Gingerbread Houses

This year was our 2nd annual gingerbread house party (I was going to call it a gingerbread house making party, but Hubs said that was too wordy). It's pretty easy to put together and it's always fun to see what other people come up with when they're building. I was going to do a post about how to host one of these and give you all of my tips and tricks. I was also going to do that about a week and 1/2 ago. I'm just guessing no one is going to throw together a last minute gingerbread party in the 5 days until Christmas so instead I'll show you pictures of the houses we made and you can email me if you really want the details, ok? :)

Now before you think I'm crazy I spend an entire day making tons of gingerbread, let me tell you we use the term gingerbread house loosely. As in we don't use gingerbread. Graham crackers work great and require zero effort in the kitchen on my part (yay!).

We supply the "gingerbread" and glue/icing and ask each person to bring a bag of candy (or two). This way you don't have to buy pounds of candy and you end up with a good variety of stuff to work with. I made a big batch of royal icing for people to work with. This year the recipe I used wasn't so great and I broke my beaters. Oops. Thankfully it was mixed enough to hold things together. Here's another royal icing recipe I found (it should be better than the one I used since it has almost 5 stars after lots of reviews...I wish I used this one!). You can divide the icing into ziploc bags or disposable icing bags for each person/team.

And now for the pictures...

Um, not sure if this one had a name, but it wins for the tallest!

Grandma's Kitchen - complete with Grandma and pots on the stove

Beargraham Air Base - I think there's a little too much detail on this one for me to explain it all

Not just your standard "gingerbread" house - this one even has a balcony and an open garage door!

Our beach house - on stilts with a fish cooking on a fire out front

And that's our party in a nutshell! I would say I'm taking a little break for the holidays and I probably won't be posting as much, but then I realized I've kind of already been taking a little break and I haven't been posting very regularly the past month or so. So I guess I'm just trying to say don't hold your breath for a post in the next two weeks. We'll be having fun doing family things and I haven't gotten quite crazy enough to take my sewing machine with me on vacation yet! I hope you all have a great holiday!

15 Minute Costume

Not only is this costume quick to make, it also costs a dollar or less! I went back and forth on whether I was going to dress up for a party since costumes were optional, but decided to go as a lego.

You can thank Hubs for the pose...he wouldn't take more pictures unless I did that. You know what's nice about being a lego (aside from the low cost)? You get to be comfy and wear jeans and a tshirt and your costume is easily removable if you get tired of it. To make yourself a lego you need a tshirt (you could go with colored pants too if you really wanted to be all lego-y), poster board, scissors, tape, and thread or string...oh and a ruler would be nice.

I had everything, but poster board so I spend $1 on the poster board. If you don't have a solid colored shirt without writing on it, just turn a solid shirt inside out and you're good to go! You could probably spend less if you went for white poster board, but I went with green. Cut the poster board down so that it's a little narrower than the width of your body.

You're going to cut six circles and six rectangles for your lego. I used a cup to trace out the circles. Measure the diameter of your circle and use the internet your middle school algebra skills to figure out the circumference. Or just keep reading because I'm about to tell you. :) My circle was 3.75" across.

3.75"x 3.14 = 11.8"  So now you cut six strips that are 2"x11.8". This is what you've got so far:

And now you assemble the dots on the lego. Sorry there aren't any pictures, I was in a hurry when I made it so I didn't stop for pictures. Or maybe I should say your welcome because my paint drawings are like works of art. :)

Those gray pieces are tape FYI. I tried to do most of the taping on the inside of the cylinder. There was one piece on the outside where I taped the rectangle together so I just made sure that side was toward the ground when I taped it to the poster board. Stick a couple pieces of tape on the inside of your cylinder and stick the cylinders to the poster board.

Now you just need to punch a couple holes tie yarn or thread or whatever you have on hand in each hole so you can wear it like a giant poster board necklace.

(the color of the lego and my shirt match a little better in real life, the flash made the colors look a little different)

Hopefully this helps out anybody that's looking for a super fast, super cheap costume! Oh, and if you're wondering how it went over...everybody thought it was great at the party (and they had no idea I threw it together in 15 minutes)!

Cake Pop Dos and Don'ts

I have been in love with cake pops for a while. Who wouldn't after seeing pictures like these?

(source)

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Could cake BE any cuter??

Yeah, those definitely aren't mine. I thought I'd pass on my experience and also send you to the site I used when I was working on them (Suburbs Mama made the red ones in the first picture). Pretty basic step-by-step instructions, although she used a stand mixer and I didn't.

In case you've been living under a rock don't know what cake pops are, I'll fill you in. Baked cake, crumbled up and mixed with frosting then dipped to form a candy or chocolate shell.

I doubled the recipe since we had friends staying with us and the baby shower. I made 2 funfetti cakes (and remembered how ridiculously easy it is to make cake from a box, it was great). I let them cool overnight then piled them in the biggest bowl we own. It was really nice to not worry about getting the cakes out of the pan nicely.

It was a lot of cake!

Then I started stirring it. I think I used a fork mostly. It was my arm workout for the night. Ok, it wasn't that hard, but those cakes don't crumble themselves.

The size condensed quite a bit when it was crumbled, but that didn't save me from spewing crumbs on the table a few times in the process.

Having your laptop near the bowl isn't the best idea FYI. Unless you like funfetti on your keyboard. Then you should scoot it as close to the bowl as possible! In the picture above I had already started stirring the frosting in (1/2 tub of frosting per cake, so I used the whole package of frosting), so the mixture was even smaller. Make sure the cake and frosting are combined really thoroughly...when I got down to the bottom of my mixture I realized the frosting didn't make it all the way down.

Then you get messy. There's really no getting around it. Start forming the cake balls. I put some on waxed paper and some on foil I think. Anyway, they go into the freezer for 10-ish minutes.

In the tutorial, her freezer is seemingly empty. I don't know how she maintains that, but ours needed some serious rearranging to fit the cake pops in. I found I could roll about 30 pops in 10 minutes. Overall the two cakes make around 60-70 pops. That's definitely an estimate because this was over a week ago now and I didn't write anything down. : )

Melt a little of your candy/chocolate coating and dip the stick in then put the cake pop on. I picked all of the pops up to put the stick in because I didn't want to end up with a bunch of flat-topped cake pops from pushing them into the pan. (Hopefully that made sense...little did I know, I could've left the balls lumpy since my dipping job wasn't the best) Then back into the freezer for 20-ish minutes (this took even more rearranging since the pops now had sticks).

The final step was by far the hardest in my opinion. Actually, everything up to this point was pretty easy. Follow the directions for melting the candy melts and start dipping (I used two 12 or 14 oz packages of the candy melts and it wasn't quite enough to cover all of the pops). Most tutorials mention "tapping off the excess" which is a great idea. Nobody wants a clumpy thick shell, but if I got a little too tappy the cake pop fell off the stick : (

Of course the guys didn't mind a few cake pop casualties, but I'm not sure how to avert certain cake pop death. Maybe my pops were too big or I didn't push the stick in far enough. Also, I was too cheap to buy a styrofoam block to stick them into while they dried. That was dumb. Save yourself some stress and shell out $3 for one. Cake pops are not very good at balancing in cups.

I was constantly performing a balancing act, putting the wet ones into the coffee mug or glass then rotating them to the mason jars when they were dry. (And using tons of napkins because occasionally I had to catch one that decided to jump out of the drying cup so I kept getting the melted candy all over my hands.)

Sadly, those are the closest to finished pictures I got. I made half of them with a chocolate coating and served them in the mason jars. I didn't realize the sticks wouldn't be tall enough for the mason jars so I ended up putting marshmallows in the bottom to prop the sticks up. In the end I really liked having the marshmallows in the mason jars, I thought it kind of went with all of the other polka dot elements.

Even though they weren't as smooth as I was hoping for they were a big hit at the shower and probably an even bigger hit with the guys. We had no problem finishing off the leftovers! I will probably try making them again at some point (they were seriously really tasty and slightly addictive). I will not make them again unless we're having people over though. This is probably the unhealthiest dessert I've made in...well, a long time. It's no big deal if you only have 1 or 2, but they definitely aren't very nutritious.

Good luck if you try making them, and even if they're ugly they'll still be yummy : ) I'd love to hear any tips you have on making the candy shell smoother and/or how you get the cake pops to stay on their stick while you dip them!

My plan is working

Guess what Hubs said the other day. "When we have a house you're definitely having your own room for this stuff." This stuff being sewing stuff mainly. I knew my master plan was working it wasn't completely a bad thing to leave fabric scraps all over the place when I have to stop mid-project. Mwahahaha!

I'm kidding, I didn't really plan that. But I was excited to hear that hehe. It would be really nice to have more than a corner of a room for everything. If only I had gotten that on tape so I could really hold him to it. : )

So this is the project behind the scrapfest that led to him generously offering me an entire room to hide my messiness. (Although let's be honest, pretty much every project spends at least one night on the floor of the living room and/or office...sorry Hubs) I made a small table runner for a shower I'm having in a couple weeks (actually by the time I'm getting around to finishing this post it is THIS WEEKEND). We didn't have anything that would really go with a baby shower/polka dot theme but I did have lots of polka dot fabric. Probably too much, actually...maybe I should branch out a bit.

Here are the detailed "plans" for the project. I wanted it to be a bit wider, but the black fabric I had for the back wasn't wide enough - remember I was dealing with scraps here.

Originally I wasn't going to use any batting, but then I remembered I had a bunch leftover from the tshirt quilt. So I thought why not? It will give the table a little added protection from hot things and wet things. Plus, I love adding things to a project to make it even more time-consuming!

Steps to making a table runner out of scraps when you have little to no time:

1. Make a rough sketch and plan your dimensions.
2. Cut fabric and forget to add in seam allowances on at least 2 of the sections.
3. Realize your scrap of fabric for the back is about 1/4" too narrow, but go with it anyway.
4. Stack batting, then backing right side up, then top wrong side up. (So right sides of the fabric should be touching)
5. Sew everything together around the edge, leave an opening to turn it right side out and clip the corners before you turn it right side out.
6. Realize you shouldn't have just gone with it when your fabric was too narrow because now you have a big fat hole in the side of your table runner.

7. Since you have no time, just sew up the hole and plan to put a giant bowl over that section of the table runner. Plan to sew across the table runner (to prevent the batting from bunching) and do something to disguise/fix the hole later.

And you're finished! I would seriously consider skipping #3, which would also allow you to skip 6 and most of 7. I guess this is one of those do as I say, not as I do situations.

I'll let you know how many of the party guests are horrified that the table runner is all funky on one side. And I hope to get some good pictures of it in action (read: the messed up side covered up by food) this weekend!