Ice-Cream Christmas Cookies

For Christmas my grandma usually makes these little cookies half with jelly in the middle and half with pecans in the middle that she calls Ice-Cream cookies. Well she has been sick all week so she asked me if I could make the cookies this year, so I finally got my hands on the recipe for them. I forgot to take pictures during the mixing of the batter process, but it's not too complicated.

For this recipe you'll need butter, powdered sugar, egg yolk, vanilla, flour, jelly of your choice, and pecans.

First you cream the butter and the powdered sugar together. I thought that this was the most interesting part of the recipe because I have never made a cookie that has powdered sugar used instead of granulated sugar.

Next you add in the egg yolk and vanilla and beat well. Sift the flour into the mixture and then mix.

Now you have to form teaspoon sized balls and put them onto the baking sheet.

They should look like this

Then if you're making the ones with the pecans on top you gently press the pecans into the center of the cookie, but if you're making the ones with the jelly in the center, gentle press down in the center of the cookie with your thumb to create an indent.

Fill the indents with jelly (I used strawberry, grape, and orange) and then bake at 350 for 15 - 20 minutes (I baked mine for about 17 minutes and they turned out perfect).

When they're cool just dust the top with powdered sugar and they're ready to go! Now when I made them I tripled the batch so I would have plenty of cookies and I ended up with about 4 dozen. So I'd say that they make about a dozen a batch.

Ice-cream Cookies

6 tablespoons butter or margarine

6 tablespoons powdered sugar

1 beaten egg yolk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup sifted flour

Instructions

Thoroughly cream butter and sugar

Add egg yolk and vanilla; beat well

Add flour

Drop teaspoons on un-greased cookie sheet

Top with fruits, nuts, jelly, or candies

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes

Hand-Painted Rings

Nothing says "holiday weekend" like a good yard sale.

To me, yard sales are a lot like thrift stores; you never know what you're going to find. Inevitably, you're going to find the things that the previous owner really didn't have any use for: old children's books, an outdated television set, those ugly vases that just don't look right in the living room... But every now and then, you'll find something really quirky at a sale that you just have to add to your collection of oddities. When I stumbled across this nifty table-top instrument, I was more than happy to pay the suggested $3. 

This thing is so much fun - well worth the money.

Naturally, I was looking for some blog-worthy projects to go along with this quirky find. About a block away from the first sale, I stumbled across exactly what I needed!

This bag of 40 brass rings (size 8) was perfect for an adventure in hand-painted jewelry. As much as I love visual art, I'm not the greatest painter, so I decided to go looking for supplies that would be simple and easy to work with.

I ended up with a set of craft smart paint pens, a microperm ultra-fine permanent pen, two bottles of nail polish (that included a thin tip inside of the cap), and a small tray of nail art decorations. To start, I did a lot of experimenting; my big worry was that the paint from the paint pens wouldn't stick to the brass. After covering a lot of the rings in messy blobs of paint and tiny beads that wouldn't stay, I managed to paint some simple designs that I liked. First I laid down a page of newspaper and wiped the fingerprints off of the ring.

After that, I had to find the best way to hold the ring while I painted it. Luckily the paint dried quickly! There were many designs I tried that did not turn out the way I'd hoped (flowers that turned to blobs, letters that were unreadable, etc.) but I did end up with a few that I liked:

Obligatory Harry Potter reference.

I attempted steampunk gears.

I decided to try using the tip of the nail polish cap to scrape letters into the paint. It ended up looking like this:

All in all, I had a lot of fun experimenting.

I decided to seal the rings with clear nail polish (a tip I learned on pinterest... where else?) but unfortunately, it smeared the paint. Hopefully I can find something else to keep the paint from rubbing off of the ring.

After this simple project, I learned to love my new set of paint pens. I can't wait to find another craft for them!

Becca and Lottie's Fail....

So I know some of you are probably wondering where the blog posts have been for last week and this week. Here's what happened: Lottie had this awesome post planned for last week to do a Halloween pumpkin carving post, but she waited a little bit too long to buy a pumpkin. She went around to three stores and they were all out of pumpkins. At this point it was time for the next weeks blog post, I said we would just skip a week and I would just take my turn because I had a lot of yummy things that I was cooking this past weekend.

I made so many yummy things this past weekend including peroguis and baby cake chocolate cupcakes for my roommate's 21st birthday. Now usually I have my wonderful boyfriend take pictures for me while I cook so I don't have to worry about it or get my phone all dirty.

Unfortunately, he was either not there or playing video games while I was cooking this weekend, so the picture taking was left up to me. And as I found out I get distracted while I cook and ended up with pictures of all of the ingredients I was using then forgot to take more until I was done with what I was making. And at that point I had nothing else to cook.

So both Lottie and I had a fail for our posts these past two weeks. We'll be back on our feet and posting crafts and foods for the coming weekends.

Well here are the ingredients I used for Peroguis

And the ingredients for the cupcakes

Brown Sugar Garlic Chicken

So I'd realized that I'd been doing desserts a lot so I decided to try a dinner item that I had floating around on my Pinterest. I saw this recipe for Brown Sugar Garlic Chicken, and anything with garlic catches my boyfriend's attention.

So all you need for this recipe is olive oil, brown sugar, garlic, and chicken breasts. That's it! Plain and simple.

First, preheat your oven to 500 degrees (because that takes FOREVER) and put your thawed chicken into a greased baking dish. Now the original recipe called for four boneless skinless chicken breasts, and somehow I ended up about five thinly sliced ones, so I just ended up cooking it for a shorter amount of time.

So if you're using fresh garlic like me, you're going to want to peel it as so:

1) Smash it with the flat side of you knife

2) Peel the outer part off

And peeling fresh garlic is just that simple! So next you're going to want to chop up the garlic in to small pieces.

Next you're going to heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan and then add the garlic in.

You're going to let the garlic cook for a couple of minutes (until it's soft) then you add in the brown sugar.

Make sure you stir it all up and then spread it on top of the chicken, then sprinkle it with a little salt and pepper. And put it in the oven. I put mine in the oven for 15 minutes because they were so thin, but the original recipe said to put it in for 20 minutes. It just depends on how thick your chicken is.

Now my one complaint with this recipe was based on the pictures from where I got the recipe, I expected my chicken to come out looking like this:

Looks really good right? Well this is how my chicken ended up looking:

Yeah... it didn't turn out looking as appetizing as I had hoped it would. But it actually did taste really good. I'll probably make it again, just because it has so few ingredients and is super easy to make. Plus I had this little cutie visiting us and following me around the kitchen

There's no better way to end than
with a cute dog picture

Brown Sugar Garlic Chicken

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

4 cloves of garlic

4 tablespoons of brown sugar

3 tablespoons of olive oil

Instructions

Preheat oven to 500

Grease baking dish and place chicken breasts in it

Chop garlic and cook in olive oil until soft

Add brown sugar to garlic and olive oil, mix well

Spread mixture on top of chicken and sprinkle salt and pepper on top

Bake for about 20 minutes

Refrigerate leftovers

What Does the Fox Say?

When my Facebook friends started posting statuses asking "what does the fox say?" my first response was:

Well, I...I don't know. What does the fox say?

Needless to say, this question led me to youtube in search of the music video. Of course, once you watch the video once, you have to watch it again, right? And again... And again. Whether you like the video or not, the song is definitely catchy. When I asked Becca the big question: what does the fox say? (to which she first replied: gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding) she mentioned that the fox was her sorority's animal of choice.

So when I came across a fox ornament pattern on the internet, I pushed all of my other crafting ideas aside. What a perfect fall-time gift for a fox-loving friend!

The pattern I used came from the Red Heart website. The pattern is free and very easy to follow - you can find it here.

I was lucky to find the colors I needed buried in the bottom of my yarn basket.

Haha, how perfect - Red Heart yarn!

 This was the start of a delightful project. Here are a few snapshots of my work-in-progress.

At this point, I was sure I was making the head.

At this point, I realized I wasn't.

I used safety pins to mark where the nose should go.

I used the end of my crochet hook to stuff the ears, arms, legs and tail.

 

 

At last, all of the pieces!

The pattern was great, and I was very happy with the results it gave me. For my own convenience, though, I changed a couple of things:

I definitely gave up on marking rows. The pattern suggested that I mark the beginning of each row, since the piece is worked in a continuous round. It's a great suggestion, but I got impatient with marking rows and decided to wing it and see what happened. Luckily my guesstimations turned out right.

I also added to the number of stitches I chained for the arms, legs and ears. Working a tight circle with a color so dark and hard to see is not easy. To save myself some time and trouble, I added a stitch to the first round for all the limbs. The extra stitch gave me a little more space to work with; it also gave me slightly larger limbs for the (slightly overstuffed) body. It worked out well in the end.

I was very excited when all of the pieces were finished. All that I needed to do next was attach everything to the body!

An hour later, I realized that I had been overconfident.

Stitching the pieces (especially the arms and the nose) onto the body took a lot more time than I thought it would... And it was tricky. My plastic yarn needle bended in ways I knew it shouldn't have, but amazingly it managed to attach each and every piece securely.

At long last, I wrapped the little scarf around Mr. Fox's neck... Because every fox should be a little bit fancy.

So... What does the fox say?

Crochet!

Pumpkin Bread

Fall is the season for all things pumpkin! Now I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin drinks, but pumpkin food COUNT ME IN! So this week I decided to try to make my own pumpkin creation. I've made banana bread countless times, so obviously the next step for the fall season is pumpkin bread! So I looked up a pumpkin recipe and decided that I wanted to tweak it a little. You can find the original one I used here.

So for this recipe you'll need: Flour, salt, sugar, baking soda, pumpkin puree, coconut oil, eggs, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and water

So first you're going to preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Then you mix together one and a half cups of flour, one half a teaspoon of salt, a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of baking soda. And then just set it to the side

So you might be wondering what the distorted looking orange stuff in the ziplock bag is in the other picture. That is my homemade pumpkin puree. I decided a while ago that I liked the homemade version better than the stuff from the can. One pumpkin gets me about eight cups of pumpkin puree, which I measure out into ziplock bags (one cup per bag) and then into the freezer they go until I'm ready to make something pumpkin! Here's what it looks like after it's defrosted:

So the original recipe that I found had called for olive oil. Now don't get me wrong, I love olive oil, but I couldn't bring myself to put it into a baked good because it has such a strong flavor. Now I had heard that using coconut oil in baking makes things come out really moist, and I happened to have coconut oil on hand because I use it to make sugar scrubs so I thought I'd give it a try.

So the recipe had called for half a cup of olive oil, so I figured I'd just use half a cup of coconut oil. So I keep my coconut oil in the fridge so it stays solid and doesn't spill all over on accident (I've had that happen). So I just cut some out of the jar and put it in the measuring cup thinking that if it was over or under half a cup after I put it in the microwave to liquify I could add more or take some out. As it turns out I had cut out EXACTLY half a cup, I took that as a sign to proceed and try it with coconut oil

See! Right at half a cup!

So what you want to do now is mix the one cup of pumpkin puree, a half cup of coconut oil, two eggs, a fourth of a cup of water, and then half a teaspoon each of allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg in the mixer

I would also like to stop for a moment and revel in how cute my spice holders that my mom passed down to me are!

Seriously SO CUTE!

So after you have all of the wet ingredients mixed up, its time to add in the flour mixture

Make sure that you mix it really well to get everything incorporated. It should look something like this:

So the original recipe called for a 9x5 loaf pan, I only had 8x4 loaf pans, so i used two of them. Make sure you grease the pans down so that the bread will pop right out.

They need to cook for about 50 minutes, until a knife comes out clean. And then you have delicious pumpkin bread to share!

I think I'm going to call this recipe a success judging by the fact that in only a matter of hours there is very little left of the first loaf from me and my roommates going at it.

Pumpkin Bread
Adapted from Simply Recipes

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup coconut oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350

Combine flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda in a bowl

Mix together pumpkin, coconut oil, eggs, water, allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a mixer

Add in flour mixture

Pour into two greased 8x4 loaf pans. Bake about 50 minutes or until knife inserted comes out clean. Take loaves out of pans and serve.

Makes 2 loaves. Cover after making.