Mother's Day :)

For Mother's Day lunch I was in charge of desert.... It is my favorite :) So I logged onto my Pinterest to find something delicious. It was way too easy.

 

This was my original inspiration, which can be seen on my Desert Board. But, my sister Megan and I wanted to make it our own. So we did.

Our bottom layer was a mixture of crushed up Oreos, Oreo cream, and a little butter to hold it together.. We are still working out a way to perfect this, so any ideas would be awesome. I think I had more fun taking the cream off of the Oreos so that I could mush up the Oreos easier. For real, it was a lot of fun.

Anyways, back to the cooking. Mush up the Oreos so that they are as fine as possible. I recommend doing this in a plastic bag and using a rolling pin... Or letting a little kid step on it a few times :) Once the Oreos are crushed, pour them into your pie pan. Next, in a small bowl throw all your Oreo cream and about 2tbs butter then place it into the microwave to melt it. Mix this into the Oreo crumbs until everything is covered well. Press this into the pan well and bake in a 300* oven for about 8-10 minutes to help it set.

Next is making some mousse. I decided to use a White Chocolate Jello mix for this. A small box of the mix will work just fine. Mix that with 1-1/2 cups heavy whipping cream. Whisk it until it is nice and thick. Now is putting together the pie.

So here we have the Oreo layer... On top of that I put a layer of strawberries. After the strawberry layer was the mousse layer. Then, after the mousse layer I put another layer of strawberries.... Finally, I topped the pie off with some melted Hershey kisses and semi-sweet chips. We put this in the fridge to set for about an hour while we ate dinner and so that the chocolate could harden up.

While we were kind of worried that this pie was not going to turn out, it was delicious. I know there are stil. Some kinks to work out, but I will definitely be making this again and again... And really, who doesn't love strawberries and chocolate?

That's all I've got for cooking originality... I also made some lemon cookies which you can find in my desert board and they were outstanding.

All in all, this weekend was awesome. Here are some of my favorite pictures from it.

Lexie cuddling with uncle Richard and Coco.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lexie showing Avery how big kids play with the toy piano... He loves his big sister.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mother's Day Crafting with Lexie

Hey everyone. Yesterday was a huge day for the hubby and I. We got a new car :) a 2007 Nissan Altima. It is gorgeous. After that he had a VA appointment so we were out in Hillsboro. We decided to go out to my sister Megan's house so I could do some crafts with the kids and have a little BBQ.... We are having great weather for that finally! Below is a quick tutorial for the crafts Lexie and I did, plus a video tutorial because I didn't get a lot of pictures.

First project is painted candles. For this you will need:

A pillar candle

Wax or parchment paper

Hair dryer

White tissue paper

Acrylic paint

And a cute little kid, like Lexie... Obviously this one is optional because an adult could do this as well.

Begin by laying out some parchment paper, this craft can get a wee bit messy. Then, cut a piece of tissue paper slightly smaller than your candle. This will be your painting surface. I gave Lexie about four colors to choose from and let her paint however she wanted. Now, Lex is two so her painting wasn't more than dots really. Anyways, I let her paint and after she was done I added some finishing touches. You'll see those below in the finished picture.

Once your kiddo is done painting, and you've added your finishing touches, wrap the tissue paper around the candle, paint side out. This part is a little tricky since you don't want to smear the paint, so just be patient and take your time.

Next, wrap the parchment paper around your candle and tissue paper. This will be a handle for you to hold onto while you use the blow dryer. Now you should find a comfy spot next to a outlet and plug in your dryer. Sit down, hold onto the parchment paper, turn the dryer on high, and start blowing the candle. Soon, you will start to see the tissue paper disappear and the colors become brighter, and don't worry, you can take the parchment paper off while drying too and check. Basically, your candle should feel like wax again and not tissue paper. Below you can see the finished products, one for mom and one for grandma.

Another cute project we did was footprint animals. These are a cute way to remember feet at different ages, and makes a great gift from little babies like Avery. You can see ours below.

I love the way all these projects turned out :) I hope you all enjoy doing some Mother's day crafting and I know all the mom's out there will love these crafts.

 

Enjoy the crafting :)

 

Sunshine?

Three days was enough.... Not. I want it back. As I sit here and type I'm listening to the rain on my window. I love the rain and all, but I am at the point of needing sunshine because my seasonal depression is starting to mix badly with my bi-polar. There is only so much I can take and so much medicine that I can handle, so please come back sunshine. Only two months until Richard and I leave for Vidcon and Disneyland :)

I've been working on a birthday board for part of my mom's mothers day present. I'm kind of proud of it. It is something that every member of my family needs. Six kids plus their spouses and ten grand kids, yeah my parents have a lot of birthdays to remember. I will do a full tutorial on this later, I just wanted to show y'all what I've been up to.

I'm also planning to go over to my sister Megan's house and do some crafts with Lexie for mothers day, so there will be more tutorials there. I love kid crafts and am glad I have a niece to make do them :)

I took my car in to get its oil change today and left kind of irritated. We bought this car in late October and have had a bunch of minor problems with it. Well, it basically came down to the guy listing all the problems with it that he sees now and telling me that buying a new car will be a better idea and probably cheaper. Ridiculous. However, Richard and I are starting the hunt for a newer car tomorrow. I've tried a foreign car with this Passat and it has made me want American made only. I told Richard that when we get old I'm going to be one of those people who complains about anything not American made, oh well... Hopefully we find something that we like, can afford, and can work everything out with the old car too. Fingers crossed. You'll all get the updates.

 

Crafts for Kids

Saturday my big sister Megan, her husband Sam, and their kids Lexie (2) and Avery (6months) are coming to visit. Megan and I had some crafting to do so to keep Lex entertained I made a few things.

First off was this cute little guy. I made him from leftover plastic Easter eggs. It was raly simple. Basically, I threaded some yarn through the eggs. I made sure that the bottom of each egg was resting inside the top half of the egg. At the end, I put the whole egg on there and glued it shut. Put some googly eyes on there and a felt tongue and you have a snake. Another idea is to throw some beads or something in the end before you glue it closed so that it makes a rattle snake.



Then, I made some play-doh. Follow my recipie below and you will never buy store bought play-doh ever again. Seriously, this stuff is the best.

In a pot pour all your ingredients:

1 cup flour

1cup water

1/4 cup salt

1 tbs oil

2 tsp cream of tartar

Food coloring- I love the neon colors, or even kool-aid powder will work

Place the pot over medium heat and stir, stir, stir.

The mix will go from watery to play-doh pretty quickly and once it looks like the picture to the right it's done. You should be able to scoop it all out at once.



















Now comes my favorite part. Divide the batch into two parts.

Add a few drops of food coloring to each half and knead it in.

Once you're done with that you have the best play-doh ever. I repeated this process so I had four colors, but you could just double the recipie in the first place and then divide it into four parts.

So Lexie didn't last long, but her sleeping is still really cute. And Coco decided to cuddle up with her.

Now, this is the actual project Megan and I did. She had a lot of baby food containers that needed to be turned into storage containers.

First start by removing any labels and cleaning them up.

Next, take the lids and paint them with chalkboard paint. We tried to do a yellow around the rim and just the chalkboard on top, but it did not look good so we painted it all the black.

To make the jars look cuter I hot glued a little lace ribbon around the jar. This also helped to cover up the glue from the label that didn't come off and also any printing that was on the jar. Personally, I think they turned out really cute, but I may be biased :)

Check back later this week for my next tutorial and I'll be doing a video soon!

Pudding Paint With Lexie

So Thursday night Richard and I went to my sister Megan's house. She told me to bring a craft for her two year old, Lexie, and finding one is not the easiest. So, if you have a two year old and you want to do a craft then plan on making a mess. We enjoyed doing some pudding painting and it is the easiest craft to set up.
I used one large box of instant vanilla pudding. I separated it out into four containers and put a few drops of food coloring in each. Lex loved watching the pudding turn color as I stirred it. You can obviously use more colors, but I did red, yellow, blue and green. Then the fun begins. I recommend stripping the kid down to their diaper, putting out a large piece of paper and letting them go crazy. We used paper plates for Lexie to paint on... We found out quickly that a larger area would be needed. Check out the pictures below and go have some fun pudding painting :)

Check back tomorrow for a new tutorial, Silk Dyed Blown Eggs. We are also going to start a YouTube channel with my tutorial videos on it... I'll let you know about that when it's up and running.