Friday Flashback

Last year, Wiggle Man decided that egg holders were for sissies. So he just used his hands.



Nothing like showing up to church Easter Sunday morning with brownish, purplish hands. Wonder how he'll do this year....

Monkey Boots and Mud Puddles

This is what Wiggle Man and I did today:

We splashed.

We played with the ball. (Our version of soccer is...interesting.)




Wiggle Man made good use of his monkey boots.




Do you think he's enjoying himself?

Boats from the dollar section at Target make up Wiggle Man's navy.

Can you see Wiggle Man? He's sliding down his (wet) slide. He's wearing different pants now.

Splish, splash.

I think I really need my own boots now. Seriously, doesn't that look like fun?

Caramel Addiction

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Well, I'm The Missus, and I have a problem. I'm a caramelcornaholic. It started innocently enough. I made a batch (technically, I made a third of a batch, at least according to the recipe I was using) Saturday night, in preparation for Sunday's Football Festivities. Between the Rev and I, that ginormous bowl of caramel deliciousness did not make it through the night. By bedtime, it was all gone. All of it. Gone.

So, Sunday afternoon, like the domestic maven I am, I prepared twice as much. This, along with the frozen pizzas and the veggies and dip I prepared the day before would be our Football Festivities Feast.



And, like the domestic maven that I am (or have been of late, anyway) I managed to burn one pan of the caramelly goodness. It was there that I learned a profound lesson. Yesterday's oven temperatures do not work with today's (adjusted) recipe.

I realised I had read the recipe wrong on Saturday, putting less baking soda in than I should have. Baking soda makes the caramel get all puffy (sorry for the technical terms here) and fluffy. So less baking soda means less fluffy caramel poured over your popcorn. This means it's a little thicker, so it doesn't melt as well in the oven. You put it in the oven on baking trays to help coat all the popcorn, taking it out every 15 minutes to stir. Because it wasn't melting as well, I bumped up the temperature a bit to help things along.

Fast forward to Sunday's batch. I realise I read the recipe wrong the day before, and make the proper adjustments, resulting in gloriously fluffy caramel. I poured it all over the popcorn, and put the trays in the oven. At the same temperature I had the day before.

Which resulted in this:



That, friends, is a charred pan from which burnt caramel corn was scraped off. And eaten. I mean, it's still caramel corn. (I told you I had a problem. In my defense, I couldn't eat all of it...just the least burnt parts. And I saved the good batch for the game. Really.)

The point? (Besides showing you my yucky pans?) Yesterday's solutions may not work for today's problems. It seems obvious, but sometimes I need to be reminded to think things through, taking every circumstance into consideration.

But, I decided to make the best of a charred situation, and share with you my secret for cleaning this:


See that white stuff all over the pan? Yesterday after they cooled off, I wet the pans just a little, and poured baking soda all over the burnt sugar mess. You want to make a paste out of the baking soda and water, and essentially cover the burnt bits with the paste. Don't be like me, and forget the edges and corners.

Then, do nothing. Let those babies sit. Give the baking soda past plenty of time to work its magic. Then, after about a day, take a plastic food scraper (oh, how I love thee) and scrape the mess away. Everything under the baking soda paste will scrape away. You probably won't even need the scraper to get it off. But, I use it just in case I find a spot I missed with the paste. A little rinse under the faucet, a quick scrub with some dish soap to remove any residue, and there you have it:

Clean pans! (My food scraper wanted to pose with the pan, so I let it.) Now, I know you're thinking that pan isn't exactly gleaming, but it's not like it was gleaming before it was covered in burnt sugar. I mean, it's still me we're talking about, after all.

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

That's what they say, anyway. So here's my little angel, getting his clean on.

I won't tell you what he was wiping off his face in this picture. I will tell you that whatever it was (and far be it from me to discuss yucky things on this blog) just may have come from out of his nose.

But I'm not telling.

More Places

The nice man at Wholey's let Wiggle Man hold a lobster.


He's thrilled.

Actually, he's distracted by the choo choo.

I'm telling you. Everywhere we went seemed to have a train somewhere.

Places

Last week the Rev and I took Wiggle Man on a little trip. We told him "vacation" is where you go see new places.

Places became his word of the week.

Especially places with trains.






Here's a view from the top of the Duquesne Incline, in Pittsburgh, where we got to spend some time with good friends.

Cake Pops

This weekend, we had dinner with some friends. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to practise my cake decorating. (Plus, let's be honest--I was craving chocolate cake.)

Well, it was also the first chance I'd had to make a cake using Bertha, my new KitchenAid stand mixer. Well...I got a little excited, and used the wrong attachment on Bertha when making the icing. It was lumpy, no doubt about it.

I tried putting the cake together, anyway. I even got as far as putting a crumb coat of icing on it and letting it set up in the fridge overnight. But I just couldn't do it.

So, I took the opportunity to try something I've been wanting to try for a while now: Bakerella's Cake Pops. Check out her awesome blog for the actual recipe; I simply took my cake, scraped off the offending lumpy icing, and mashed it up with some nice, non-lumpy chocolate icing.

Then I formed the chocolatey goodness into balls (some were too big, in hindsight) and stuck them with lollipop sticks. My cake pops took a chill in the freezer to firm them up:

And then they took a bath in melted candy melts (Wiggle Man wanted "poopah" melts). I should have kept the melted candy and chocolate warmer; you can see this one didn't coat as well as the ones behind it.

And some dark chocolate. ("The chocolate coating makes it go down easier." Actually, these went down pretty easily, thank you Valerie.)

I ran out of chocolate and candy melts, so I thought I'd use up some white chocolate. I think the cake pops had been out of the freezer for too long and weren't as firm as they should have been:

Sadly, Wiggle Man and I had to eat this poor cake pop ourselves. Just to, you know, make sure they tasted ok.

Yup.

Wiggle Man was a little confused by the cake pops (he couldn't tell if they were ice cream or cake) but definitely enjoyed eating them. I wish I'd gotten a picture of him chowing down on his poopah cake pop.

Cake on a stick. What a grand idea. Thanks, Bakerella!

Merry Christmas

Emmanuel.





God With Us.

Oh How The Years Go By

Seven years ago today, The Rev gave me this:




And I said yes.

Snow Fairy

I bet you didn't know I had magic powers, did you?

Picture it: Rochester, NY: 1998. A young Canadian girl arrives at college in the fall. A speech is given to the incoming freshmen, warning us not to expect snow days. This is Western NY, after all. They know how to handle snow there. That year, so much snow falls that even the experienced WNY road crews can't stop school from closing three times.

Picture it: South Jersey, 2002. The same young-ish Canadian girl arrives. Everyone says something along these lines: "Canadian, huh. Well, you won't see that kind of snow down here." That winter, a blizzard so intense comes through that our lovely Canadian heroine was trapped in her house for three days.

Picture it: Virginia, 2009. The same, not-as-youngish Canadian girl arrives. The same comments follow: don't expect the kind of snow you're used to up in Canada.

With that, I give you pictures of this morning's snowfall. You're welcome Virginia. (And the rest of the East Coast. Apparently my powers grow stronger.)

Oh Christmas Tree

Here it is, in all its splendour: (Well, as much splendour as I can capture in a photograph...it doesn't do the lights justice.)



A close-up of an ornament:

Wiggle Man seems to love the tree, too, and lets me know when I need to turn the lights on.

Nativity

Putting out my nativities (yes, plural) is my favourite part of decorating for Christmas.

I have nativities on my tree:



I have a nativity on my mantle:

I have an Amish nativity. (Straight from Lancaster County, PA, thank you very much.)

I have a nativity from Tanzania, bought when I was in Kenya:

I have a Willow Tree nativity: (minus one Wise Man who perished in an unfortunate incident--Willow Tree people do not do well if they fall down the stairs.)

I have a banana leaf nativity from Kenya. (I didn't actually buy this one in Kenya, but I saw one just like it, and wanted to buy it...but I'd already bought the one you see above. So my mother-in-law bought this for me when some Kenyan friends sent crafts to be sold at a fundraiser at church.)

It's my favourite this year, but really...they're all my favourites.

Puggies!

Yep. Wiggle Man loves his "puggies". Especially a whole patch of "puggies."



"Puggy", for the uninitiated, is Wiggle Speak for "pumpkin".



Of course, teeny pumpkins work so well on top of cupcakes.

Especially when they're teeny tiny fondant pumpkins.

Yum!

Thanks to The Frosted Cake 'n Cookie for the how-to on the cupcake toppers!