Merry Xmas Everyone

If you're reading this, then the world didn't end on Friday! Hooray! Today being Christmas and all, I'll keep it short in the midst of celebration. And if you don't celebrate Chrsitmas, then I hope you had a great Hanukkah, Kwanza, Festivus, or are simply having a fabulous Tuesday afternoon in December :) 

Pumpkin Creme Brulee and Drunken Apple Sauce

So awhile back, before Lilly and I really knew each other that well, we bonded over the fact that we both enjoyed pumpkin seasonal (*coughandnotsoseasonalcough*) treats. Over the summer Lilly had emailed me this recipe, which looked amazing. However the other day when the opportunity arose to finally make it we didn't have heavy cream. However, looking at the amount of cream and egg yolks needed for this recipe made me feel for my heart, and specifically how I don't want it to feel attacked :/ I know, not something I should really worry about, but I do. 

So instead I followed this recipe, which better matched the amount of certain ingredients we had on hand. Namely, I had made a pumpkin cheesecake (maybe if you're all lucky one day I'll make a post on that, it's to die for) for Lilly's birthday and had the left over pumpkin puree (which to be honest I at no point actually measured, but I suspect it was probably a little over what the recipe called for) and 2 cups cream leftover from making whipped cream. We also had 4 egg yolks saved in the fridge from something else we had made, maybe one of the batches of muffins a few weeks ago? Who knows. I wasn't great about measure all the ingredients perfectly. I didn't use cloves, and I used 2 cups of cream instead of 1.5 and half a cup of milk. 

  

I'll admit it. I didn't bake them long enough. At all. Even after a few hours of refrigeration they were still liquid on the inside. That didn't stop me from trying one, but it made Lilly queasy just watching me do it. So the next day I re-baked them, and once they were finally cooked they were totally fine (though honestly, they were still delicious even when they weren't fully cooked!)

Side note: I'm not sure how safe it is to photograph yourself using a little butane torch, but it's certainly somewhat challenging. 

A day or two after the pumpkin creme brulee experience, Lilly and I were going to an informal potluck that I had to make something for kind of last minute. We had a few apples (four, to be exact) in the fridge that were on the brink of going bad, so I decided to make applesauce with them. For those of you who have never made homemade applesauce, you should try it sometime (it tastes amazing warm over vanilla ice cream!) it's super easy. All you gotta do is peel and chop those bad boys up and then simmer them in a pot with some water and (cinnamon) / (nutmeg) / (sugar) / (ginger) to taste (all those parenthesized things are optional, but what I tend to use). I also got this crazy idea: we had about half a glass of red wine left in a bottle that had been there for over a month. Clearly no one was about to drink it, so I threw it in the pot. And honestly? I think that was a fine decision :) 

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

So for the record I am all about holidays and celebrating and having a few silly decorations for each occasion and whatnot. Lilly on the other hand, is typically not (sad, I know). But proving to be the absolute best girlfriend ever, when I returned to the apartment from New Hampshire, she had put up a few decorations and had a bag full of fun little decorations that I could put up!! :) 

As the story I was told goes, the jade tree started to get decorated...until Lilly found a spider in it :/ Apparently that was enough to discourage her from that venture. 

Above on the left is what will one day be the home of Lilly's moss terrarium, but for now is waiting until spring so that she can actually go out to forage for some moss. Since it was empty, I felt it could use a little holiday cheer and filled it with some sparkly red garland and a few little green bells. On the right above is our little mini tree! :) This item I've had since my freshman year of college. Lilly added her touches to it, putting it atop her cake platter and topping the tree with a lobster (have I mentioned we have a bizarre amount of lobster themed items?)

This might be one of my favorite touches of all! It's probably just because I've been wanting to put something up on the wall behind TV, but have yet to get around to finding something for there. Now it's home to 10 cheap foam shaped ornaments that are caked in glitter. Seriously. So. Much. Glitter. But it's all good, I didn't make too much of a mess putting them up :)

Cyanotypes

So for the past few days, much to Lilly's dismay, I've been back in my home state of New Hampshire (aka - the best state in America, just sayin) and while home yesterday I made some cyanotypes. Cyanotypes are basically contact prints that are blue in color. Personally I like them because they're one of the few photographic processes (outside the digital world) that are easy to accomplish at home. There's no fancy equipment or anything really necessary. 

Now I had originally started this task because I wanted to see how it would hold up on canvas (more on that in a bit), but I mixed up more chemicals then I really needed so I did a handful of paper prints as well. It was kind of cloudy out today, and after doing the canvas prints I had some stuff I needed to do, so I let the paper prints sit by the sliding glass doors to the porch all day in the hopes that they'd get enough sun. Hindsight 20/20, I should've just left them outside all day since it was so low on sunlight in my backyard (I did with one of them, and it had the best deep blue color of the bunch). Oh well. Still not to shabby for the most part :)

So fun fact: I got 8 canvases this weekend to experiment on. Originally I just got 4 little 4x4 inch canvases from Michael's (they were on sale and totaled at less than $5!), but then when I was in the Christmas Tree Shop later that day they had some cheap canvases of a more normal size, so I picked up a few more. The cyanotype chemicals did not like the little canvases, they wouldn't soak in and just repelled and balled up on top of the canvas. The cheaper canvases it took to much better though, it probably has to do with the way the canvases were pre-primed and whatnot, I suppose there will have to be more experiments there....not that I really mind at all :)

Some of these will be going on the walls once I get them back down to the apartment. The rest I'll throw up on Etsy, so check out my shop! :)

The Perfect Desk to Fit and Odd Space

When Lilly first looked at the apartment we now live in there was one space that she wasn't quite sure what we'd do with. It's an awkward nook at the top of the stairs outside of our bedroom, that is a decent size if you ignore the fact that you can't stand in most of it due to the eves. She picture messaged me these photos of that space the day she saw the apartment first:

These don't do a great job of showing you the space, but they're the only ones I have of it before the invasion of our stuff. There were two obvious options for this space, one which I liked more than the other: Storage Space or Home Office Space. A space for a desk and office-like thing appealed to me much more, so I set off brainstorming how best to use the space to our advantage. 

After hearing the description of the space I knew I wanted to run a desk along the wall under the eve, but needed to see the space to make sure there was enough room for this feat. Indeed there was. Plenty of room in fact. So I began designing in my head the 10 foot long desk that now occupies that space. 

Lilly had already gotten a precious yellow filing cabinet from a thrift shop, so I decided that if we got two more, we could run boards across the three cabinets and each have our own desk space. 

While the middle cabinet was already a great yellow color, the two end ones were far less exciting beige colors, so I became no stranger to Home Depot and Lowes as I mis-predicted how much spray paint I'd need to paint the two end cabinets purple (I think in the end it took about two cans per cabinet? maybe?)

My mom got me two of these awesome colorful wooden bowls last Christmas as well as the colored pencils made from actual sticks. 

Lilly has a fun assortment of very retro things on her side of the desk that are quite fun. She still hasn't found a desk chair that she likes enough to get yet, but I found one I absolutely love at Savers for $7! It may not be much to look at, but it's super comfy, and really easy to transport as well.

While I'm sure all of you who may read this can figure out how to make this desk all on your own, if you want my extra insights on the process of making it, and/or can spare $2 to support this blog, I've created Instructions in a PDF format for sale at my etsy shop. Cheers!

Lazy Monday Baking

Yesterday Lilly and I stayed in and had a bit of a 'lazy' Monday. However, I don't sit still for long, feeling the ever compelling need to do something productive, so one thing lead to another and I ended up baking not one but two batches of cupcakes (well, technically muffins, but they taste like cupcakes, and I like to call them as I see them). Originally we set out to make pumpkin brulee, since I remembered to bring my brulee torch to the apartment with the last round of stuff I moved in. However, we were lacking in the heavy cream department, and neither of us were prepared to venture out into the real world to get it. So we browsed through recipes involving pumpkin until we found this one.

The recipe seemed rather healthy (as far as these things go that is). We omitted the raisins, a) because we didn't have any, and more importantly I had set out to make cupcakes, not muffins. We also didn't have cloves or allspice, so I put in a teaspoon of ground ginger instead, and me being me forgot to add the water.  That being said....they still came out delicious! :)

While I was in the process of making the pumpkin cupcakes, Lilly asked me how many bananas are needed for the banana chocolate chip cupcake recipe I make with my 3 year old cousin (in this case I use the word cupcake to trick him, but really, they're still more like cupcakes than muffins :). Already predicting where that question was leading I began to make a whole new batch of cupcakes while the pumpkin ones were in the oven. My cousin and I use this recipe for banana bread, mostly because it's ingredients are things that my aunt usually has in the house when I'm over babysitting him. However, we use chocolate chips instead of walnuts (how many 3 year olds do you know that eat walnuts?) and usually I use yogurt (anything in the plain to vanilla variety) instead of all (or in yesterday's case part of) the sour cream. Also, I pull out the potato masher and mash (or rather, my cousin usually mashes) the bananas instead of slicing them. 

Since we only have enough muffin pan space for 18 muffins/cupcakes at a time, when I made the pumpkin ones, I filled those cups up and then used a layer cake pan for the rest of the batter, so that I could rinse off the mixing bowls and get going on the banana ones. After the pumpkin cupcakes were out of the oven, I set Lilly loose on the internet to find one more thing: a recipe for cream cheese frosting. A normally easy feat, but the catch was that we didn't have any confectioner's sugar (ahh, the woes of moving into a new apartment seem to continue). All was well though, because she found a great recipe that suited our needs perfectly (note: we left out the almond extract).

I love my cake tester! so much better than wasting lots of toothpicks or raw spaghetti :)

The chocolate chip banana cupcakes we left unfrosted, although in the past I've used chocolate frosting on them, and then they really are more like cupcakes than muffins. I'm sure they'd also probably taste amazing with a little Nutella on top...but that could just be because I <3 Nuttella :)

Lilly's friend came over after dinner to partake in a little guilty pleasure TV (America's Next Top Model!), and after feeding her one of each of these she was left with the same problem we had: she didn't know which one she liked better! All in all not a bad way to spend a 'lazy' day.