Graham Cookie Cake: Dessert Victory

Ingredients:
-1/2 C Milk
-1/4 C honey
-2 Tsp Vanilla
-1 tsp cinnamon
-3 shakes of ginger
-2 Cups AP Flour
-1/2 C Wheat Flour
-1 C brown sugar packed
-1 tsp baking soda
-1/2 C salted butter, softened


Mix all of the ingredients together.  I still do not bother chilling my dough but you can if you like.  With a greased (preferably dark nonstick) pan, turn out and shape your dough to whatever you want it to look like. 

I have a tradition of fun desserts, and really cookie cakes especially, that I always try to keep going during Super Bowl.  So I kept it up this year with a homemade graham cookie cake, which is WAY better than any storebought thing ever thought about being.

Bake at 350 for 10 minutes or so, until the edges start to brown and firm.  Lighter pans may require a bit more time.  Sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the cookie when it comes out of the oven.

Icing Ingredients:
-1/2 pack of cream cheese
-1/2 stick of butter, softened
-2-3 TB REAL maple syrup
-2-3 cups of powdered sugar
-1 TB meringue powder

Powdered sugar can be adjusted on how stiff you want your icing.  I wanted mine to be just at a stage before set, so I used closer to 3 cups.  Mix all of these ingredients well, I mixed and added powdered sugar until mine could hold a peak.

Then I just piped a border and some cute designs on it once the cookie was completely cool.  The good thing about this jellyroll pan is that it comes with a lid and a handle, so taking this thing was SUPER simple. 

This is a great way to do a cookie cake that is completely homemade, not packed with preservatives and questionable amounts of who knows what, and that is a delicious diversion from the relatively tasteless norms that come from the store.

I am sorry, but those things hardly even have a chocolate flavor, much less a quality COOKIE flavor.  You know everything that goes in this cookie, and can easily make it any shape you want to fit the theme of the party.  I also don't mind knowing that the dessert people are downing is part wheat flour instead of all completely white flour!

This was a complete hit for the party, with VERY few leftovers.

Happy crafting! Pin It Now!

Lemon Poppyseed Wafers

Ingredients:
-1/2 C Milk
-1/4 C honey
-1/2 tsp vanilla
-1.5 tsp lemon extract
-2 Cups AP Flour
-1/2 C Wheat Flour
-1 C brown sugar packed
-1 tsp baking soda
-zest of a lemon
-1 TB poppyseed
-1/2 C salted butter (I partially melt mine as I never remember to set things out beforehand)
-powdered sugar for dusting

Mix the milk, honey, extract, and butter all together, and then mix in all the rest.  Chill your dough if you don't want it to be a sticky nightmare.  Or just be prepared to use liberal amounts of flour for dusting your rolling pin and surface.

Roll them out fairly thin, the more thin the more cracker-like they will be, and put them on a greased baking sheet. 

Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes, this will vary by what kind of baking sheet you are using.  Dark nonstick pans bake a little more quickly, so keep that in mind. 

Spread out some wax paper on a table and transfer them to it when they come out of the oven.  Immediately dust with powdered sugar. 

They are delicious!

Happy crafting. Pin It Now!

Menu Board, lighter and brighter

All of my lightbulbs burned out in my kitchen.  Luckily, my best friend gave me some incandescents she wasn't going to use since she switched to CFLs that I could use in ornament crafting.  Well LUCKILY I did not think of enough things to use lightbulbs in during the crafty winter months so I still had some bulbs.  I put them in my light, flipped it on...

And whoa boy did it make my apartment light way brighter.  I don't know what low wattage bulbs were in there when I moved in, but they sucked.  So then since my apartment was all light and bright, I naturally had to change the menu board to match.

Then, as I now ironically note, I took the picture in a more lowly lit part of my apartment ahhaha.  That is rather funny.  Anyway a major crafting problem for me is not always having enough paper of the right type to do large projects like this.  I could have waited to go buy more, but instead I opted for my usual use what I have theory. 

The top left and bottom right with the birds are pages I had.  in order to blend these pages with themselves and with the borders I markered some white pages with gray and putch sketch lines and words of my favorite quotes in very small writing as a nod to the paper.  I also used a pen to draw in the bottom half of the butterfly as it was only on the top paper. 

So that my panels would not be color and the rest black and white, I used my graphic design markers to color in some of the scrapbook pages.

Then I added squares at odd angles because it is IMPOSSIBLE to get things straight when your craft area of choice is the floor.  Seriously, super tough.  I put in the bubbles so that I could write things I needed to buy, make notes, and jot down ideas.

I like it quite a bit!

As always, happy crafting! Pin It Now!

Pesto-Rella Grilled Cheese

It would be more work than it is worth to get a picture to upload for this.  I am running on 3 hours of sleep, gave a presentation, had class until 9PM, and am completely and utterly exhausted. I was also starting when I got home.  I needed something quick, and grilled cheese is my comfort food.

I used wheat bread and put a slice of mozzarella (yes slice, not shredded) on one side and a smear of pesto on the other.  You know what it needed? BACON.  Please, please make this and put bacon on it.  That would be so delicious.  But I was way too hungry to wait for bacon.

I smeared some butter on one side of the outside of the samich, put a pat of butter in a skillet and plopped the samich in non-buttered side down.  Cooked it until toasty, ate, and enjoyed. 

And then I ate some more homemade graham crackers that I made yesterday. Holy cow they are YUMMY! They really do taste like graham crackers.  I know that may sound crazy to say, but who knew it was that easy to make them?  Homemade cheesecake crust is on the horizon.

I really wanted nutella ice cream to go with my grahams.  Someday I will have NI and HGC's together at last.

I am rambling because I am exhausted.  I can feel my eyes sinking back into my skull haha. 

Happy crafting! Pin It Now!

Homemade Graham Crackers

That's right.  Homemade GRAHAM CRACKERS!

Ingredients:
-1/2 C Milk (I used half milk, half almond milk...because I had it)
-1/4 C honey
-2 Tsp Vanilla** (original recipe I was basing mine off of called for 1 TB...but I was a little gun shy on putting that much in.  You do what you feel like).
-2 Cups AP Flour
-1/2 C Wheat Flour
-1 C brown sugar packed
-1 tsp baking soda
-1/2 C salted butter

You have two choices.  You can mix the wet ingredients first and then mix all the rest in like I did in the same bowl.  Or you can dirty up two bowls, do the milk honey vanilla in one and the dry + butter in the second one, and then combine.  Clearly mixing them all in at the same time worked out ok for me.

You have a second round of choices.  You can deal with the dough straight from the mixing bowl like I did, acknowledging that it is going to be super sticky and kind of frustrating.  Or you can chill it for an hour.  Either way you have to turn your dough out onto a floured surface.  Either way you want to work with about 1/3 of the dough at a time. My way just involved it being slightly irksome and slurping up flour left and right and nearly sticking to my kitchen island.  BUT it did save me a whole hour.

Preheat your oven to 350, place the grahams on baking sheets (I put mine on parchment paper) and poke some holes in them with a fork.  For the record, I completely cannot stand Reynolds Wrap's weird parchment paper with the foil backing on it, but it happens to be the only thing I have on hand.  And when it comes to one less thing to wash at 1 AM in the morning when I am playing catch up...that will be a godsend.

Since some of mine were pretty thick and I made mine rather large, I baked mine for about 9 minutes, maybe 10.  If yours are more thin and regular, you will be looking at a time of 6-8 minutes.  The original recipe definitely rolled theirs more thin than mine, as they got 64 out of it and I got 28.  But I like the softer, almost shortbread texture.  So I really don't mind a bit.  When mine came out of the over I sprinkled them immediately with a cinnamon sugar mix. 

What I do mind, however, is that I have no ICE CREAM to go with these. What a buzzkill. 

Interesting things of note:  you could not cut these, and press them into a pan and make a giant pseudo cookie cake out of them.  That could be fun.  Perhaps a base to a dessert pizza.  Who knows.

I personally like the flavor of these, even though my vanilla was substantially less than that of the original recipe.  These are not overly sweet or potent, which sits well with me.  They are dessert without being dessert.  And they would taste great with nutella.

I am sure this will be a future experiment of mine of completely changing the flavor and profile of these into all sorts of crazy shenanigans.

Happy crafting! Pin It Now!

Drawing Journal

 So I really like the idea of art journaling, and I wanted to do my own take on it.  I have watercolors, but not pastels and similar.  I also don't like crinkled up pages of books that were not meant for watercolors.  So, I decided to alter this a little and call it a drawing journal, and mostly stay in colored pencils.  The benefits, as I see them, include nothing bleeding through the paper and me not having to purchase anything extra.  Except maybe more colored pencils but that has little to do with this book and everything to do with me not enjoying the selection that my pack came with.

Anyway, I believe I am going to start each page out with a line pattern like this where I will write whatever I am thinking about at that moment.  I have yet to decide if I am going to do pages or spreads, but I am thinking about just pages.  That way, whatever I need to get off my chest has only one small sketchbook page to happen.  No room for fluff!

I also decided that I want to take the main point of the message and convert it into the artwork.  For my first little entry I was thinking about what it means to be me.  The overall concept that I used to the artwork soon became "Strong Bird by definition, Green Zebra by choice."

This fit my color scheme well and comes from when I used to look through those baby name books to see what mine and others names meant.  Between my first and middle name I get strong bird.  Maybe that's accurate, maybe it isn't, all I know is that I really do think peacocks are gorgeous and penguins are hilarious and ostriches are just awkward looking in the best way possible.  So maybe I am cool with the bird idea.

But since I am not the typical young adult and am very much not always the typical female, I identify more with my concept of being a greenzebra in a sea of black and white (in case anyone was ever wondering where the greenzebra stuff came from, that is part of it). 

I really think this could be a fun idea and a good use of a sketchbook.  This is going to be for all of my things that I may not want to specifically put on my blog, but may eventually want to show someone.

Should be fun!

Happy crafting.

Pin It Now!

Pumpkin Cheesecake Wontons

 I was not feeling very creative today until I realized I had an unopened pack of wonton wrappers.  That is essentially crack for me.  I love putting random stuff in wontons.

I also love using things I already have.  How convenient.  I happened to have some leftover maple cream cheese icing...mwahahaha. Here we go!

-1/4 pack of reduced fat cream cheese
-1 TB maple syrup
-1/4 tsp vanilla
-1/4 C pumpkin
-1/4 tsp or LESS of cinnamon
-4 shakes of ginger
-1 shake of nutmeg
-1/4 c powdered sugar

OR, just your leftover icing from those yummy cinnamon rolls with pumpkin and spices added in.  Anyway mix all those together and fill wontons with the mix.  I rubbed a little oil over the top of mine, it really wasn't necessary I just wanted to see if they would get crispier.  If you have cloves, you could do less cinnamon and a tiny hint of cloves.  I have none.  So I had no choice.  I in no way shape or form would do any more cinnamon.

Bake at 350 for about 14 minutes until golden brown and sprinkle with powdered sugar when they come out.

These were pretty darn good, but I think they will be better when they get cold.  Caramel drizzled over them when they were hot, or maple syrup, could potentially be awesome as well. 

I baked mine on parchment paper so I wouldn't have to wash my sheet.  Then I spilled powdered sugar on it.  There really is no winning.  But these were delicious, so I will count that as a win.  I love pumpkin flavored things, I know it really is more of a fall type flavor but I don't care.  What the heck does winter have anyway?

Soup?

Peppermint? 

Peppermint soup wontons? I think not.  So, pumpkin it was haha. Plus I have been pining to make a cheesecake lately and so these at least are a nod to that.

Wontons make everything more fun.  I don't know how they do it, but even broccoli would be better in a wonton.  No really, a broccoli cheese wonton would be legit. 

If you are sitting there thinking how you really don't like pumpkin, shame on you.  However, you could use just about any pie filling mixed with cream cheese or fruit mixed with cream cheese and have an excellent cheesecake-esque filling, just replace the maple with honey if you need to.  Or do apple pie filling, caramel, and cream cheese.  Ignore spices if you are using preflavored things like that.  I would consider a hint of ginger with nearly all fresh fruit if it were me.  Not banana.  Definitely not banana. 

Happy crafting!

Pin It Now!