Snow

Carl and Gus finally got their snow man. Gus asks every day, "Can we build a snow man? Is the snow too crunchy?" He gets a script in his head and sticks to it. "How's your back?" Or when Ron comes home from work, "How's yous day, Dad?" "How are Ken and Dave?" "Did Ken eat all the peanut M&Ms?" Every day. Like clock work. I love that kid.

I mostly built the snow man while they played with the Tonka diggers in the snow. They rescued the trucks from the snowed-under sand box. They were so excited when they learned that the trucks work in the snow too. Louise sat patiently in a sled while they played and I rolled big balls of snow around, looking desperately for areas in the yard that hadn't been trampled by boys or the dog. Carl made the snow man head and didn't have much patience for it, thus the size. Instead of a scarf and hat, we decided it needed an apron... a painting and art project apron.

For all the work I put into it, they kicked it down in about 14 seconds. Did they not want a snowman? Or are they just boys? The carrot lay in the yard afterwards, a sign of the snow life that briefly was. A sign of the fun afternoon on a crisp February day.

Turtle Cake Tutorial

There's a fun cafe in St. Paul called Cafe Latte. It is THE best place to go for a nice soup and sandwich, salad too. Or even better, coffee and dessert. Located on Victoria and Grand, it is easy to find and usually easy to find a seat.

Their most famous cake is the Turtle Cake. If you like chocolate, pecans and caramel, then you're ready for this one. I made it for the first time for my sister-in-law Katie who had made it many times for other people, but no one had ever had it made for her. She turned the big 4-0 and was in town to celebrate with us.

Here's her cake.... Happy Birthday, Katie!

Ingredients:

Cake Ingredients:
• 1 Egg. • 2/3 cup Vegetable oil. • 1 cup Buttermilk. • 2 cups Flour. • 1 3/4 cups Sugar. • 1/2 cup Good quality cocoa. • 1 tsp. Salt. • 1 tbsp. Baking soda. • 1 cup Hot coffee

Frosting:
• 1/2 cup Milk. • 1 cup Sugar. • 6 tbsp. Butter • 2 cups Good-quality semisweet chocolate chips. • 3/4 cup Caramel. • 1 1/2 cups Toasted pecans.

Prepare oven and pans: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 3 (9-inch) cake pans. Cover each bottom with disk of parchment paper. It works well to trace the bottom of the pan with a pencil on the parchment paper, then cut out.

Prepare the ingredients. The recipe calls for a good-quality cocoa, but I only had Nestle. It still tasted great. (Notice the vintage canisters... they belonged to my grandparents. My mom remembers them from her childhood!)

I used this powdered buttermilk because it keeps for a long time in the fridge, always handy for a recipe at midnight or when I don't have a chance to pick up fresh buttermilk. If you use this, make sure you mix it VERY well, or you'll get little white floaties on top of your cake of buttermilk powder. (Not a pretty sight!)

To make cake: In bowl, combine egg, oil and buttermilk. In large separate bowl, mix together flour, sugar, cocoa, salt and baking soda.

Gradually add wet ingredients to dry until well mixed.

Gradually add hot coffee. Pour yourself a cup too. Mmmmm. (I recently found an amazing new coffee at Costco-- Rwandan coffee. Comes in bean form in a big 3 pound bag. Cheap, strong and DE-LISH!)

Scrape batter into prepared pans.

To bake cake: Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.

Let cake rest in pans for 10 minutes. Turn out onto wire racks to cool. Note the parchment paper still on the bottom, waiting to be peeled off.

To make frosting: Mix sugar and milk in saucepan. Add butter. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat. Add chocolate chips to pan. Using wire whisk, mix until smooth. If frosting is too thick or grainy, add 1 or 2 teaspoons hot coffee.

Spread 1/3 of the frosting on the first layer, top side of the cake down.

Here is the first layer with the frosting, 1/2 cup caramel and 1/4 cup chopped pecans. I like to leave a few of the pecans whole or large pieces.

Add next layer, again top-side down. Repeat frosting and sprinkle with 1/2 cup pecans and drizzle with 1/4 cup caramel. And final layer top-side up, frost carefully and finish with remaining pecans and caramel. The top looks best when you arrange the pecans in a pattern, leaving most or all of them whole.

We had no problem eating it. Hope you enjoy it too.

Morning sunshine

Early morning sunshine, coming in the east window upstairs.

Breakfast at the kid table with my favorite mug of all time.

Breakfast shadow fun.

It was -12 degrees this morning at 7 am, with a -25 windchill. The only way to feel warm today was to sit in the sun's rays at breakfast, longing for the days when we can go outside and run, run, rrrrruuuunnnnnn again in the yard.

Just a little crafting going lately, mostly because I'm STILL cleaning the office and craft space. When it is done, I will post the before picture. I'm just annoyed at how long it is taking. But really, at the end of the day, chasing around these three kiddos, cleaning is often at the bottom of my list.

Here's the chicken purse, a birthday present for our 15 year old friend Heather.

Close up of the batik chicken. Haven't YOU always wanted a batik chicken? Thought so.

Valentine's Day at our house

Hearts for a few of our Valentines.




My oldest Valentine. Just weeks away from turning 5... how can that be?



My little Gus (Gustaf) plus the older neighbor Gus (August.)



A heart lunch for the boys.



And my smallest Valentine... following my footsteps in the kitchen.

Ahh, love.

Happy Things in the snow

The sledding train.
Everyone's attached.
Even Molly dog's frisbee got in on the fun.
And I got to pull. Such fun!

I've fallen in love with the idea of Happy Things. Thanks for the idea.

Here's my weekday happiness.

These boots were made for walkin'

These boys are going to be SO tall someday, they won't need the help of my boots.


In the mean time, these boots were made for playin'.

Grand Central Station

Train Yard, Grand Central Depot.
Collection of the New-York Historical Society

We watched the program on PBS tonight entitled "Grand Central: American Experience." Wow. What a show. Carl's eyes were fixated on the TV like I've never seen. We hurried home from dinner at a friend's house to catch it. It felt quite strange to hurry home for TV, as we aren't TV watchers, at all. Our TV lives in the basement and has TERRIBLE reception. Recently we acquired a small model from my grandpa who buys them at thrift stores and cleans them up. It lives in my closet now, except for moments such as tonight.

The show detailed the long and amazing history of Grand Central Station and how it affected traffic and the lives of New Yorkers. Having only been to NYC a hand full of times, I can't truly understand the relationship New Yorkers have with GCS, but it was a sight to behold when I arrived on an Amtrack train 10 years ago.

Carl (and Gus too) is fascinated by trains. He loves all the Thomas stuff, but also really digs real trains. Last week we visited the Jackson Street Round House (also called Minnesota Transportation Museum) and climbed in and out of the train cars, checked out the turn table, rode a caboose down the line and picknicked in a rail car. Such fun.

There's a place on the PBS site to watch it. I missed 15 minutes or so while putting Louise to bed-- I'll have to catch it later.

Yearning for warmer weather

Ay, the Minnesota winter is dragging on. It isn't the snow that is driving me crazy, but the cold! These two boys of mine need to do something physical every day. When the temperature is -10 and a windchill that will eat you alive, we haven't been outside much lately.

Instead, we've been reading. Lots of reading. A lovely trip to the library helped us find these treasures, filled with lovely images of plants, flowers and vegetables.

But this is the one that has really caught my eye.

In the past I've grown a few things, but always felt that I'll be a much better vegetable gardener when I have more space. More space, well, that's the farm. I've been thinking that I'll have to wait until we actually move there. Not with this book. I'll be able to take over the wildflower garden area that got a little TOO wild.

Fortunately, at the end of the summer I dug out all those pesky overgrown wild flowers, moved some, put some out for free on the curb, and composted the rest. What a glorious feeling to actually choose what I wanted to keep, not just because they were given to me or free somewhere. My garden matured that day. Hopefully my back will cooperate this year and I'll be able to make a few of the 4 x 4' squares that this Bartholomew guy discusses. What novel ideas... only plant what you can imagine eating. If you think you can eat 3 cabbages by the end of the growing season, well then, "Only plant three!" So many of us get excited about all the seeds in the package and then plant them all. No wonder we can't maintain all of the plants and our gardens get messy and weedy. We don't like to thin them out because we're wasting potential food. So this year... only what we can use. Fortunately for me, the boys will be out there eating sugar snap peas by the fistfull, so we can plant A LOT!

But it is still winter. Spring is a long time away. I can feel mostly satisfied by reading, drooling at the photos, longing for the sunshine.

The cleaning/organizing is going well in the office/craft room. I realize I didn't post the photos that were supposed to be in the last post. I think I'm embarrassed of how messy things really were. I'll add the before pics when I finally finish and can post the after photos too.

I haven't been crafting AT ALL since I started cleaning. A self imposed moratorium on crafts until it is organized. I'm impressed at my willpower on this one.

Fine tuning the blog

I've been working on fine tuning the layout of this blog. It is intimidating to set up, with so many talented bloggers out there in the craft community. I've decided to keep it a secret until further notice, or shall I say, until I feel sufficiently comfortable with the way it looks.

Not much crafting going on here these days. Louise and I returned from warm and mostly sunny Atlanta after visiting college friends. What a nice treat-- an escape from the snow. I'm still finding occasional Christmas decorations around here, so I've been busy wrangling them up and putting away til next year.

I've decided that before I get started on any more projects, I MUST clean my desk and craft space. It is embarrassing. The issue at hand is a lack of time devoted every day to putting the mail in the proper place. My kitchen mail center works great-- when I take the time to use it correctly and not pile things up by the coffee pot. My filing system in the office works great-- if I stop to file things away. This does NOT work.

Nor does this. Suddenly my stash of craft supplies has morphed into a dragon needing to be tamed. Before I begin ANY other projects, I need to get to work. The problem? After being with the kids all day, at night all I feel like doing is resting, putting my feet up, talking to R, doing the necessary tasks to keep the household running. Cleaning the basement does not fit into that category.

One more thing... have you discovered the beautiful film "Once"? These two have so much chemistry in their music. Take a listen.

Finished projects

It was a successful Christmas in terms of production. I finished most of the projects I wanted to complete.

Here are a few pics of the t-shirts (although I still haven't finished Carl's or Louise's.)

And the granola was a hit too. Here's a pic of the bags before I set them out on the table getting ready for book club. When I returned from the park one hour later, Molly dog had kindly helped herself to one of my bags, ripped it apart, and took it to savor in the basement. What a dog.

(The fabric is a vintage sheet from an estate sale many moons ago!)

And here is the little monkey I made for my niece Annika's bday. I put him in a little box, included a photo album and a purse to carry him in, then wrote a little story about him.

(my inspiration is floresita )

Here is Louise with the monkey Lulu.

Lulu and her travel bag.

Lulu and her story, in her photo album. I should have written it down for myself too... for future reference.

Christmas projects and cooking underway

Ahhh, I love getting ready for the holidays. I have an eternal list of projects I'm working on that may indeed never get finished. At this point, I'm working on 6 embroidered t-shirts. I just love them. Can't get enough! I also hope to sew two bathrobes for the boys and finish up some pjs I started for Carl when he was a baby, didn't finish for Gus, but now Louise can wear them, with a little bit of girl-ification. Nothing that a a little bit of pink embroidery floss can't fix.

The other thing I hope to do is get my granola made. This year for the neighbors and friends, I want to make a jumbo-batch of granola and package it in cute little handmade bags from a vintage sheet I have in my stash. The granola recipe was found in Bon Apetitit magazine, a request from some coffee shop in Colorado, I think. The boys go crazy for it, requesting it over sweets for snacks. Bring on the granola, I say!

I've been documenting cooking projects we've been doing with the kids. I blog in my head most days, mentally typing what I should be typing at the computer. Here's the rustic cranberry apple tart from a dinner party a few weeks ago. The crust had 3 (yes, three!) sticks of butter in it. Mmmmm.

The pizza was a "what's for dinner that is fun" kind of invention. I decided I might get the boys to be more adventurous with pizza toppings if they could help prepare it themselves. They loved the process. The more cheese, the merrier.

(how do I turn this???)

Here are the highlights from our applesauce-fest this fall. We drove to the farm to harvest the apples before they froze. Too bad we didn't wait longer... the mosquitoes were TERRIBLE! Check out the bites on Louise's and Gus' faces. They were outside the van for 6 minutes or less, fully covered except for their poor faces.

Later Carl and I dared get back out of the van to brave the elements (read, mosquitoes) and pick the easy to reach apples. Don't you just love the apple bushel baskets? A former co-worker found them at a garage sale and couldn't resist them when she heard about our farm purchase.Thanks, Melanie! To many more apple harvests.

The apple sauce adventure was fun, but more work than I bargained for. We had a few issues with the canning process... one jar that cracked while boiling, spilling the precious gold out into the boiling water creating a cloudy mess. The worst, however, was when I was trying to get the air bubbles out of the one jar of pink applesauce (the sweeter of the two kinds of apples we were using, and I left the skin on for the pink color). I jabbed too hard with the knife and the jar was hot with the hot sauce. Clink... and all of a sudden the luscious pinkness was slowly leaking out onto the counter. I couldn't rescue it either, as there were shards of glass in the oozing mess. What a waste. Lessons learned for next year. Note to self: only can when not distracted. Three little kids in a kitchen while using a canner is not a good idea.