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!
04 Saturday Mar 2017
Posted in All Sparkled Up, allsparkledup, calligraphy, cooking, encouragement, food, Free Idea, nature, photography, recipe
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It’s for a restaurant in my imagination. Outside, surrounded by trees and mountains and seas. The rush of wind and fall of water.
Whole Earth.
Five Courses – Water, Field, Tree, Rain and Root.
A menu for Whole Earth, a restaurant in my imagination.
What limits your dreams? What stops you? What if you never quit? In addition to a dozen other professions out of my reach, such as surgeon, lawyer, scientist, glass blower, architect and machine engineer.. I would love to be a chef. Here is a menu for my non-existent restaurant, Whole Earth, with some of the courses. Don’t ever let anyone stop your imagination. You never know how far it will reach.
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…
04 Tuesday Aug 2015
I don’t know what gave me the idea but I was eating a tortilla one day a couple weeks ago and thought it would be great to make a weaving of colored tortilla strips.Â
It took a week or so to hunt down colored tortillas. We found the green Spinach Wrap tortillas at Whole Foods and the spicy Habanero Lime tortillas at Trader Joes.
The first Woven Tortilla was made of strips of white and orange tortillas. I cut them with kitchen shears.
Strips of white Mission flour tortilla and orange Habanero Lime tortilla.
Spicy Habanero Lime tortillas are woven together with a white flour tortilla.
The woven tortilla mat is brushed with olive oil.
The woven tortilla mat is lightly toasted on both sides over medium heat in a skillet.
Woven Tortillas
Woven Tortillas, served with taco meat, black beans, guacamole, sour cream and cheddar cheese. Use knife and fork to eat.
Strips of Habanero tortilla are woven through slits in a white flour tortilla.
Woven Tortillas
Green and orange tortilla strips are woven through the slits in a white flour tortilla.
Woven Tortillas are so fun and festive! Tasty too!
Woven Tortillas – great way to add color and flavor to a Tex-Mex meal.
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::
29 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in All Sparkled Up, art, Easter, food
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Every year I save one colored Easter egg in the back of the egg bin in the fridge. All winter long it’s a nice reminder that spring is on the way.
Soon this egg will be replaced with a new one. Its fun seeing art in the refrigerator! I’m planning on hanging a little painting on one of those pristine white walls.
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.
All Sparkled Up 