Posts Tagged ‘food’

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Crochet Cupcakes

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

This turned out to be a me-too project, in that I made one for a friends little girl who was turning two, and then both my girls said “me too! me too!”. So I made two more. They didn’t take very long.

The silhouette could use a little bit of work, I don’t like how it doesn’t mound roundly at the top, which has to do with how tightly I stuffed it to be sure that the candle would stick up, but I do like how the frosting sticks out over the edge of the cupcake base, which is partly the obvious increase and then decrease, but also that on the inside of the cupcake I stitched the bottom of the increase row loosely to the top of the decrease row to keep it from stretching too far up and loosing its shape. But, maybe I was being to smart for my own good with the internal stitching, and the shape would have been better without it? It would have kept that dip out of the frosting silhouette…

Also, I put cardboard in the bottom to keep it flat, but I should have added a weight also, because they are still tippy. Next time. But isn’t the flame cute? It would make a nice sparkler I think.

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Posted in Crafty | 2 Comments »

Rolling Gingerbread

Monday, December 26th, 2011

This year we did it, we built a rolling graham cracker car/train thing. It rolls! I had to slightly violate our 100% food rule, because I forgot to bring stick pretzels, so the only thing I could find to use for an axle was the stick for a cocktail umbrella… they were there for gingerbread house decorating, so it sorta counts, but I’d like to have a do-over with 100% food. Next time maybe. Although, I think I’ll move on to a counterweight trebuchet… But a car with a gravity weight drive… the belt would be tricky, I could use those sticky gummy ropes, does a candy necklace with elastic in the middle count as food?? Lollypop sticks would also make fine axles come to think of it… Oh, or large candy canes. Does custom pouring hard candy gears count as cheating?

(Direct Youtube video link)

Here is proof that it rolls! The wheels are made out of graham cracker plywood (2-ply) with a hole cut in the center (used a bento circle cutter designed for cutting out eyes from cheese and such) with a Good N’ Plenty stuffed in it, which the tooth-pick-like cocktail umbrella stick stuck into that. The toothpicks go straight through the body of the car. My original plan was to build box tubes under the car and run stick pretzel axels through them, this is cleaner and simpler, but disappointingly not 100% food based.

(Direct Youtube video link)

Here is Jesse’s micro car, with Necco wafer wheels and similar toothpick construction.

Previous years:
2010: Gingerbread Marble Run
2009: Gingerbread Castle

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Posted in Crafty | 3 Comments »

Smooth and Fuzzy

Monday, September 12th, 2011


This is way better than those texture books, look at that serious experimenting going on! :-D We were talking about the names of different kinds of fruit and what the differences were, which led to a contemplation of smooth and fuzzy. Apparently your cheeks are the appropriate measuring devices for smooth and fuzzy. Please try this at home!


The verdict for this snack time was fuzzy got eaten. We did not do comparative taste tests. :-)

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Posted in Homeschool | 4 Comments »

Gingerbread Marble Run

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Is it unseasonal to post this now? I should start pre-dating all my holiday activities a year in the future so people see them at ‘appropriate’ times. Whatever. When my kids are older I’ll magically become more organized…

Also, there is no gingerbread or actual marbles involved in this… it should be titled “Graham Cracker and Everlasting Gobbstopper Run”, but…

Every year (okay, maybe every other…) we build a gingerbread house, usually at a big party with our friends, which we used to host, but due to living in a tiny house this year Chris hosted it, which was AWESOME of her. This year we couldn’t get inspired over any particular architectural undertaking, although there are some awesome modern gingerbread houses, and super realistic ones, and, oh dear, prison yards and peep shows… But, gizmos are always good around here, so we went for the rolling candy castle. We ran out of time (carefully mitering gingerbread strips takes time!) to really decorate this, so it’s not very candylandish, but it does run! And that’s the important thing around here, or is it?

Proof (here’s the straight link if the embedding is being flakey…):

Hopefully that video link thing works for you.

Awesome? We think so. And I should clarify, we is me and my eternal partner in gizmology, my awesome husband Jesse.

Next year, unless we do something totally different which is probably what will happen, it would be cool to go for taller, add tunnels, and some ^ points where the ‘marbles’ can split directions. How about plinko? Perhaps a rolling car? So many possibilities once you get away from just ‘house’.

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Posted in Crafty | 7 Comments »

Lemons

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

What do you do with a 5 gallon bucket of lemons? Make a whole lot of lemon juice ice cubes. I love having lemon juice ice cubes around, they are great for that quick fix of lemonade or adding to iced tea. Using the lemon juicer is also good for coordination and hand strength! No, she didn’t do the whole bucket. :-)

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Posted in Homeschool | 3 Comments »

Making Cheese

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.

Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?

[Recently all my comments have started being flagged as spam by Akismet, so if I don't respond to your comment by email promptly, okay, it always takes me a couple days, but if it takes me a week, sorry, I forgot to check my spam comments again. Dunno what I broke...]

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Posted in Homeschool | 2 Comments »

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