Long Hair Fix: Complex Look with Simple Braids

 I always tell people that in order to be a prepared female it is NECESSARY to have adequate hairstyles for the zombie apocalypse.  Consider this:
-Tomb Raider/Angelina Jolie: Braided Hair, awesome female in action
-Hunger Games/Jennifer Lawrence: Braided Hair, awesome in action
-Most of the females in Mortal Kombat: Braided hair, ridiculously awesome

My point is that all the great kick butt females have braids.  Or at least all the ones I mentioned.

To do this braid all you have to do is the one sided French braid technique.  You will only pull hair from the outside of the braid.

Here is my sketchily created diagram of what I did.  I started at the side of my head with a small section of hair.  I crossed from both sides a few times before I started pulling hair into it.

After those few times, I start pulling hair only when I crossed from the one on the outside (toward my face).

When I got down to my ear level I decided to lateral back around my head.  I only pulled very small sections this whole time.

This allowed me to secure the braid in with pulled hair while still having hair below, as seen in the second picture.

Basically, I only pulled sections to incorporate with the braid that were right where I wanted the braid to lay.

I continued that pattern all the way around and up, still only pulling hair and incorporating with the one coming from the outside. 

When I got all the way around and back near my braid, I stopped pulling hair and braided it regularly to make it easier to poke through.  I then poked it through a section of the braid, unbraided the excess, and went back to the method I had been using of incorporating hair with the sections pulled from the outside.

I continued to do this in a series of loops, braiding out the end and securing it with bobby pins under another section. 

It looks difficult, and may even sound difficult, but it was actually really easy since it is the same technique the whole way through.  If you can French braid, you can EASILY do a braid like this. 

I have a couple of other styles I am going to try with this soon.  When it is 90+ degrees outside, I LOVE having my hair all up without it looking like I just tossed it in a ponytail. 

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Tasty, Healthy Pasta Salad with Chicken

Ingredients:
-1 package whole wheat Buitoni tortellini
-1 6 oz container of plain 0% fat Chobani Greek Yogurt
-1/4 C Pesto
-1/2 C shredded chicken
-1/2 tomato, diced
-2 black and 1 green olive, sliced (seriously, you slice them thin and only use a few its all you need)
-1/2 C crumbled feta
-1/4 C fresh shredded parmesan
-1 TB basil
-1/2 tsp crushed rosemary
-1 TB garlic cheese topper
-Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta according to package directions, drain, and let cool for a few minutes. 

Mix the remaining ingredients together and add salt and pepper to taste.  Refrigerate overnight and enjoy.

The great thing about it is the vast majority of the dressing is Greek yogurt, and by adding in the extra herbs you get a lot of flavor without needing to increase the pesto AND a lot of protein.  I do love sneaky protein.  I also used fat free feta from Trader Joe's, it is delicious!

The pasta is honestly so tasty that no one would ever know it is whole wheat. Doubly sneaky.

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Homemade "Mexican Pizza": A Taco Night Twist

(Recipe designed to feed 2)
Crust:
-1C Corn Flour (find it on the international row in your local grocery)
-1 TB butter, softened
-A little under 2/3 C water
-1 tsp salt

Toppings:
-2 Chicken tenderloins (or one chicken breast)
-1/4 C corn
-Pizza sauce to taste or salsa
-1/2 tomato, diced
-Mozzarella, pepperjack, and asiago cheese
-1/2 TB taco seasoning
-Salt, pepper

Plop your chicken in a pot of salted water and let boil for about 30 minutes or so, until it is tender enough to shred with two forks.

Meanwhile, mix the crust ingredients and knead, adding the first 1/3 C of water and then increasing slowly until it comes together.  You want it to be just moist enough that it holds in a ball but still can be pressed out without crumbling apart.

Put the dough between two sheets of saran wrap and use a plate to press it out.  Finish rolling it out thin with a rolling pin. The plate saves a lot of time. 

Spray a pizza pan with holes in it with cooking spray and peel the top layer of saran wrap off.  You can use your hands to press out the dough more if needed.  Flip the crust onto the pizza pan and bake at 400F for ten minutes.

Pull it out of the oven, top with the above ingredients and sprinkle with taco seasoning, salt, and pepper on top the cheese.  Pop it back in the oven for 10 minutes, then switch over to broil until the cheese just starts to brown, watching carefully.  Your crust may get a little tiny bit dark but it turns out being crispy and fantastic, so don't worry.

The crust really does taste like a tortilla chip or similar and makes a delicious thin and crispy pizza.  You could put some sour cream in a baggie and cut the tip off to pipe a little over the top of the pizza.  I used to really like Taco Bell's Mexican Pizzas before I pulled away from eating fast food all that often. 

This fed the both of us with a couple of pieces left over (we cut smaller pieces similar to a flatbread due to the oval shape I had pressed it into).  For anything over two, I would double the recipe or have a lot of sides to go with it. 

This meal is really inexpensive because it does not require a lot of meat.  The two chicken tenderloins were actually a little more than I needed for the pizza size, and I used probably a third to half a cup of it for a pasta salad recipe that will be featured tomorrow.

There are a LOT of ways to cut back on grocery bills, and finding ways to stretch meat farther is a great one in my opinion.  Even the crust in this pizza has a lot of great flavor being made from corn flour, and you will absolutely not sacrifice any flavor using such a small amount of meat.

Happy crafting!

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Sweet 16 Cake

So this cake was our first ever hexagon cake, which you can find my already math-ed out tutorial on cutting squares into hexagons here:

http://greenzebra9.blogspot.com/2013/06/turning-square-cakes-into-hexagon-cakes_14.html

The flowers are my gum paste skills sneaking into the cake lineup again, which I did using absolutely no tools except Reynolds wrap.  Want to know how I managed that?  Well it just so happens I blogged on that too:

http://greenzebra9.blogspot.com/2013/06/gum-paste-cherry-blossoms-creative.html

Anyway you need to make the gumpaste at least a day in advance, preferably about two.  It gives it plenty of time to dry, and it is much more reliable than fondant in my opinion.

I really hate fondant for the record.

The letters are chocolate, and the 16 is actually a candle covered in the same chocolate that the letters were done in.  Which makes it the right color, AND totally useful for the whole, ya know, birthday part of all this.

I used a small star tip to pipe some scallop-esque shapes around the top of each layer as that really helped fill it out and tie it all together.

The flowers were put on with dabs and piles of icing to make them stay where they needed to be. 

The colors matched the pallet of the party which was light pink, dark pink, orange, and aqua.

I used a larger round tip to pipe dots around the bottom, pressing in any little peaks that were leftover.

The bottom is a 12, the next an 8, and the top a 4.5 square (turned hexagon).

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Peach Mango Fruit Salsa

Ingredients:
-1 quart of strawberries
-4 very soft very ripe peaches
-2 very ripe mangoes
-1/4 C honey
-juice of half a lemon and half a lime
-zest of one lemon and one lime
-1/2 tsp cilantro

All you need to do is peel and chop all the fruit and toss it in a bowl with the remaining ingredients.  Make it the night before you need it so that it has time to sit and really infuse all the flavors.

Mint would also be a reasonable spice to use. 

My favorite thing to put fruit salsa on is Food Should Taste Good tortilla chips/crackers.  The sweet potato flavor is fantastic with fruit salsa and also tastes AMAZING with hummus.

At Whole Foods, I found the lime flavor of the FSTG crackers and they are phenomenal.

Whatever you do, I beg you deeply, do NOT I repeat do NOT buy Lime Flavored Wheat Thins.  They really do not taste like lime at all, which makes sense because Onion Powder and Garlic Powder are listed well before lime juice.

Basically, they taste like funyuns.  You know what I really hate? Funyuns.

Opt for the tasty chips from Food Should Taste Good, their lime is spot on.  I also like to make my own wheat scoops chips and add a little cinnamon sugar.  Graham crackers are another option.

I take this for lunch a lot because it is sweet and tasty so I feel like I am being terrible and indulging, but in fact I am getting a lot of vitamins and healthy mumbojumbo.  This and my pineapple version with kiwi, pineapple, and mango have been fun summer treats.

Also to consider is using this as a topping on fruit pizzas, ice cream or sherbet, waffles, and even grilled fish.  I love the pineapple version on swordfish.

Happy crafting!

UPDATE: Have some leftover and want another creative use for it? Check out this post about turning it in to a delicious fresh fruit crisp! http://greenzebra9.blogspot.com/2013/06/fresh-fruit-crisp-leftover-fruit-salsa.html Pin It Now!

Redneck Cupcakes: Deer, Weapons, and lots of CAMO

So...I had a picture of how cool the camo batter was...and I hit delete instead of email.

OF COURSE.

Anyway, the cupcakes themselves are camo for the two with grass on top.  I divided the batter out into the main bowl and 3 ramekins.  I added black cake coloring to one, green to another, and brown to the third.  I put half tablespoons of batter in, alternating the colors until they were 2/3 of the way full. 

To decorate these, I mixed german chocolate (pecan coconut) icing with regular buttercream icing to make the deer.  My dad (and me too!) loves German chocolate cake.  I smeared it on with a spoon and then used my fingers to bring in the sides toward the bottom to make it look more like a deer face. I mixed it with our wedding cake icing so that it would set, as well as so it would give me a light brown without adding extra color.

I broke pretzels to use as antlers, and I would suggest dipping them in chocolate  because they get real stale real quick.  I used a black sixlet for the nose and cute googly eyes.

For the "hunter" cupcakes (which everyone kept calling cookie monster) I used the grass tip and a leaf tip to create a mound of icing where the hunter was hidden.  Clearly he is a hunter that is afraid of heights and did not want to get in a tree stand so he has elaborate camo.

That is my story and I am sticking to it.

I added googly eyes and then melted some chocolate.  I put the melted chocolate in a Ziploc bag, cut a tiny bit of the corner off, and freehand piped some bows and arrows and guns.  Pipe them on to wax paper, let them cool a few minutes or refrigerate them real quick, and use a thin metal spatula to get them off.  Be very careful and make extra, odds are you will break a few.

For the other cupcakes I used the grass and leaf tips to make a forest floor type setup, as well as piping some twigs in brown icing.  You could do that in chocolate as well.

For all of my green, I dipped a knife in brown and one in black and ran it up the sides of the icing bag before I put my green in.  This gave me a camo, woodsy, variegated color in a super simple way.

They were a delicious way to celebrate Father's Day!

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Pink and White Wedding Cake: Scrolling, buttercream, and gumpaste flowers

This is going to be short, sweet, and to the point because I am wiped out after all the baking this weekend.

This cake is almost entirely buttercream.  The top flowers and flower on the side are gumpaste.  All of the scrolling, piping, and similar is buttercream.

If you are not in the market for a five tier cake, the top three layers would make an equally adorable and very much still impressive smaller cake. 

We did the ribbon band around the second layer with the largest Wilton icing tip that is used for base icing.  By putting the cake on a turn table and resting your hand on the edge of the table where you are decorating, it is pretty simple to get it fairly straight.  I put a beaded trim of icing above and below it.

Here is a closer up view of the top couple of layers. The heart topper was just a hair wider than the top layer, which made a really adorable impact on the cake.

As stated in a previous post, those flowers on top are gumpaste and made around blow pops.  The smaller sticks of suckers were great to pop into a cake top, and the suckers saved me from having to waste a lot of gumpaste in a core.

The center of the decoration on the top layer is a white sixlet.

All in all we were very happy with the end product.

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