My Funny Valentines

Bella enjoys her Valentine's Day treats!

Valentines day has always been a fun time, but it's getting even more exciting now that I have little girls to shower with love! Today was no exception, Vivi and Bella got some new toys, and were allowed to eat chocolate BEFORE BREAKFAST! Then I made them a special meal of heart-shaped strawberry pancakes! They were super sticky afterwards, so they got to have a pink bubble bath, and they are now all decked out in their Valentine's day best! Later on we will go visit my best friend from my childhood, Ashley, and her daughter Alexis, who is Bella's best friend. 

Vivienne loves her pancakes!

To make the heart-shaped strawberry pancakes you simply add 3/4 cup of chopped strawberries and 3 drops wilton pink gel food coloring to pancake batter (however you prefer to make pancakes, I use Aunt Jemima's pancake mix) I cut a heart out of the middle of each pancake using a cookie cutter. Next, I put strawberry jelly between each one, and drizzled honey over the top, and finished the whole thing off with a sprinkling of powdered sugar! The girls really loved them!

Heart-shaped strawberry pancakes with honey!

My Epic Pinterest Fail and the Ensuing Discovery

Have you ever walked into a store and just been hit over the head with a glorious aroma that makes you want to weep angel tears of joy? I have always wondered how certain retail establishments get their mystical, magical fragrances. Recently I came across a pin that said that I could make my own house smell like Williams Sonoma simply by sautéing some lemon, rosemary and vanilla, so I gave it a try last week.

Now my house smells like a
Willams Sonoma that's burning
to the ground

My experience was not precisely what I expected. The lemon and rosemary overpowered the vanilla completely, even when I put in double the amount of vanilla. Instead of smelling like a pricy purveyor of pots and pans, my house smelled like I was preparing to cook some fish. So I decided to dump some brown sugar in the mix to amp up the sweetness. I never achieved a Williams Sonoma scented house, even though I simmered my mixture for an hour. It smelled vaguely nice if I stuck my head over the pan, but the smell was not permeating the rest of my house as promised. I decided I would burn off the rest of the liquid and then just throw the lemons and rosemary in the trash, so I turned the heat up to high to boil it off quickly. As always happens in my house, I was distracted by my children and completely forgot about my pan of aromatic vegetation and sucrose until about 20 minutes later when I smelled smoke. I ran into the kitchen and found the contents of the pan on the verge of spontaneous combustion, so I quickly turned off the stove and doused the pan with water. So now, instead of a lovely aroma that evoked visions of shopping and copper utensils, my house smelled like a rancid volcano erupting with scorched lemons and burnt sugar. On top of that, I was stuck with a saucepan that had half a centimeter of charred sugar cemented to the bottom.

I tend to find humor in my foibles, I don't get easily embarrassed by my failures, so I turned to Facebook to share the hilarity of my idiocy and get ideas of how to salvage my one and only quart sized saucepan. My best friend's brother reminded me that oven cleaner could be used to remove bad scorches from pots and pans as well as ovens, and I just happened to have some! So I ended up using Easy-Off to remove the scorches, and burning candles to get rid of the nasty smell... which is what I should have been doing in the first place rather than trying to extract essential lemon and rosemary oil on my stovetop. So if you are ever curious if you can make your house smell like your favorite retail establishment, I would highly recommend a trip to Yankee Candle instead. And the next time you create a tiny Mordor on your stovetop, remember my Pinterest fail, and turn to Easy-Off.

Book Lovers Never Go To Bed Alone

I am so behind on my blogging, thanks to the holidays! I still haven't posted the blog about Vivi's birthday, but I'll link to it when I finally do. Tonight I'm up late doing a little Cyber Monday shopping. We just got back from our Vegas vacation a week ago and I was finally able to do a little reading. I have been slowly trying to fill my library with quality, leather-bound editions of the classics. Barnes & Noble has been selling some really beautiful ones, and I bought Wuthering Heights, because I'd never read it. What a disturbing book it turned out to be! The characters are utterly worthless, evil creatures who are completely bent on creating hell on earth for everyone around them, most particularly those they love. It ends as well as can be expected though, and if I were to take a moral from it, it would probably be that no good deed goes unpunished.

I thought I'd share a fun little book-hack I've come up with. I always get these beauty catalogs in the mail that come with four or five of those paper samples of perfume or cologne. Usually these things fall out on the floor or in my lap or end up in Vivienne's mouth, thereby making her whole face smell like Justin Bieber's "The Key" or something else equally nauseating. I actually do like some of these samples and tend to go through them to see if I want a new fragrance on my Christmas list, but they tend to pile up. I got the idea recently to use them for bookmarks, for the dual purpose of holding my place and making my books smell lovely. I've started sorting through them each time they show up and putting my favorites in my books. I think this adds a fun little sensory experience to reading, as if your leading man is right there in the room with you.

Ah well, time to hit the hay, as they say. I hope I can get back on soon and post the rest of my blogs that are piling up inside my brain!

Autumn is Here... Time For Punkin' Bread!

The Amazing Disappearing Punkin' Bread!

I still need to write the blog about Vivi's and my joint birthday party, but in the meantime I'd like to share my Punkin' Bread recipe! I have already made this three times this fall, it's completely addictive and the perfect complement to a cup of coffee on a crisp Fall morning! I call it Punkin' Bread because my little punkins just love it! Bella christened it "punkin' cake" because it's so sweet. I make it in a bundt pan, and there is always enough left over to fill a small loaf pan, and I usually give the spare loaf away. It doesn't really need any kind of adornment but I usually put either cream cheese or butter on it because I like to mix salty and sweet flavors. This Fall though, I tried something different. The first loaf I made was for Vivi's party and I had also made a cake (obviously, it's a birthday party) and I had kind of panicked thinking I wasn't going to have enough frosting for the cake, so I whipped up a batch of buttercream frosting from scratch using this recipe. When the frosting I had turned out to indeed be enough for the cake I was left with a preponderance of unassigned buttercream frosting, which can be totally dangerous... Imagine Liz with a spoon and a bucket of buttercream frosting, huddling in a dark corner muttering "my precious, my precious!"... So I tried putting it on the punkin' bread, and it was mind-blowingly delicious. Since that was so good, this last time I made it I tried some browned butter icing, which is also excessively scrumptious! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! (Punkin' Bread and Browned Butter Icing Recipes follow)

Punkin' Bread!

Ingredients:
3 Eggs
1 Cup Vegetable Oil
2 1/4 Cups Granulated Sugar
2 15 oz cans of Pumpkin
2 Tablespoons Vanilla Extract
3 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 Tablespoon Cinnamon
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1 1/4 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1 Tablespoon Pumpkin Pie Spice

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350.

Beat eggs, add oil, pumpkin and vanilla. Add sugar and continue to mix until smooth.

Sift together dry ingredients and slowly add to pumpkin mixture until fully incorporated.

Grease the pan before adding the batter to bake - I use copious amounts of  Pam cooking spray.

Makes enough for two regular sized loaf pans, or a standard sized bundt pan and a small loaf pan.

Bake at 350 for one hour for cake/loaves, or 10-15 minutes for muffins.

I remove my Punkin' Bread by putting the cake carrier base over the top of the pan (while it's still warm, but not straight from the oven) and (using potholders so as to not burn your hands) turn the pan over on top of the cake base, it should slide right out, with a little wiggling.

Punkin' Bread stores well in a cake carrier or cake stand, out on the countertop for about five days, or longer if you can fit it in your fridge. It can also be frozen.


Browned Butter Icing:

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon butter
2 Cups Powdered Sugar
2-4 Tablespoons Milk

Instructions:
Melt butter in a small saucepan on medium-low heat until it is golden brown and bubbly, but be careful to not scorch it.

Remove saucepan from heat and mix icing in the pan itself.

Add Powdered Sugar, do not mix

Add milk, one tablespoon at a time, mixing with a wire whisk.

Icing should be smooth and runny but not watery. For best results, store the icing in a tupperware in the fridge and warm it up by the spoonful, one with each slice of Punkin' Bread (in the microwave, 15-20 seconds on high.) You can put it directly on to the bread and warm them both together, or warm the icing itself in a ramekin and then pour it over the Punkin' Bread.

Punkin' Bread and vanilla latte!

When warming up the icing, put it on the punkin bread cold

then microwave them both together for 20 seconds

it's not as pretty, but just as delicious!

My Library

This place is my sanctuary. I love curling up in the papasan chair with a good book and a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. I have just recently added a children's section to the library, and moved the papasan... maybe one day I'll finally have the upright piano I want so badly and it can go on the opposite wall. I added a couple of Bella's overflowing collection of stuffed animals, specifically the ones that are literary based, next to their books kind of like the children's section of a bookstore. It's fun, and the girls love going in there and playing with the toys and reading! And it went a long way toward getting some of the stuffed animals out of Bella's room!

There Are Places I Remember...

The house I grew up in

It's been a while since I posted, I've been super busy so my blogs are back-logged. Back-logged blogs... say that five times fast... Anyway, on September 13 my oldest and dearest friend Ashley sent me a text telling me to pack my bags because we were going on a surprise trip down memory lane for my birthday! I grew up in Victoria, Texas, which is (for most people) a pit stop on highway 59 between Houston and Corpus Christi. It's too large to be considered a small town, when I was living there the population was around 40,000. However, since it's pretty far removed from other cities it functions very much like a small town and has that small town siren call that keeps natives coming back.

My sister Katie holds our cat Abe

It may not seem like a fun trip to most people, even to Ashley because she lived there much longer than I did, but she knew that I would really like to go there, and she even arranged a meeting with our 4th grade teacher, Ms. Prince, in whose class we met in October of 1993!

I was born in the Calhoun County hospital in Port LaVaca because my parents had been living in Point Comfort until right before I was born and my mom's Obstetrician was there. I lived in Victoria at 504 Joplin Street from birth until just before my 13th birthday. To this day Victoria holds the record for my longest residency in any Texas city, although I suspect it will soon be outstripped by Austin in a couple of years.

My family moved to Victoria because my dad got a job at the Brown and Root plant there, and none of the rest of our family lived there, so when we moved away in the Fall of 1996 there wasn't much reason to visit. We did go back and forth periodically for the next three years because it took us that long to sell our house, and I went back every once in a while throughout high school and in to college to visit Ashley and her family, but now that they've moved to the Austin area, it has been at least six years since I went back.

Some of my old class mates (5th grade) play on a piece of
playground equipment that has since been removed

Ashley took me to visit my old landmarks, we went to Vickers Elementary School, and checked out my old house, which is three blocks away. I used to walk to and from school until I was old enough to ride my bike. We visited the Victoria Mall which is basically the only thing to do in town most days. We visited my old home church, Trinity Episcopal, where I also attended school for second grade, by a stroke of good fortune the organist was there and he let us in and we roamed around, breathing in my past. It was really odd because they have never moved around the class rooms, and the second grade class room is in exactly the same spot it was in when I was there. However, there is now a portable building where there used to be a small playground, and they turned the old library into a computer lab. C'est la vie.

Ashley and I climbed an old jungle gym - this was silver
when we were in school

I have never had the courage to go up to my old house and knock on the door and ask to come inside. I know it would be completely different if I did, new furniture, new smells... That's why I was so happy to be able to go back into my old church where not much has changed. I had Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me" stuck in my head all weekend though.

My 5th grade class

Ms. Prince was my 4th grade teacher at the beginning of the year, and due to large class sizes they had to hire a new teacher half way through the year and I was moved to her class. Her name was Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller and Ms. Prince were my favorite teachers from elementary school. Mrs. Miller moved from Vickers to Howell Middle School in 1995 but I didn't have her in sixth grade. At some point in time she must have moved away from Victoria, but Ms. Prince is still teaching 4th grade at Vickers, she's in her 37th year of teaching!

We thought this was the same slide, it's in roughly the same
place, but I'm not sure it is, you can tell the top is
different in the two pictures.

The kickball field!

The interior of the sanctuary, from my family's
usual pew, on the same side as the pulpit
of course

Trinity Episcopal Church front

My dad stands in the parking lot looking very Episcopalian

Me in second grade as a private school kid

This is probably 4th grade... hard to tell...
I look like Ashley's mom I'm so much taller. I still kinda do.

This is what I wrote in the margins of my year
book next to Ms. Prince's name, "The most cool,
sweet, Christian woman I've ever known" other
than my mom, obviously!

Ashley, Ms. Prince and I reunite at IHOP! She looks
exactly the same as she did twenty years ago!

Mrs. Miller - probably my favorite teacher. I had her for
5th grade as well as the second half of 4th grade.

Texts From Kristen

I could start a whole new blog just for this topic. Kristen and I have been friends since Freshman year of high school, and this chick is bonkers. She is absolutely hilarious, incredibly intelligent and her humor is pretty much exactly like mine.

Kristen and I discuss the follies of the English language.

Kristen and I plan a slumber party and discuss rain hyperboles.

Kristen's son is FANTASTIC!

Kristen interrupts her own text to alert me to the fact that she has just seen my nightmare scuttle across her garage floor.

Kristen makes me an awesome drawing.

I got some texts from Evangeline too!

Kristen was there for me when I was venting about my barfy baby

Drunk Liz loves everyone twice as much as sober Liz does.

File this one under texts *TO* Kristen. I am amused with my own cleverness. Why do I continue to shop at this retail garage sale?

Traveling with Kristen is always an adventure!

We literally texted each other the same thing at the same time. Never regret tacos.