Best Snack Mix Ever

I have a major weakness for candy corn. The stuff is so good and so addicting. (And like conversation hearts in February, it MUST be Brach's brand. Nothing else measures up.)

Years ago the fam decided to fatten up the snack some more by adding in a couple of our other favorite things - semi-sweet chocolate chips and salted peanuts.

Just dump it all in a bowl and shake it up so the salt from the peanuts gets on the candy corn and chocolate. It creates the perfect blend of salty sweet goodness. Yum, yum.

Easy Low-Sugar Freezer Jam

I've never been a fan of most jarred jams. They taste too sugary and gritty for me. I grew up on homemade jam from fresh raspberries and was never able to make the switch to the mass-produced stuff. Since moving away from home, I've settled for Smuckers Organic Raspberry Preserves, but it still isn't the same as the homemade stuff. 

I recently discovered a local berry farm that has raspberries. Hooray! And better yet, the raspberries are ripe around September. So after my blueberry and blackberry fix in July and August, I get to binge on raspberries. Score!

I took my daughter to the raspberry farm a few weeks ago and we picked a few pints. Most ended up in her stomach before we left the farm, but I did save enough to make a batch of freezer jam. Most jam recipes have TONS of sugar in them, often more sugar than berries. That seems just plain wrong to me. So here's Mom's low-sugar recipe, which uses considerably less sugar and still gels nicely. And in my opinion doesn't taste low-sugar at all. Best yet, it is super easy and only has four ingredients!

LOW SUGAR FREEZER JAM

• 3 cups crushed raspberries, strawberries, boysenberries, blackberries or marionberries
• 1 box pectin (just the regular stuff, not the low-sugar recipe stuff)
• 1 ¾ cups sugar
• 1 ½ envelopes unflavored gelatin

 

Measure berries into 3-quart pan. Sprinkle with pectin. Stir and let stand 30 minutes. 

 Stir in sugar.

Dissolve gelatin in ¼ cup warm water. (Not really quite sure the best way to measure the 1/2 packet of gelatin, so I just cut the packet in half and eye-balled it.)
 

Bring berry mixture to just under a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Add gelatin and stir.

 Pour into freezer containers and cool. Refrigerate or freeze. Makes 4 ½ cups.

Note:

This recipe can be doubled, tripled, or made with as many as 27 cups of berries at a time.

September Already?

I saw a school bus go down the street yesterday. How did that happen? Seems like the summers go by so fast around here.

There's been a lot going on around here. At the beginning of the summer, I put together a quite ambitious project list, and I'm happy to say that (with a LOT of help) we've knocked out most of it.
I've also decided that when I say that I can do something, it's ok for that to mean that I can ask or pay someone else to do it! Because at the end of the day, sometimes it just needs to get DONE!

Here are a few of the projects...

New Deck Lattice
My brother is a talented deck builder in Portland, Oregon, and when we bought our house a few years ago, he flew out to Wisconsin and built us a gorgeous deck. Fast forward a few years, and we now have both a toddler and a family of wild bunnies in the neighborhood who are very curious about what goes on under the deck. So we put up some lattice around the bottom to hopefully keep curious critters at bay. Not that I actually did any of the work. My father-in-law did it all. I supervised :)

And the finish on the deck will be restored to its former glory before the end of the summer. It is in desperate need of re-staining, but the deposit check has been mailed!

New Painted Dresser
A while back it seemed like we needed furniture in every room. Dressers, kids furniture, etc. Then we scored some deals on Craigslist and at the Elkhorn flea market. Now it seems like we have more furniture than we know what to do with and we're constantly moving it around from room to room.

As part of the Great Furniture Shuffle of 2012, I found this great antique dresser at the flea market. I loved the look of it, it was in decent shape, the drawers slid pretty well, and it was only $60! for the dresser and mirror.

I thought about trying to fix this one up myself, but alas, I am pregnant and tired. So I wisely decided to have Jorie at 63rd Avenue do it for me. (She's also the one who painted our awesome dining room furniture!) She used Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Aubusson Blue and then hand painted the white based on a design I gave her. Then the whole thing has a coat of clear wax to seal it.

And here's how it turned out! I love it! The mirror is also blue now too, we just haven't gotten around to putting it back up yet. Although I may wall mount it instead of mounting it to the back of the dresser. We'll see.

Martha's Fabulous Pumpkin Cookies
The other day I found some pumpkin in the freezer from last fall that I needed to use up, so I made these cookies off the Martha Stewart web site. They are amazing. Drop everything and go make them now. Seriously, do it. You will not be disappointed.

I'm working on putting together a new project list for the fall - can you tell I'm nesting? So far, there's the boy's room to work on, some window treatments for the guest room and the kitchen, and a makeshift mud room for the garage. Oh yeah, and I'm sure rearranging more furniture. Why not? If it all gets done this fall, I will be so thrilled! Coming up next on the blogosphere, a preview of the boy's room so far, a quick and easy (and low sugar!) freezer jam recipe from Mom, and maybe a few simple projects I've been doing with E. Stay tuned!

DIY: Painted Ikea Erslev Rug

I've been seeing a lot of DIY painted rugs on Pinterest lately. People take the $40 white Erslev rug from Ikea and use some paint to jazz it up. E has been getting more creative with her snack time lately, leading to some added artwork on our somewhat white, but nevertheless recently cleaned, carpet.

We were at Ikea a couple weeks ago and picked up the Erslev rug. It's a nice rug and very inexpensive but it is WHITE. Not exactly the ideal color for a toddler. One day and a cup of mandarin orange juice later, and I knew we needed to add some color or something to hide the inevitable stains that will come.

First, I used an old box lid to make a stencil. Just make three rows of marks every nine inches apart (horizontally and vertically) and connect the lines diagonally. Lowe's has a much better chevron how to on their Creative Ideas site. (That's piggy in the picture - she's our moral support.)

Once I had the stencil, I used it to tape out the lines on the rug. I probably could have just freehanded it with the paint, but again I have a toddler. A toddler very interested in moving cardboard. So I used the tape. I did have to make some marks on the rug at certain points to ensure I maintained a consistent width - and didn't add an extra inch because of the width of the tape. And the tape helped keep the lines straight and crisp. Also, I started a little into the pattern just to satisfy my own need for symmetry. What would happen if I started at one part in the pattern at one end and ended at a different part at the other? I couldn't handle it. I'd have to throw it out and start over.

I have a lot of extra paint in my basement from various rooms in our house that I used here - what better way to make sure your new room matches your color scheme than to use that exact color?  The green is from my kitchen. The blue is from my master bathroom. The pink/red is combo of two $3 samples from Home Depot. I also mixed in a bit of textile medium from Michael's ($6 for 8 oz but less if you use a coupon!). It turns any paint into fabric paint and hopefully avoids the crunchy dried paint feel. I probably should have used more than I did - the bottle says two parts paint to one part medium - but I only bought one bottle and was too lazy to go back to the store for more.

I used a combo of a foam roller ($3) and sponge brushes (7 cents each on sale at Michael's) to paint the rows. It took a bit to make sure the paint got into all the grooves, but it wasn't a painful process. I was a little nervous to pull the tape off in the morning, afraid that the paint had bled underneath. I was pleasantly surprised that the lines were crisp and clean.

There were some spots where the paint didn't fully penetrate the rug - it is woven, after all.  I thought about putting on a second coat, but decided against it. It's a rug, and it's only going to get walked on, adding to the worn-in look. I've decided to embrace it.

Here's how it looked when all the tape was removed. I love it. It's fun and bright, and yet still matches everything else in the adult side of the family room.

And here's how it is with the room all put together again.
 

This project was a bit intimidating to me - who paints a rug? That's crazy. But it only took about six hours total, and that included time out for dinner, bath time and bed time. I started before the evening news and I was done by the end of Leno. And cheap too - less than $60 for the rug, paint and supplies. It has me thinking where else I can do this - a baby room maybe?

Peace, Love and Zebras

This week Ben's cousin Rachel celebrated her 11th birthday and she asked me to make her a cake for her family party. She asked for a two-tier zebra cake with pink peace signs on it.

I googled "zebra peace cake" to get some ideas, thinking I'd get lots of results for zebra cakes or peace sign cakes. I was surprised to find hundreds of pink cakes with zebra print AND peace signs, most for tween girls. What's the deal with all the zebra peace stuff? Did Justin Bieber wear a zebra-patterned peace sign on national TV or something? I guess I am just out of the tween loop.

Anyway, back to the cake. I saw a neat method on pinterest where you layer chocolate and white cake to get a zebra effect on in the cake. I thought I'd give it a try, which meant baking a lot of cake. Way more than I needed, in fact.

But that's OK. Fortunately I have a couple willing eaters in the house to help me take care of all the excess.

It was pretty warm in the house this weekend, so I was worried about the fondant melting. I typically crumb coat the cakes in buttercream, then put them in the fridge to set before applying the fondant. Then after applying fondant and decorations, I usually put it back in the fridge. I realized today I had been doing things ALL WRONG.

Apparently fondant will naturally acclimate to whatever temperature it is, so as long as it's not excessively humid, the fondant is just fine unrefrigerated. But if you have a cold cake, and you put room temp fondant on it, and leave it out, it will start to sweat while the cold cake warms up. Not fun to work with!

After a while, however, when the cake and fondant adjust to room temp, the cake will dry out and be fine. So if you don't have a perishable filling, keep the cake at room temperature!

Here's the sweaty cake before I realized I shouldn't keep putting it in the fridge.

Oooh, shiny. And when that black fondant gets shiny, it gets messy and the color transfers everywhere. Black-tinted fondant really is a pain, in my opinion.

So this morning, I took the cake out of the fridge and let it sit on the counter for a couple hours. What a huge difference!

The gooey, slimy fondant dried out and became much more stable. Hooray! That means I could apply more disco dust (that's edible glitter!) to all the pink areas. Disco dust and slimy fondant don't get along.

I used a printout of a zebra pattern and a pastry cutter to make the zebra stripes and a circle cutter to make the peace signs. I also used the fondant to make a number 11 for the top. I stuck some toothpicks in them and left them out to dry overnight. There they are on the side.

And here's the final cake all put together.

And here's how the inside looked. Not exactly zebra striped, but close enough.

 And tasty too!

DIY My Family Board Book

We have family scattered all over the country, so when E was born, I wanted to give her a book that had pictures of her family so she could learn more about them and learn their names.

I took a basic board book ($.50 at Goodwill), some family photos (FREE thanks to a Walgreens special), some scrapbook paper (6/$1 at Michael's) and alphabet stickers ($7 at Michael's) and put together this My Family board book for less than $10.

 

Here's how I did it:

I started by tracing the shape of the pages of the book on the scrapbook paper. I did individual pages and not the full spreads because I wanted to keep the center clear to help the book close better. I used mod podge and a sponge brush to glue the pages to the book, and then photos to pages.

This step also involved an ice cream break. This is an important part of the process. Do it.

After the glue had dried, I used alphabet stickers to label each of the pages. I'm sure there is a much fancier way to do this, but this was certainly easy. It just took four packs of stickers to make sure I had enough of each letter.

The final step was to add a spine to the book, again using paper and mod podge. I used the scoring blade on my paper cutter to make sure the paper fit perfectly.

I still may coat the entire thing inside and out in mod podge to help ward off damage from sticky fingers and to keep all those stickers stuck. But for now, this was a simple project that I hope will help E feel connected to her family around the country.

Happy Birthday Ben! Running Records Display

So, it's nearly the middle of July. Which means that I have finally given my husband, Ben, his birthday present. His birthday, of course, being in June. But while I got a very late start on this one, I was very excited about this project.

If you know us at all, you know that Ben likes to run. A lot. He runs a lot of races and earns a lot of medals and sets a lot of new personal best times. So many that I can't keep them all straight. 

Until now, Ben kept his medals, race bibs and other running stuff up in our spare bedroom. With a new baby coming soon, Ben has to clear out his upstairs man cave and move it to the dark, damp basement. I wanted to give him a little something to cheer up the space.

I saw an idea online for a way to display marathon times and thought it would be fun to give Ben a way to showcase all his best times for all the major distances he's run.

Here's how I did it: 

I started with eight plain pine boards from Lowe's. Seven of them were 4 inches wide by 2 feet long and one was 6 inches wide by 2 feet long. They come pre-cut in the lumber department for a couple bucks each, and I think you can pick between pine, poplar and oak if you're picky. (The total cost of this project was about $35 for wood, paint, stickers and supplies.) I bought seven colors of acrylic paint from Hobby Lobby and painted each board a different color. Then I taped off 9-inch segments on the ends of the 4-inch boards and painted them gray.

When that was dry, I used Americana Chalkboard Coating to turn the gray areas into a chalkboard. This is great stuff - it goes on clear and can change any surface into a chalkboard with just two coats. It was only about five bucks and I barely used any of it! This will definitely be used again.

Using a ruler and a little math, I spaced out some alphabet stickers and applied them to the boards.  The verse at the top is from Hebrews 12:1 and Ben helped me pick out the seven race distances that he wanted to display.

 

After applying the stickers, I put a coat of matte mod podge over all the boards, skipping the chalkboard areas. Once that was dry, I used basic screw-in cup hooks to attach all the boards together. The wood is soft enough that I could do this by hand, so my fingers are crossed that they stay put once we hang it up! Per the directions on the chalkboard coating, I covered the entire chalkboard area with a thin coat of chalk to prime it before cleaning it off and writing in the times.

Here's another look at the completed project, with Ben's times written in.