29 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in All Sparkled Up, allsparkledup, baking, birthday, cake decorating, family, food
She turned 10 and had fun putting the royal icing fantasy flowers on her little cake at her party.
She even broke some petals from the flowers and used them so creatively. I love her style!
23 Saturday Dec 2017
Posted in All Sparkled Up, baking, Christmas, crafts, DIY, family, holiday, home, home decor, Uncategorized
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I hosted a Christmas Lunch for two of my daughters-in-law. The tablescape was Christmas at Sea, which featured an old ship that belonged to my dear father-in-law. I love the Christmas song “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing in on Christmas Day” and that was the original inspiration for the table. I would need smaller ships to fit three on the table though so one ship was big enough. One of my daughters-in-law used to work on a cruise ship so the theme was all the more fun.
The ship was placed on a piece of fluffy white batting in the center of the table. Small glass balls in white and wintery shades of gray were scattered like bubbles around the ship.
Small crocheted snowflakes were hung from the ship’s sails.
I also hung several glass balls and glass icicles and chandelier prisms from the ship to add to the wintery icy effect.
The napkins were made from Vintage Christmas Carol sheet music fabric from Spoonflower. I had the design printed on Linen Cotton Canvas and it made lovely napkins.
On each napkin I placed a sugar cookie snowflake. They turned out pretty but are so fragile that I broke the royal icing on several even before the lunch! But I adore snowflakes so I’ll probably make these again, even if they do break easily.
Several of the smaller snowflake cookies were placed around the ship.
To light the ship, I used three strands of tiny, battery operated lights. The battery boxes fit perfectly under the ship and were hidden under the white batting.
Lunch was Potato Bacon Chowder, Ham Barbecue Rolls, Spinach Salad, and Cranberry Cheesecake Pie for dessert. We were sad that one of the girls couldn’t make it due to a sore throat. But now I have a good excuse to host again. It was too fun to only do once. Instead of Christmas at Sea, it will be Winter at Sea!
I wish we had a fireplace mantel in the living room. I’d love to style ships like this on a mantel. If you do, please post in the comments and share. I’d love to see it!
31 Saturday Dec 2016
Posted in All Sparkled Up, allsparkledup, baking, cooking, crafts, DIY, food, recipe, sparkling, tea time, tutorial, Uncategorized
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So happy she loved the gift I made for her! Specialty Sugars for her tea and coffee and sprinkling on toast, cereal or anything else that needs a little sweet sparkle.
Delicious and beautiful flavored sugars in jars.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” it is said. So true. I couldn’t access my precut wood pieces or run a saw so I ended up using the only wood on hand, a 30 year old piece of Sassafrass root from my parents property. It’s been in my tea collection for decades and still has a beautiful scent. I used a small craft saw to cut thin slices of the wood to make the tags. I wrote on them with permanent marker. Now I wonder if I had wood-burned the words in… could the slice of sassafrass be steeped in boiling water to flavor tea? What fun that would be! I’ll have to try it out.
For each of the flavored sugars, I used one cup of granulated sugar plus the flavoring agent. That was plenty to fill the jar, with a little left over.
I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas! We sure had a jolly time.
12 Wednesday Oct 2016
It’s the most luscious Ham & Cheese sandwich ever! Definitely our favorite. The guys loved them for lunch.
Don’t these ingredients look yummy?
Ingredients for Croque Monsieur. Sliced homemade bread, sliced ham, gruyere cheese, Herbs de Provence, mustard béchemel.
I followed Bon Appetit’s recipe for Croque Monsieur. So delicious!
I baked a loaf of bread the day before but the guys cut into it so I had to make the Croque Monsieur slices a little thinner. The mustard béchemel turned out perfect. The only mustard I had on hand had horseradish in it but that was great with the ham and gruyere. The herbs were from Penzey’s, Herb de Provence.
Four slices of bread were spread with the prepared béchemel.
Note: Tear two round ham slices in half to fit a square piece of bread.
Half of the cheese sprinkled over the ham.
The remaining four slices of bread were spread with more mustard béchemel and placed on the sandwiches.
The remaining cheese was scattered on top of the sandwiches.
Herbes de Provence sprinkled over tops of the sandwiches.
Baked for about 18 minutes at 425 F.
Croque Monsieur
The smell coming from the oven was sooo good… The cheese! The toasty bread! The herbes!
Oh I wish you could taste this Croque Monsieur hot from the oven!
The middle was all melty and soft and the bottom crusts with dripping cheese had a great crunch. Oh so delicous!
Please comment if you’ve ever had a Croque Monsieur sandwich. Did you like it? This will be our go-to sandwich when we have tomato or bean soup this winter.
05 Wednesday Oct 2016
Posted in All Sparkled Up, allsparkledup, baking, family, food, recipe, tea time
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The plan was to get a free cup of hot coffee from “Luke’s Diner” in town. Commemorating the 16th anniversary of Gilmore Girls, and to celebrate the upcoming debut of a Gilmore Girls mini series, Netflix sponsored pop-up “Luke’s Diner” in coffee shops all over the country. Oh my goodness, I love that show!
I had every intention of going and really looked forward to it. In fact, I even walked toward the line and snapped a picture. What a special event in town!
“Luke’s Diner” pop-up at one of the local coffee shops
But then I started to miss my own “Rory” so much that I had to leave. If I had stayed, I feared I would have started to cry and end up blubbering something like “Will you please be my daughter? I miss my daughter! Anyone in this line, can I please be your Lorelai because my daughter lives halfway to China and I’m missing her so much and we watched Gilmore Girls together when she was going to college and HOW can I possibly get a cup of coffee that we would have shared but can’t because she’s halfway to China??” If I had stayed, I totally would have done that. 0_0
So I left without coffee, immediately went home and did a Sookie thing – I whipped up some Sugar Crusted Orange Ginger Muffins and cried the entire time. I sure did.
Sugar Crusted Orange Ginger Muffin
I made up this recipe years ago, just because I needed a batter that fit in the big, new muffin tins. I still use my favorite batter-scooping spoon, even though the handle is broken.
Scooping the muffin batter with the broken spoon, just because it’s the perfect size and shape for scooping.
Sugar Crusted Orange Ginger Muffins
Sift together in a large bowl:
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
5 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cardamom
Mix together in another bowl:
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup oil
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp grated orange rind
Mix together in another bowl:
3/4 cup raisins (I like golden best but any raisin will do)
3/4 cup candied ginger cut up into little pieces (I never buy the precut ginger because it has too much sugar sprinkled on it. All that extra sugar changes the texture of the recipe. It’s better to buy candied, sliced ginger and cut it up yourself with scissors.)
Dump the egg mixture into the flour mixture and quickly stir with a whisk or wooden spoon about 5 or 6 strokes. Mixture will be lumpy and NOT mixed together.
Dump in the raisins and ginger.
Stir quickly and thoroughly but briefly using a wood spoon or whisk. Mixture will be lumpy. Make sure you scrape the dry ingredients off the bottom of the bowl while mixing. If the batter gets rubbery and stretchy, you mixed it too long and the muffins might be tough. Anyway, drop spoonfuls of batter into greased, large muffin tins.
Sprinkle tops with coarse sugar crystals.
BAKE at 400F for 20-25 minutes.
Makes 12 large muffins.
Spicy bits of crystalized ginger and raisins stud this ginger & cardamom muffin.
I miss you and love you, Heather. <3
And Texas just seems like half-way to China. ;)
03 Saturday Oct 2015
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It started with the figs last week. I’ve heard fresh figs are very hard to find in the market and very expensive. Now that we have two fig trees, I can see why. Ripe figs are quite perishable, being in perfect form for just a day after picking. They can be kept in the fridge a week but do get softer. Like bananas, figs can be eaten when super ripe but they turn winey.
Every year I tend to give away our little fig harvest.
The entire first harvest of figs.
I love sharing and I’m just in the right place at the right time and there are people to give figs to. But this year, there was no one. So to do the figs justice, I determined to celebrate each and every glorious one. Such richness, oh my. Figs are liquid gold, honey that grows on a tree, a king’s dessert!
The fig trees nearly died two years ago from the cold winter. I’m so thankful we have figs again on one of the trees.
We rarely get a second harvest of figs, which usually freezes before it has time to ripen.
We were out of town so I missed the peak ripeness of some of them and several had already dropped. I picked all the ripe figs from the tree.
Look at this basket of amazingness! I wish they weren’t so perishable.
Ripe figs in a basket.
Like honeycomb dripping with honey, the plump figs ooze with sweetness.
A month ago I found a new favorite goat cheese, Julianna from Capriole.
Julianna Goat Cheese from Capriole
My entire breakfast that day centered around the first ripe fig with Julianna cheese. (posted on Instagram)
Ripe fig with goat cheese, plum, omelet, biscuit and honey
But still, there truly is nothing finer than just one perfect fig.
Figs, 2015
If you only have one fig, enjoy it slowly, plain, with nothing else at all.
One Perfect Fig
But if you have more figs, then it’s fun to go further. Which started my search for the perfect compliment, a flaky barquette to cradle a fig and other flavors.
…to be continued…
27 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in All Sparkled Up, baking, Baking for Neighbors, BFN, community, food
You can read more about Baking for Neighbors Day on this post. Today was BFN for the 4th neighbor and I sure enjoyed it!
It has been a long time since I baked for neighbors. I got a bit derailed when we got an anonymous note in the mailbox over a year ago. An anonymous neighbor put a pretty blue envelope in our mailbox. Inside was a cute card with dogs on the front. And inside the card was written “Keep your #$%&* dog out of our yard. We’re tired of it dragging your recycled beer bottles into our yard too. You’ll be glad to know that we’re moving because of you. #*#%@ “… etc.
If that neighbor knew us, they would have known that we’ve never owned a dog. They would know that we don’t drink and we do our own recycling so there are no bins of bottles. If our neighbor knew us, they would have known that I broke my back and was doing a great job of recovering. And they would have known how much I love to bake.
So instead of being discouraged and scared of meeting that anonymous neighbor that hates us, I decided to keep going with Baking for Neighbors. Today I handed the fourth neighbor a loaf of steaming hot, fresh from the oven, Sourdough Grain Bread.
Sourdough Grain Bread
When I handed her the foil-wrapped bundle, she was surprised and delighted. That made me so happy! I guess she’s not the neighbor who put that note in our mailbox.
All wrapped in napkins and foil, tied with string – a big loaf of Sourdough Grain Bread fresh from the oven for neighbor 4.
I’m all encouraged now to keep going with BFN Day! Four neighbors down, 67 to go. ::big smile::
17 Tuesday Feb 2015
While it was freezing outside, this was going on in my oven this morning.
Savory Meringue Breakfast Buns in the oven
Meringue Breakfast Buns, served with banana drizzled with Tomato Marmalade.
26 Friday Dec 2014
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I will be away for a bit but want to leave you with a couple photos. I’ll post more when I return.
Making gingerbread.
Gingerbread snowmen with wood pick arms and raisin buttons.
Decorating gingerbread.
The fun part of making cookies.
Lots of sprinkles!
Italian Sienese Nougat Candy
Wrapping each little square of Sienese Nougat Candy in cellophane. Washi tape worked great.
Springerli. The rolling pin and cookie mold are from House on the Hill http://houseonthehill.net/index.php?p=home
The first cookie tray for the company office.
My mom made the miniature tree under the cloche. I have several small forests of trees; this one is on top of the tall dining room book shelf.
We never see our tree lit until Christmas Eve. Every light in the house is turned off and the house is very dark. The light sets are turned on one by one according to the scripture. Here is the very first set, lighting the star at the top of the tree over the manger scene down below.
With a completely fused spine, I’m unable to get down to floor level to look through my camera lens so focus is hit or miss. But I love this photo and I can identify with a clueless sheep. Yet my Lord still watches over me tenderly.
The tree completely lit later Christmas Eve. We didn’t have time to put the ornaments on so there are very few. But the lights make the tree lovely!
15 Wednesday Oct 2014
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All Sparkled Up, baking, dessert, dessert table, food, party, Rosanna, tablescape, tea time
The timing was right… It was Rosanna’s 8th Annual Tablescape Contest, my daughter-in-law’s birthday, and I was finally healed enough to tackle an ambitious baking event. What better way to celebrate all three than with a Dessert Tea!
Dessert Tea table setting
Here is the table before I started adding all the desserts. I made the tablecloth from an old bedspread with fringed edge. (You can see scraps from that old tattered bedspread in the photos of Tea by the Sea. Crafters don’t waste any scrap. Ha!)
I adore Rosanna’s style and was hoping to enter her 2013 tablescape contest last summer. But we didn’t get the remodel done in time and I wasn’t very mobile back then. The china cabinet was emptied so we could move it around and all the china was stacked on two tables in the living room. That’s when I got the idea for a blue and white and yellow theme for a table.
This year, I thought about the Dessert Table theme for weeks. Each time I got an idea, I added it to my notes.
Four elegant mugs on a dessert pedestal hold the floral centerpiece.
After I decided on the serving dishes, I wrote a list of tasks, desserts and a tentative baking schedule.
There were two main focal points for the table, Rosanna’s elegant Luxe Moderne mugs for the centerpiece, and her La Mode fashion plates.
I used four of Rosanna’s mugs on a vintage dessert pedestal to make the centerpiece. I was so excited about this design. It has a lot of potential and I plan on using four mugs as a centerpiece base for other tablescapes.
Sugar cookies were painted following Rosanna’s designs on her mugs. I wrote about the cookies here. It was challenging to paint the designs! I have new respect for Rosanna’s design skill.
The fashion plates are so pretty!
These are not dresses, they are napkins! Small squares of fabric folded are diagonally and draped over a miniature hanger. A bit of ribbon and trim… and you have sweet petite dresses!
This server was made to accommodate round plates. But rectangle platters made for more interest.
Dessert Tea – Layered Desserts with Vanilla Bean Cake, Raspberry Mousse and Orange Gelatin with Raspberry and Mandarin Orange Slice.
To continue the fashion theme, I cut 6″ to 8″ squares of fabric for petite tea napkins and fringed the edges. Each napkin was folded and draped over hangers to look like dresses. Most were folded diagonally. Each was tied at the “waist” with ribbon, a little flower tucked in the waist and a small piece of trim was draped over the top to look like a collar.
I made the miniature hangers from pieces of coat hanger cut with wire cutters. One coat hanger made three miniature hangers. The metal cake stand was perfect from which to hang the napkin dresses.
The tea service was on the back of the table, behind the desserts. I wrote how I made the Sugar Bonnets here.
On the tiered server, top to bottom: Spritz, squares of Fudge and Shortbread, Butter Cookie Dresses.
I experimented with a new baking pan to make the Layered Desserts. They were delicious and so pretty! I will post the recipe some time.
The Layered Desserts looked perfect on the long rectangular tray.
I also made a Lemon Orange Cheesecake topped with Pineapple and a Marmalade Glaze. So delicious!
Dessert Tea – I didn’t have time to make round pastry shells. It was quick and easy to cut squares with a pizza cutter and place the pie pastry in the tart pan.
Dessert Tea – a table set with a delicious assortment of desserts: Layered Desserts, White Chocolate Praline Cake, Pineapple Marmalade Cheesecake, Cherry Tarts, Spritz Cookies, Fudge, Scottish Shortbread, Butter Dress Cookies, Chocolate Cupcakes with Caramel Macadamia Frosting, Honeydew Melon Balls with Blueberries and a bowl of Cherries.
Dessert Tea – napkins folded diagonally and hung on a miniature hanger, tied with ribbon and draped with lace.
Two bowls held Honeydew Melon balls and Blueberries and Cherries, garnished with fresh mint.
Cherry Tarts were on a glass dish.
I only had four covered glass dishes but that was enough to place four Chocolate Cupcakes with Caramel and Macadamia Frosting.
The birthday cake was a White Chocolate Praline Cake with homemade Strawberry Raspberry Jam topping.
All together, the table looked lovely and the event was a huge success!
I submitted my photos and won an honorable mention in the tablescape contest… happy face! =)
My daughter-in-law was thrilled with her birthday, the girls loved the dress napkins and all our guests enjoyed the delicious desserts.
And it was the perfect event to celebrate the return of my health and stamina after such a long recovery. A sweet day indeed!
