Get Free Stuff

Wanna know how to get free stuff? Just be born. Seriously. I guess I've been gradually signing up for emails for different restaurants and stores and this year it just hit me how many free things you can get. If you aren't taking advantage of this, you definitely should. I could've eaten out for free my whole birthday week if we lived near any of these places. (Unfortunately our little town doesn't have about 75% of the places that sent me stuff, so I'll have to wait until next year.)

I thought I'd give you a quick run-down of who's giving what for birthdays. No one is sponsoring this post, I just wanted to share the birthday love! Also, to avoid getting a bunch of unwanted email I have a separate account that I always list when sites ask for my email. I still check it regularly, but I can usually delete most emails.

• Sunglass Hut - $20 in store coupon (no minimum purchase! And before you say there's nothing in that store under $20 think holders and cleaning kits.)
• Moes - free entree 
• Qdoba - buy one get one free
• Firehouse Subs - free medium sub
• Starbucks - free drink (I think this is because I registered my Starbucks card...which was also free from my bank hehe)
• Red Robin - free burger
• Cold Stone - buy one get one free (pretty sure this one used to be totally free, but oh well)
• Ihop - free Rooty Tooty Fresh n' Fruity
• World Market - $10 (no minimum purchase! I got a mug, a ring holder, and some chocolates and only spent 16 cents!)

I'm sure that there are others, but I was pretty excited about all of these! Next year I'm going to eat well (assuming the Air Force moves us somewhere that has this stuff)!  Tonight Hubs and I are going out to PF Changs to celebrate, compliments of my aunt : ) I'll try to take a few pictures at dinner (and of the goodies my family sent!) to post later. Have you found any other great birthday deals?

Lena Beth and the tiny dress

I thought I'd share some pictures of the dress I made my niece! And share some pictures of her because she's adorable, and who doesn't want to see pictures of adorable babies?

I used the pattern from Made by Rae for the Itty Bitty Baby Dress. I used the bigger size since "little" Lena was 8lb. when she was born. I also enlarged it to 105% or 110%, I can't remember. I wanted her to be able to wear it for a while and since I haven't seen her in person (*gigantic sadface*) I didn't want to err on the too small side.

(See the tiny hanger? We didn't have any baby hangers and it was too small to fit on a normal one so I took one of those pants hangers you get from the cleaners, took the cardboard tube off and bent it to form an itty bitty hanger for an itty bitty dress hehe)

The dress came together pretty easily (read: no zippers on buttons to slow you down). But it did involve piping and bias tape, which I had never used before. And I still haven't used piping...I kind of just rigged the bias tape to work for that since I didn't have any on hand.

I untied the straps for a picture so you can see what the straps look like.

I also added an itty bitty tag so you could tell which was the front and which was the back (you might be able to see it better if you click on the picture to enlarge it). The front and back patterns are identical, so it wouldn't really matter except I put all of the seams for the bias tape/piping on one side and I wanted that to be the back.

Her Mommy and Daddy were sweet enough to take a picture of her wearing it for the first time!

I'm glad it's a little big, maybe she'll still be able to wear it when I visit next month! Now for a few more baby pictures because I'm a proud aunt : )

the happy family

It seems like whenever she is awake, she's looking around at everything. Especially in the top right picture, haha! My sister-in-law said she sat like that for a few minutes! I seriously can't wait to visit! A big thanks to everybody who's been snapping pictures and sharing them, I love seeing them.

If you have a baby girl or are related to one or remotely know one, I would really suggest this dress. The pattern was easy to follow, I finished it in an afternoon, and it doesn't require a ton of fabric since it's itty bitty. And it's tiny and cute - does anyone else notice that the tinier something is the cuter it is?

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!