Pumpkin...well everything.

So my hubby is in love with Pumpkin butter.  I've never really been a fan, but I thought I'd be nice and make him a batch.  We usually get ours at the store, a local company makes it every fall.  This year we couldn't find it anywhere.  I looked through a lot of recipes online and found one that I thought sounded good.  So here it goes.

Recipe:

Ingredients:
1 15-ounce can pumpkin
1/2 cup apple juice
3/4 granulated sugar (i used cane sugar)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp vanilla

Directions:
1) Set crock pot on low and combine all the ingredients in the bottom, stir together well.
2) Cover and let cook for about 5 hours. It should be thick enough to stick to your spoon when turned upside down.
3)Spoon into a jar and let cool completely in the fridge.  (It can keep 2 weeks in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer.)



Here is the picture of what mine made!

It is really good too, and I am not the biggest pumpkin butter fan, although I do love almost everything else pumpkin!

Hope you enjoyed it!

November Crunch

Wow have I been busy.  I just joined my local MOPS group (so excited!), I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again this year, I'm trying to finish my ornament for the Jesse Tree Ornament Swap I found on Karen's Adventures in Mommyland, Raspberry is teething something fierce and Poppyseed has been sick, and my baking is in full swing!

I don't have a lot of extra energy for typing right now so this is just a quick check in to say hey and upload one picture of a cake I did a few weeks ago for someone's birthday. It was inspired by a bunch of cakes I found on Pinterest and I think it turned out really well. The picture doesn't do it justice.

Anyway, I'll soon post a few pictures of Poppyseed's birthday cake and I'll share with you the ornament I'm making and how to make it! Look for me to be back here soon.

One last thing.  Looking at a few blogs around I found a pretty cool thing at CatholicMom.com. They have a Small Success Thursday post, but I missed it for the week they did it, so I thought I would list a few small successes we have had this week:
1) We finally made time during our nightly prayers with the kiddos to start teaching Poppyseed the Rosary. He really enjoyed it and hopefully we will make it part of our daily nighttime ritual.
2) We are still alive after Raspberry's first two teeth popped through last week! Teething is one of the worst.
3) I got up the nerve to go to the local MOPS group.  (I'm not the biggest fan of meeting new people and it was also the first time that either of my children were in a daycare setting!) The speaker we had was great and one of the bible verses she had on the power point really spoke to me, so I'll leave you with that: 

Philippians 4:8 (NIV)

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.


*You can never have a positive and a negative thought in your mind at the exact same time, so if you are thinking positive thoughts, the negative ones are not there.*

Cookie Monday!

For my business one of my standing orders is for the small coffee shop at the local college.   Since Halloween is coming soon, they have been asking for everything pumpkin...pumpkin donuts, pumpkin whoopie pies, pumpkin muffins...well, you get the point. 

This week they asked for some "Halloween" sugar cookies, so I had some freedom to play around with different shapes.  I made them some pumpkins (of course), candy corn, tombstones, and Frankenstein heads. It was fun but I was a little rushed last night to get them done, so they don't look the best. 

For the sugar cookies I use Martha Stewart's recipe. I do modify it some to suit my own tastes, but it is really good just like it is written.  For the royal icing I just use the Wilton recipe. It is simple and straightforward and works great every time.

Hopefully as I do more cookies like this I will get the consistency of the icing down...that is the hardest part for me.  I'm not exactly sure what the consistencies are supposed to be so it's hard to figure out if I'm doing the cookies right.  Sometimes the icing runs over (like on the pumpkins) and other times it is hard to spread into an even layer (like on the Frankenstein head) but I'll get there. 


I hope you like the cookies. I'll be doing a lot more baking this week, so look for the posts later!  

Thursday

Since no one is yet to read my blog...no one commented about the three different books I posted about previously.  I really want to evaluate all the homeschooling options I can so, I think since they are relatively cheap on Amazon, I'm going to order them and try them out myself.  Then I'll let you know how it goes and do a book review sort of thing!

NaNoWriMo is coming up soon! For those of you who don't know NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month...aka November. If you go to the NaNoWriMo website you can check it out. (Just click on the picture)

The whole idea is to bust out a whole novel or 50000 words in 31 days.  It takes a lot to do that as I found out last year, but for all the sacrifices I made it was an amazing feeling at the end of the month to say that I WROTE A BOOK! Yeah, I did it.  Hopefully I will be able to do it again this year.  Last year I wrote a dystopian YA novel.  I'm not quite sure what I am going to be writing about this year. (any suggestions?)

I have a few ideas in the works but I will link to my own NaNoWriMo page when it starts up and you can see what idea I chose.  It is going to be a lot harder to do this year since I have two children to take care of instead of just one. 

Last year my husband was amazing at helping me to get my word counts each day and just being supportive.  I know I can do it again this year though, but don't expect many blog posts that month since my eyes will already be popping out of my head staring at the computer typing my novel, it will be very difficult to type anything else. 

Have a great Thursday!

My crazy weekend!

So if you read my blog last week, you know I was doing a wedding cake for this past weekend.  I was a little nervous since I had never done a cake so large before...but I pulled it off! (and it looked awesome if I do say so myself!) Just go back a post or two and see what the inspiration cake was and let me know what you think...which one do you like better?

So not only did I do the cake I had my regular baking schedule to do and it was Homecoming weekend for my alma-mater.   So we were all pretty busy.  I got to show off the kids a little and everyone had a great time.  Since it was S's birthday a few days ago and we couldn't really celebrate on the day, his parents took us out to lunch and we got to play in the city park for a while. P and R really enjoyed that.  Hopefully we will have a few more nice days like we did yesterday before the cold sets in...I'm not looking forward to four (or more) months of freezing weather....mostly because I'm stuck inside with the kids.

I'm also excited to say that I joined a Christmas ornament (Jesse Tree) swap! I'm really pumped about this.  I'm trying to get involved with new things and since I'm a creative type, I think I'll have a lot of fun doing it.  I'll like you up (http://kareninmommyland.blogspot.com/2013/10/jesse-tree-swap-2.html0) to the blog where I found this awesome thing.  It's all full now, but maybe it will inspire you to start something creative and new on your own.  Hope you had a great weekend and I'll type some more later.

Homeschooling, Catholicism and Us

       

So ever since we found out we were having kids S and I have talked about homeschooling.  We talked about it for many reasons.  S and I had polar opposite experiences in high school.  I loved high school and he counted down the days until he graduated.  My teachers were involved and seemed to care, his teachers counted down the days until summer vacation.  I came from a well off county in North Carolina, he was in a very poor school district in West Virginia.

Since all of our family is in West Virginia now we really want to stay in this area.  The schools where we live are not the greatest.  I do believe that public school is what you make of it, but it can be hard to make something when there is not much to work with.

We are Catholic, which we try to integrate into every facet of our lives.  I am not against the separation of Church from school, but schooling is such a large portion of a child's life that it seems like a missed opportunity to teach about God.  The closest Catholic school to us is about fifteen-twenty minutes away and it only goes through elementary school.  We would have to drive about forty minutes to continue that Catholic education through high school. 

S has a masters degree in History and I am working on my masters in Children's Literature.  We are both well educated and motivated to see our children succeed.  We just want what is best for them.  I'm not trying to convince you that we should be able to home school our kids, I'm just giving you a little back story.

So where this is going...since we had children I have been doing research on the internet.  Trying to find blogs, websites and any other information I can about home schooling and what it involves.  Yesterday I was looking around and found a few books I wanted to learn more about.

The three books I found are Literature based learning books.  They are all pre-K, since Poppyseed is only going to be two at the end of the month and Raspberry is only 4 months old.

The pictures are the three books I was looking at purchasing to see if they were good programs.  So if anyone is reading, have you tried any of these products and which one did you like/why? Thanks for all the help and I hope to hear from you soon.  Also, what programs do you use and like? I want to find as much information in the next few years that I can so we can make an informed decision about this home schooling thing. 

Raspberry

So Raspberry is just over four months old and rolled over for the first time today! Her older brother was a rolling pro by the time he was this old, but she has decided to go at her own pace.  I love seeing the two of them reach milestones like this. 

With the busy schedule the whole family has this week it is nice to be able to relax a little in between diaper changes and terrible-two tantrums. 

Since I have my first  4-tier wedding cake due on Saturday I have been in cake mode overdrive.  Reading up on stacking cakes, icing cakes, baking cakes... I've done this before but I feel like I need as much pre-making cake information crammed into my head as possible. Am I crazy? Maybe.

My Pinterest Board (http://www.pinterest.com/erindistefano) is getting jammed packed with cakes upon cakes.  Here is a picture of the cake I am going to make for the wedding.  I'll put up pictures of the one I do and we can compare them at the end of the week.

 

So wish me luck, I have a very busy week and now need to get the kids ready for Kindermusik.  We're off to sing and dance!