. A little back-story on this cake - about two years ago Dashiell saw this giant cupcake pan on TV, and he wanted me to run right out and buy it. Now I'm not in the habit of running out and buying the things he sees in TV, and in his words " We really NEED (insert items name here) this, because it's really useful". These really useful items he has wanted are in no particular order - magic putty, the perfect brownie pan, sham wow, you see the trend here. But the big cupcake pan was something I was willing to see about getting when he said that was what he wanted me to make for his birthday cake.

After taking a few minutes on Google to figure out that the expensive pan from William Sonoma was the way to go, because the cheap pan from Wilton's (at Michaels) was a piece of crap. I saw more than a few people say they bought the Wilton's pan and then had to turn around and buy the Williams Sonoma pan, because it seems the Wilton pan bakes one side to the cake faster than the other - burnt bottom gooey top. Cut to Dashiell's birthday and one giant cupcake cake later the William Sonoma cake turned out perfect, although it takes a really long time to make said cake because there are many steps involved in the cooling and construction of this cake. The most important part of this story is that Dashiell like chocolate cake and I've only made this cake in chocolate before.

Harper decided she wanted the GCC (giant cupcake cake) this year, and that was welcome news to everyone, because we were up in Napa for Dashiell's birthday so I didn't make GCC for him this year. Now Harper loves white cake I call it wedding white, and this it different from regular vanilla as I was informed one year because vanilla looks yellow to her. So GCC was a fluffy white cake with blue butter cream icing, and this was not a good thing because it turns out that chocolate is a sturdy cake able to hold up under the weight of the two layers with the frosting on the top, but fluffy white just collapsedd under it's own weight. GCC looked like a big blue fallen souffle by the time the candles were blown out - good thing it tasted so good.

I decided to share a coconut cupcake recipe instead

Ingredients

• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons each vanilla and almond extracts
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon each baking powder, baking soda, and salt
• 1 cup coconut milk
• 1 1/2 cups flaked coconut, plain or toasted
• 8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature2 3/4 cups powdered sugar

Preparation

1. 1. Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, cream together 2 cups butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in 1 1/2 teaspoons each vanilla and almond extracts.
2. 2. In another large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add to butter and sugar mixture in 3 batches, alternating with coconut milk. Stir 1 cup flaked coconut into the batter.
3. 3. Fill 30 paper-lined muffin cups (1/2-cup capacity) in two or more muffin pans about 2/3 full with batter. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes before removing muffins from pans. Cool completely.
4. 4. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, beat cream cheese, 3/4 cup butter, and 1/2 teaspoon each vanilla and almond extract until smooth. Gradually beat in powdered sugar. Frost cupcakes and sprinkle with remaining coconut

Keeping up

In my quest to stay caught up on all my project ( because I feel that I've missed out on so much by starting things like big picture classes, project life, etc, and by falling behind it becomes a big source of stress) I'm done with my  pre class assignment for Stacy Julian's Twelve class. I signed up the last week of December because I was really on the fence about the cost of the class, and now I'm so glad I decided to take the plunge on this one.

 

The best thing is, I am really trying hard to use up stash on my projects this month. This January is a no buy anything new month - Studio Calico kit doesn't count :)

Converting images for Project Life

Today I decided to have some fun, and at the same time play with my silhouette while at the same time work on Project Life - which from now on will not be capitalized because hitting the shift key really slows down my typing. Anyway I had seen on Ali's blog her project life front page, and she had added some wonderful things she had cut with her silhouette of course I too wanted to add some of the same images to my album. Quick as my little fingers could fly I went over to designer digitals and found these.

Many other much more talented people done tutorials on how to do this, but there are a lot of lucky scrappers with brand new cameos that might have not yet seen how to convert digital brushes into images that can be cut on the silhouette cameo. The first thing to do is find an image ( or 2,3,4) that you like, but take the time to really think about if the image will be easy to cut - too many thin loopy lines really will be a pain to cut unless your blade is really sharp. Next open the image in your silhouette, and remember to click "all files" because the default file type is sil and you won't be able to see the jpegs until you change the file type.

Next look up in the right hand corner of of you window and find the blue square with the yellow line around it - this is the trace function. Click this button to bring up the trace options on the right hand side, and drag the blue trace box around your image

 

See how the image turned yellow this it good, but it needs to be completely yellow. I went over to the high pass box and unchecked it, and pushed the slider all the way to the right. This is the best way to make sure there aren't any spots in the middle of the letters that don't fill. Now just click the trace button ( the box with the double red squiggly boxes) While I know this might seem to be obvious, there has been many a time that I've forgotten this step and had to start over.

 

Now drag the images apart, and delete the original image and cut your new awesome silhouette image. Remember to save your new file so it can be imported into the silhouette library.

 

Getting back into the everyday routine

With the kids back in school I find myself filling up the time nicely, with almost too much to do between 7 and 3. Exercise is taking up a chunk of said time, but this is a good thing, so I won't whine. Also the decision to actually keep up with my on-line classes - you know prep and complete the projects in a timely fashion is eating up part of my day, and most important -  keeping up with project life. I'm finding myself working on both 2011 and 2012 right now.

Today is set aside for finish up my bin for Stacy's Twelve class over at BPC, and I found mine  at office depot.

 

 

We also said good bye to our awesome christmas tree, it really was one of the best trees we've had in years. So I just had to take one last quick picture just as the truck came to pick it up to be turned into mulch.

 

A family day out and about

We decided to head out to Lego Land for the last day of Christmas vacation. The funny thing was that we really didn't cover that much of the park, it's a good thing we have a membership or I'd feel we didn't get our moneys worth on admission. Harper and Dashiell wanted to do the mindstorm thing, and that took about an hour then we had lunch. Now with almost two hours gone we finally headed out to get on a few rides

 

Denny and Dashiell decided they wanted to go over and play mini golf, but Harper wanted no part of that so we split up at that point. While the boys were golfing Harper wanted to ride the knights challange. We headed up to castil hill, and Harper got in line. I have to say the line for this ride is the longest in the park, it was a good thing there weren't too many people there today. But I had to hang around for about 25 minutes for Harper to get her turn, I didn't mind too much because the weather was so nice today.

Things took a bit of a turn when Harper was racing through the exit gate, and it slammed back toward her and she cut her palm. While I have mentioned being more careful when she's running around because she has a tendency to hurt herself, she doesn't listen so we ended up at the first aid station.

After that it was pretty much time to head home, and start locating back packs and assorted school items. I think the kids still are in denial about the end of vacation - I'm not, and I'm really looking forward to a return of the normal week day schedule.

A brand new year

So a bright warm morning welcomed us, as we finally rolled out of bed this morning - Denny and I about 9:00am, and Harper and Dash at 10:00. I really need to get to bed earlier from now on, too many late nights in December can't take it any more. No scrapping today although I made sure  to take pictures for my project life, but I don't think that I'll be able to get much done until the kids go back to school on Tuesday.

This picture seemed so appropriate for a San Diego new year. Here's to a bright and sunny 2012''

Welcome to fun drink friday & mid afternoon page post

The last day of the work week is upon us, and that means it's time for a fun drink to relax and think happy scrappy thoughts. Today's drink is an orange martini - yum. And full of vitamin C too, so it's kind of good for you too ;)

Here is the recipe:

1 Orange Slice
3 oz Orange juice
1 oz Scotch
2 oz Vodka

Shake with ice and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with an orange and enjoy.

For todays # 12 in my 30 in 30 project

I was really happy I found a way to use this pattern paper, because I really loved it so much. It was a bit of a challenge, but I think the page turned out really cute. I also was able to use that super cute V.W. bus rub-on from October Afternoon, and use my silhouette to cut the palm tree/beach chair in the lower left corner of the page.

Now lets all get back scrapping, and thinking about what to do with all of those left over alpha's ( you know the dozens of Q's, X's, V's etc). I'm toying with idea creating border strips for a school page, there might be some misting involved - not sure, will see. Have a wonderful week end.