Disappointment in a cookie

The other night we were watching one of our favorite shows: The Best Thing I Ever Ate. One of the commentators showed a cookie from a NYC bakery. It was massive ( about the size of an uncooked hamburger patty) and was a chocolate cookie with chocolate chunks. I was debating making something for the Primary kids for Sunday and thought this looked like the perfect idea. So I searched the web and pulled up this recipe that looked pretty legit. And tasty.



Cookie shown on blog. Mine did not look like this.


Saturday night after a long day I decided to get started on my cookies. Because of the issue when I made the granola I decided to put my laptop on the counter with me and follow the instructions to a tee. The end result? Quite disappointing. I was tasting the batter as I went and it tasted great. Very chocolatey but not too sweet, and since the original blogger said the dough is very very thick I thought the consistency was correct. If it was, shame on the blogger! The cookies lost much of their flavor in the baking process and were incredibly dry. One of the kids only ate half of his cookie before throwing it away. Luckily my SIL had some cookies she had made and given to me to use. They were amazing (as most treats she bakes are).

Before going in the oven

After baking and while cooling. I took one while cooling to see if I would get the same "melted chocolate chip and awesomeness" picture.. Yeah... It didn't really happen.

Disappointment, thy name is double chocolate cookie. I actually (accidentally) deleted the pin because I was frustrated with it and upset about being so betrayed by chocolate.

Granola

I have a love/hate relationship with granola. I love it because it tastes great and makes me feel like I'm eating well. But then I look at the ingredient list and the nutritional information and I am disappointed. Recently I've been trying to eat healthfully and my dear, sweet, husband is slowly catching on to the idea. He has also decided he would switch from his regular Berry Colossal Crunch (the poor man's version of  fruity Captain Crunch) for granola. Yesterday I was out of my regular cereal and he suggested his granola. IT. WAS. AMAZING. It had been a few years since I had granola and even then I think it was on my mision and muesli (similar, but no added sweeteners/fats). Curse you granola, for tasting so good!
After work J and I had some time to kill uptown because he had a meeting down here at 6:30 and I wasn't in the mood to pick him up from work, drive up to Metairie and then turn right araound to drop him off. So we decided to go on our regular date of choice: to the grocery store. We're weird. But whatever. The grocery store is romantic. We went to Whole Foods and browsed around for a good bit until I decided "Hey! I pinned a recipe for granola this morning! We should make some!" So while J rolled his eyes as he usually does when I bring up Pinterest, I pulled up the pin and got the ingredients.


Mine definitely turned out darker than this. But not too different otherwise.


When I got home after his meeting I quickly got started on the granola. The only problem was that I read it on my phone instead of my computer and mixed up the steps. Instead of mixing a few ingredients separately, I mixed everything together at once. This didn't effect the taste, but it made it so that only a few things were in clumps as opposed to most things. Also, I followed the baking time which was off. We should have stopped after 30 minutes but cooked it the entire 40. Not that the granola was burnt, per se, but it did has a distinctly "cooked too long" taste. But this morning when I poured my milk over it, it tasted a-okay to me.

So here's the pin. I would recommend it. But like I said, follow the instructions better than I did and don't cook it for as long. 30 minutes is the longest you'll want to cook it.

Baby Girl's Birthday

A good friend of mine has an adorable baby girl who turned the big 1 today. I love this girl! I rarely refer to her by her name, in fact, even though I have nieces younger than her, I call her "baby girl". ANYWHO! I wanted to make something for Baby Girl's birthday that would be useful and precious like she is. I saw a few pins and thought I'd share them with you.

Here's the first one:  a clip holder with some appliqued pieces to make a scene of a cute owl. 

Next, here are the clips: a variety of felt pieces

Here's my bird with scenic background. She's saying "hey girlfriend"

I started by taking a simple 8.5"X11" sheet of felt and cutting it in half

Next, I free handed and cut out a few pieces for what I wanted

Adding the top strap

The finished product. It only cost be the price of the felt since I had everything else on hand. 

Closer up view

The almost finished product of one of the hair clips

I found the best way to use the alligator clips was to cover them. So I cut a little piece out that would wrap around it.

Cut a little slit for the clip to slide through

Hot glue it and glue the rest of the felt and clip together.

Everything combined

Here are mine: mostly felt, but some made up of fake flowers and silky flowers all on alligator clips.  The grey one ended up being my favorite. It's three circles stacked on top of each other with a single black bead in the middle. 

I wish I had had some closer up versions but oh well. I'm making some more for my biological niece and they're pretty cute as well. Oh! Also, I made a simple white headband that any of the clips can go on interchangeably. I honestly loved these two crafts. I like how different you can make every aspect these. Different colors, different designs.. I'm toying around with future ideas. We'll see how it goes. As for the pins, I highly recommend them. The first pin does NOT have a tutorial. It's a product from etsy. The second pin does and she's great.

52 Things I Love About...

Valentine's Day has gotten me in a very crafty mood. I've made two things for my Valentine and plan on making some lovey-themed items for our abode. One of the gifts I made is based off of the pin I'm sure everyone has seen where you take a deck of cards and list 52 things you love about the person. This is my attempt.

I punched holes in all of the cards

Using my favorite new paper punch (a huge heart shape) I cut out the appropriate number of hearts using a thick cream colored cardstock

Glue cardstock to cards

Because the hearts were pretty large I rotated their positions and such. Some covered holes, some didn't.

I cleaned up the ones that covered holes so that my three rings could go through easily

Arrange them however you choose. I chose to alternate red and black, but you could easily go by suites or numbers or what have you.

I free-handed a shape to use on the cover card which was also one of the spare joker cards. I traced the number and used my stamps for the letters. I never said I was good at stamping. But at the same time, I kind of ike the funky look of this.

Added my little tag to the back. Oh, and S'ghettis is Justin's nickname from me. Nothing weird. I just used to say "Ready sghettis?" a lot and it morphed into his nickname.

Finally, after adding the rings and such,  I began added the reasons why I love him. As wrong as it sounds, this was the hardest part... There are only so many ways you can say "I love your butt." 

And there you have it. It's a little time consuming, but once you get started it goes by pretty quickly and it's a personal and fun gift that I think would work well for anyone at any time. Who doesn't like knowing they are loved and why people love them? One recommendation I would make is to buy a large deck of cards. Not that this deck was an issue, but if you don't want to worry about the positions of the hearts and having to go back and hole punch again, just buy a bigger deck. I recommend it since the only thing I had to buy was the deck of cards ($1).  Here is the pin I was going off of.

Spinach and Orzo (sort of) Soup

The weather here in New Orleans has been a tad ridiculous recently. Off and on between being in the 40s/upper 30s, to the mid 70s. It's really quite annoying. Yesterday was a chilly one and because it was also a crappy day spent in a doctor's office and then driving around campus for 45 minutes trying to find a parking spot, I really wanted some soup. For me, after my Grandma Ruth's grits, fried egg and toast breakfast, my next favorite comfort food is soup. So yesterday I decided to branch out and make something other than my standard potato-leek or chicken noodle soup and make something else. I saw this while looking through my soup board on Pinterest and thought, "That sounds light and yummy." And Justin even said it looked good. So away we went to the grocery store.

Spinach, tomato orzo soup

I followed the recipe (almost) to the tee and to be honest. It's INCREDIBLY bland. Justin had about half a cup. The only variations I had were that I upped the amount of garlic to 4 cloves (because I LOVE garlic), I added mushrooms (because I've been wanting some for a while),  and because the orzo was pricier. I used a radiatori pasta which was a little bit bigger. I've never been so disappointed with a soup and now I'm stuck with a gallon of it. My only consolation is that I at least bought some leeks and potatoes to go to my favorite standby.

My onion, 4 cloves of garlic, and mushrooms

chicken stock (it was on sale at Whole Foods for cheaper than generic at Rouses), tomatoes, spinach

My seasonings

I didn't get a picture of the final product because I was cooking a few things last night and forgot to. Sorry.

So NO I would NOT recommend making the soup pictured in this pin. While it was easy to put together, it didn't taste like anything spectacular.

Gospel ABCs

I was called to lead the children 12 and under at my church last August. Since then I've been getting a hold of things and trying to switch some things around. The kids 18 months to 3 attend what they call the nursery. There they sing, have a short lesson (5 minutes about), and play. Because we had some new cabinets installed (after asking for them for a year), I feel like sprucing the place up. They have posters of typical kid songs like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, but I wanted to add some things that were more churchy. In comes this pin I saw om Pinterest. It's for a quiet book for little kids, but I wanted to make it bigger and switch up a few things. So what I did was copy their list of A-Z, then rewrite them to fit an entire page (they were filling up at about 1/4 of a page and since the room is pretty big, I wanted it bigger. Plus I wanted a different font). Also, instead of making the type white and the background different colors, I decided to simply do an outline and then color the wording. I like coloring and it gave me an excuse. The next thing I did was raid my gospel art kit which has pictures relating to different scripture stories and such. They would be easier than finding and printing 26 different pictures. And here is the end result..

I came up with outlines for my lettering.

I enjoy coloring so I did a second outline in marker and colored the pages in with colored pencils.

More after the jump!

The Padded Chair

I inherited a piece of history. It's a rolling chair. It's about 25 years old and used to be my dad's. I can remember it since it sat at his desk which was right outside of my bedroom until I was almost 12. It still functions pretty well except for one thing... The padding. To say it is sparse is being polite. I'll just say this- the plastic trim going around it sticks up more than the padding. This poor chaise has seen better days. I've been meaning to recover it but have been putting it off for a while. But recently I also got the spark to redo a desk and hutch that sit in my room and thought this would be perfect- to recover the chair to accompany the desk. The desk combo is not yet finished. It should be done by this weekend, but we'll see. However, this chair redo was quick and pretty easy. I did it while sitting on the ground watching TV with my husband and nephew. All in all, it took about 30 minutes. The biggest obstacle was actually getting material for it. At first I bought a pattern I loved. But realized it was not sturdy enough. Then I went to the home decor fabrics. But forgot the measurements of the chair and didn't get enough. So finally, with measurements in hand, I went to the fabric store and purchased enough of a fabric I loved! It cost me $9 for a yard. And here's the result:

The original chair

Unscrew the pads from the base

Lay your fabric, printed side down and place your foam piece.

Next, place your pad, face down, on top of the foam. For my second part, to support the back, I had to trim the foam about 2".

More after the jump!