Food, glorious food! And crafts, glorious crafts!

Look at all the yummies I made on Friday!
First off, that orange rectangle on the left is the most fabulous pumpkin cake-like thingie that my SP sent me the recipe and fixin's for (I forget it's proper name right now). I had originally planned to make it and bring it with me to my friend's book club (more on that in another post) but some big mice (family) got into and made it unpresentable. Oh well, more for me :-)
If it's ok with my SP I'll add the recipe later, but I can understand if she wants to keep it a secret so she can impress folks.


Now I will share my most stupidest moment of the day.
So here I am perusing the directions and pulling things out of the cabinet because I like everything on the table from the giddy-up. I see that it calls for pumpkin pie spice, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, clove etc. etc. (don't get ahead of me if you already see where this is going). So I grab everything except the pumpkin pie spice because, well why would I have that on hand? I can't figure out what could possibly be in it that isn't already listed on the recipe and of course mom's not home to ask, so I have to fend for myself which basically means make a run to the store.

Once there, I read the ingredients and it includes all of the other spices I had already pulled out of the cabinet - but I'm still not getting it. I figure it must be the sulfite balancers or some such nonsense that will make all the difference to the recipe. I head home with my magic spice and find mom is also now home. I ask her what she thinks could be in pumpkin pie spice and without looking at the recipe lists all the above ingredients. I smartly reply "yes, you would think so, but it calls for this in addition to those items."

Or does it?

Now all of the pieces fall into place.
"Ah crap!" I say.
"What is it?" my mom asks.
"Yeah, I bet it said 'or'".
"Hmmm?"
"Or. I bet it says pumpkin pie spice OR these 45 ingredients."
"Oh" says mom.
"duh" says I.

Moral of the story. READ, don't peruse directions. It could save you an unecessary trip to the store.


That being my biggest problem is really quite good considering that I also decided to try my hand at making bread from scratch. I found two recipes on the Farmgirl Fare website that I wanted to try. The first was for Beyond Easy Cheddar Dill Beer Bread, which truly lived up to it's name - and the second was for Oatmeal Toasting Bread. I made the beer bread in the morning on Thursday and brought it with me for Thanksgiving dinner, but in my rushing, failed to capture it on film. However it seemed to be a hit and I plan to make it again, but I'll play with the ingredients a bit as suggested by Farmgirl- maybe sour cream and scallions or something fun like that.

As for the Oatmeal Toasting Bread, it came out great if I do say so myself. While it took much longer than I anticipated with all the rising time (didn't know I would have to let it rise twice) having that much time between rounds allowed for me to make everything else on my to-do list so I was quite happy.

While I was making a mess of the kitchen, I decided to also make JJ some mini birthday cupcakes - look how pretty they were. I say "were" not because they were consumed, but because once at her house they were placed near the hot stove and all the icing melted off. Well actually I was intrigued to see that it was the chocolate frosting that really didn't handle the heat too well but the vanilla looked relatively good considering all things. I wish I had taken a picture so you could see the before and after.

And to address the crafty side of things, I also took a shot at dollar-bill origami and made a little box and a ring to go with JJ's birthday present from me and Nikki. You gotta love the world wide web, you can find directions on how to do just about everything on there!