iPhone Life Recently

Holiday Baking: Eggnog Crumb Cake

 

First, we need to get some formalities out of the way: namely, I almost never bake from a mix!  I've evolved to be a snotty brat that way.  After we got married, I started discovering how to cook and bake, and the first time I made an actual cake from scratch, I was shocked.  It tasted NOTHING like the boxed cakes I had previously made up to that point.  It tasted so much richer, so much more simple and basic but at the same time more complex.  I also decided that, if I'm going to go through the hassle of busting out my mixer, cracking eggs and adding dry ingredients to wet ingredients, I might as well go the whole nine yards and make everything from scratch.  At that point, it's already a project, so it makes more sense to use pantry items instead of a pre-packaged mix.

All that being said, I've come to find that Trader Joe's Baking Mixes are essentially like the real thing.  They save time during the holidays, but they also require the use and addition of real ingredients like butter (instead of oil or shortening) and milk (instead of water) to keep the cake tasting completely homemade.  I've been happy with their brownie and blondie mixes, and I am thrilled with their Cinnamon Crumb Cake, pictured above.

After making it once, I decided to switch things up for the holidays and add eggnog to the base of the cake.  The recipe calls for milk, so I made a quick substitution.  Since eggnog is so thick, I still added 1/3 cup of milk to the batter until it reached a good consistency (as for any cake.)  The finished product was delightful!  The eggnog wasn't overpowering, but at the same time it had a strong presence in the cake.  It went along beautifully with the cinnamon crumb top.  This cake was perfect for a holiday weekend morning with a cup of coffee.  I need to go back to Trader Joe's and stock up on some more to make for this weekend and maybe next weekend!

I'm going to remind myself of this tip next year, to substitute eggnog in baking products for the holidays.  It's an easy way to put a holiday flourish on an everyday treat!

Handmade Holidays: Trees!

These fabric trees are so cute and so fun!  My sister-in-law has the pattern and made herself a very pretty one.  She very graciously offered to make me a couple.  What I like about these is they are so customizable...  You can use one fabric for the whole thing, or two coordinating prints.

This first one uses a traditional holiday fabric, and it utilizes the leftover yardage from one of the fabric wreaths I made.

The second one has glittery blue and grey/silver fabric, and I picked them because they're non-traditional Christmas colors; really more like winter colors.  I'm thrilled with how they turned out!  Thanks, Stacy!

iPhone Life Recently

It's December.  If you're like me, you're hustling and bustling and trying to find time to fit everything in among all of the parties, baking, wrapping, cooking and card-writing.

I actually had a handle on things until about last weekend.  While this has been a year of strange curve balls thrown our way, last week one of my best friends went through a pretty enormous, life-changing misfortune.  It's one of those traumas that keeps getting worse and larger in scope, despite all evidence to the contrary that it's already as bleak as can be.  So last weekend, all obligations fell through the cracks as I thought about her and was with her.

Thursday rolled around and I just sat down to upload some photos to the blog and work on some posts when I noticed Seamus, one of our little kitties, was having a medical emergency and had to be rushed to the vet.  He spent about 2 days at the vet hospital after having a procedure, which clearly threw my blog plans out the window.

I have a little kitty at home recovering now, and it's soooo sad because Seamus is usually our full of energy, full of mischief little spitfire.  He's a whirling dervish for real.  Now he's just sleeping off the experience and cuddling with us, which is very sweet but very jarring given that it's him!  I'm glad he's home and we're all breathing easier.

What have I done in between all of the surprise and upset that has crept into the season so far?  Well, yesterday I baked cookies.  I also went to a warehouse book sale, which is one of my favorite things to do each Christmas.  We've visited with family and stayed in watching holiday movies.

Some things are going to fall by the wayside though.  For instance, I'm not sure if I'll get my Christmas cards out in the mail this year, for the first year ever.  I have a day off tomorrow, then I'm working 4 days in a row till the weekend.  Next weekend won't give me a spare moment to fill them out because we are having what can only be described as a Christmas Bonanza the entire 2 days.  THREE Christmas parties on Saturday, followed by a Christmas play and dinner on Sunday.  I have the fortune to be on vacation the entire next week, so I should really push myself to mail them then.  But, I know I'll have last minute errands to run, plus getting together for my sister's birthday, plus helping my friend move home from Texas.  I think I'm letting the Christmas cards go much easier this year because I bought my cards in the $1 Spot at Target.  Usually I pay about $10 a box and there's no way I'd essentially kiss $30 in cards goodbye and never mail them.  This year, $3 total?  If it saves me the time and energy, I'm kinda all for it.

So, as seen through my iPhone Photo Stream, this has been a snippet of my life lately:

Downtown Berea after dinner with friends.

My nephew!

Super silly.

Home from the vet hospital and so, so exhausted.  Poor little Seamus!

Christmas tree, Take 2.  Our lights burned out a few nights ago so I had to take down all the ornaments, remove the lights, re-string the tree with new lights and re-hang the ornaments.  In spite of all this, I am still a proponent of unlit trees.  A bunch of people I know have recently had parts of their pre-lit trees go out and it's apparently a nightmare of epic proportions to re-string them or remove the lights.  Plus, I like being able to change up the light colors each year.  I am enormously fond of blue Christmas lights, so some years we do an all-blue tree.  Some years, all white.  This year, white and blue.  I like being able to change it on a whim.  Or, decorate it twice in one season.  Bah!

Peanut Butter Blossoms

Peekaboo!

Christmas Cats Behaving Badly

So, we've only been cat owners for a couple of years.  We adopted our first cat, Seamus, the day after Christmas in 2010.  Even though he was only 4 months old, he deftly figured out ways to attempt to destroy our Christmas tree!  We usually take it down after the New Year, but we took it up a couple days after having him that first Christmas.

Cats are so curious by nature, and they're so agile....a Christmas tree is basically their version of Christmas Morning.  They jump it, scale it, bat at ornaments, bite the branches.  Last year we decided not even to put up our tree because we were so mentally exhausted trying to think of ways to prevent them from being absolutely ludicrous.

This Christmas, we decided to put the tree in our bedroom and keep the door shut at all times.  I actually love this compromise.  While we don't have the lit tree in our living room, we have all of our other decorations out there to make it seem festive all the same.  And having it in the bedroom is so unbelievably cozy.  At night, Mr. My Blog for Bonnie and I have it lit while we read before bed.  On weekend mornings, we've turned it on first thing in the morning while relaxing for a few minutes before starting the day.

Of course, the cats got wind of the fact that it's in there, and occasionally they'll barge their way into the room when our arms are full of laundry or we're unsuspectingly exiting the room in the very early mornings before work.    We let them have their fun and explore the tree...I have to say, taking these photos was an exercise in hilarity!

I love this one...I took it minutes after hanging the stockings.  They're totally contemplating all the trouble they can get into!

Handmade Holidays: Wreaths

Earlier in the fall, I decided that my Christmas wreath needed to be replaced.  Actually, I threw it away last January as the decorations came down and the bone-chilling cold started to set in.  I was given the wreath as a Housewarming present back in 2003, and while it was a gorgeous wreath, the years of constantly being hung up, taken down, and stored took their toll.  Instead of being circular, the wreath was decidedly oval-shaped.

I started looking to Pinterest for some ideas.  What I really wanted to do was make one of those new ornament bulb wreaths that seem to be taking over people's boards.  However, after reading some tutorials, I discovered that the people who made them were having issues:  the wreaths would fall, shattering the ornaments, or the hot glue wouldn't be enough of a bonding agent to adhere them to the base and they'd start slipping away one by one.  Ack!  I'm not much of a crafter, and I need some fool-proof ideas and designs.

I came across a couple of posts about fabric-covered wreaths.  This sounded perfect for me!  One day in October, I went to the fabric store and selected two Christmas prints.  I picked 2 because I couldn't narrow the choice down to just one.  I also selected two small foam wreath bases for about $4 each.  I then went to the Holiday decorations section and selected some "pickings" to glue on top of the finished wreaths.

This project was perfect for me because it really didn't require any precision.  I cut the fabric into free-form strips with my sewing scissors.  Then, I wrapped each strip around the wreath and secured them into the back with my sewing pins.  The wreath was covered in about 10 minutes and then I hot-glued the decorations on top.

I have one wreath on our outside door and the other above our TV in the living room.  They're small, but cute.  And I was able to use the leftover fabric from the wreath on our door for another decoration: a stuffed fabric tree that my sister-in-law graciously made for me! (post on those to come soon!)

Don't Underestimate the Goodness of This Cheeseball

 

Thanksgiving week has drawn to a close.  For many of us, we won't be seeing some of the food we indulged in until next Thanksgiving:  so much of what we eat for that holiday is specific just to that particular Thursday in November.

However, some of it can transition over to December and join us for all of our Christmas and New Year's festivities.  This cheeseball recipe is one of them.  I plan on making it at least once more in December to bring to a party or to an event.

I made this for Thanksgiving and it was a true hit.  How do I know?  Well, our family Thanksgiving is a food fiesta if ever there was one.  We have family come in from New York and Massachusetts and it's our one "big holiday" all year because it's the only holiday we do with extended family.  In our family, Thanksgiving is bigger than Christmas, and we treat it as such.  We double and triple our recipes to make sure plenty of leftovers exist for the entire weekend.  After eating at 1 or 2, we gather in the living room, take naps, catch up on gossip, watch football, have coffee and beer, and then we take all the food out of the fridge again around 6 or 7.  After eating again, we play games.  As we were taking all of the leftovers out for Round 2 of our Thanksgiving feast, several people asked if there was any more of this cheeseball leftover.  For a lowly cheeseball to be referenced among the many Thanksgiving sides and main dishes, you know it was popular.  In fact, I have yet to meet someone who doesn't like it.

I made this cheeseball years ago, in the early 2000's when I saw Paula Deen appear on an episode of Oprah and whip it up for the audience.  For whatever reason, it entered the rotation and I didn't bring it out again until this year.  I'm glad I resurrected it, because it is ridiculously easy to make and it makes 2 giant cheeseballs.  

Here's the original recipe:  Fisher Nutty Bacon Cheeseball.  Here's how I adapted it; mainly, I doubled the amount of cream cheese to make 2 balls instead of 1, I use walnuts instead of pecans and I only roll the ball in walnuts, not walnuts and bacon (I found that the bacon would constantly fall off the cheeseball...instead I just add all of the bacon to the mixture since it gets divided among 2 separate cheeseballs.)

Ingredients:

2, 8 ounce packages of cream cheese, very softened

2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1/2 cup milk

1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese (I usually add a bit more, here)

1 jar pimiento, drained

1/4 cup minced green onions

3/4 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped and divided

10 slices bacon, cooked, drained and finely chopped

Directions:

Place softened cream cheese in a large bowl and mix on medium speed for a couple of minutes.  Add milk and mix again.  Add remaining ingredients, including half of the nuts and mix again until well incorporated.

Divide mixture into two.  Turn out onto plastic wrap or non-stick foil and shape into 2 separate balls.  Wrap the balls and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.  After 2 hours, unwrap and roll each ball in the remaining chopped walnuts or pecans.  

Serve with crackers.

Enjoy!

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/food/Fisher-Nutty-Bacon-Cheese-Ball#ixzz2DFHn3Smt

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese , softened

1/2 cup milk

2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese

1/4 cup (1 ounce) blue cheese , crumbled

1/4 cup finely minced green onions (white part only)

1 jar diced pimento , drained

3/4 cup Fisher pecans , divided (Of course, any nut will do!)

10 slices bacon , cooked, drained, finely crumbled and divided

Salt and pepper

1/4 cup minced parsley

1 tablespoon poppy seeds

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/food/Fisher-Nutty-Bacon-Cheese-Ball#ixzz2DFHn3Smt

  

Another Photo Evolution

I decided to play around with one of my many photo apps again.  A quick exploration of how this particular photo evolved:

The original photo!  This is unedited in my iPhone.  And yes, my husband is reading a book called "Effective Project Management."  I, on the other hand, can usually be found with something by Maeve Binchy.  Love her!

I moved on to Picfx, where I ran the "Police" filter over it, giving it a nice blue look.

Last but not least, I opened the new photo in Finger Focus.  This app allows you to zoom in on any part of your photo and direct focus on a particular element. In this case, I zeroed the focus in on Seamus, while the rest of the photo remained blurred.  

Photo editing:  I just can't stop!  I'm having a great time with it because this is something I never did in the past.  Seriously, how did people survive loading digital photos without their smart phones?  It was such a pain to insert the memory card in the computer, upload everything, then open the file and re-upload everything to a share site.  By the time all that was done, the last thing I wanted to do was any edits.  The exception would be the "auto correct" button in Shutterfly, or occasionally playing around with some color saturation.  I love how instant everything is on the iphone.  

You can usually find me playing around with photo editing while I'm watching TV, when I have a quick 5 minutes to myself, or on my days off when I'm relaxing in bed before getting the day started.  It's a new hobby that is holding me hostage!

iPhone Weekend

What Thanksgiving Looked Like For Me