Around the Farm

Thank you everyone for all of the lovely birthday wishes that you sent my way earlier this week :)

We still don't have a drop of snow even though it has tried the last couple of days with the constant grey and drizzle but it looks like we just might be in for a green Christmas! Not that I mind terribly as it makes winter driving much nicer but I know the children are longing for it and just itching to try out their new snow gloves that we just bought. We've got all the appropriate gear now and nowhere to wear it *grin*.

Despite the wet weather we have ventured outdoors to say hello to our baby. Well actually he's really not a baby anymore but he likes to think he is especially with all the ruckus he makes if we don't pay enough attention to him when we're nearby :)

The children collected a good pile of cedar boughs, laurel bush and this lovely cotoneaster for our mantle and it looks and smells so festive in our family room now with it above the fireplace. I've tried numerous times to get a good photo to share with you but it has been so dark and grey that my photos just look terrible so hopefully the sun shows up soon so I can get a good shot *grin*.

We ventured up the mountain behind my mom's house to the look out...

and even spotted a few mushrooms that are still thriving beneath the cedar trees.

I've had a little sack of Kamut grains in the cupboard that my mom had given to me and they have just been waiting to be used in the perfect recipe and yesterday I finally found one! Tasha at Clean Eating Mama shared the most delicious recipe for little Kamut/walnut thumbprint cookies and oh my word they are SO good *grin*. Luckily I had all of the ingredients on hand and we whipped up a double batch so we would have plenty to share on Christmas eve :)

My nutrimill made a beautiful fine flour from the Kamut and it truly is a caramel color when it comes out like she notes in her recipe and such a wonderful flavor. Now I'm going to have to see what else I can make with it! If you have a tried and true Kamut recipe or one you've been eyeing up I'd love to know about it :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Valentine Sugar Cookies

We're getting ready for Valentine's day and making special treats :)

We always make a heart shaped cookie for our party and this time we made sugar cookie sandwich hearts with a yummy jam center. So good! I only know this because there may have been a little bit of taste testing going on as they were being made *grin*.

L was all ready to get down to business and had her new little apron that she made tied on and her hands washed even before I could ask her to do anything :) She loves to crack the eggs for me and run her hands through the flour *grin*.

I used my favorite sugar cookie recipe but halved the batch this time so that we didn't end up with mountains of cookies. You will need:

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup unsalted butter

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. baking powder

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Cream the sugar and butter together and add in your eggs and vanilla beating until everything is light and fluffy looking.

Add your flour and baking powder and mix until just combined. Turn out your dough onto a sheet of waxed paper and top with another sheet of wax paper so that you can press down on your dough flattening it out towards the perimeters of your paper and then place it your fridge to chill so that when you pull it out again it will be nice and easy to roll and cut out your hearts on :) Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 8 - 10 minutes or until your cookies are just browning on the bottom edges.

We used two different sized heart cookie cutters to create the tops of the cookies and then we ran a line of icing around the edge of the bottom cookie to create an icing dam so that our plum jam wouldn't squeeze out when we sandwiched the two layers together :) I make my jam without pectin so they are always a little bit runny and the icing works perfectly to keep everything in it's place *grin*.

I had to hide them out in the garage tonight to keep the kids from asking for more and so that I wouldn't sneak into the kitchen and nibble on them for a midnight snack LOL. I have terribly weak will power!

Hugs,
Rosina

Trying To Slow Things Down

The closer we get to Christmas the faster our days seem to be going despite my attempts of slowing things down. Hubby finally made it home for the holidays yesterday which is wonderful as that gives him a handful of precious days for family time and squeezing in any shopping or visiting before he heads back out on his tug the day after boxing day.

The children have been busy little bees making last minute gifts for each other and this year they decided that they would make coupon books for everyone. The little drawings are so cute, depicting chores such as helping with the weeding in the garden, housework, packing firewood, feeding the cows and the 'good for anything' coupon! Hubby was teasing them because that coupon was sort of like writing a blank check and who knows what it could be used for *grin*.

I've made great headway on my handmade gifts to :)

K finished the construction of the fairy house today and actually added a balcony accessible through a little round door and I got all of the little crocheted rugs finished along with a lacey tablecloth and am waiting for the glue to dry on the little hanging chandelier. My little gnome snack mats are finished and wrapped and I have a couple pairs of felted sweater slippers just waiting to have their tops crocheted so it's looking like I'm going to finish everything on time after all *grin*.

We've been enjoying our cookie stash in the freezer and our little gingerbread houses perched on our mugs of hot cocoa and I am so looking forward to Christmas eve. That is the night that we open our gifts, spend time with my mom, dad, sister and her husband and just relax enjoying one anothers company. The snow has began to fall again and it looks like were definitely going to have a white Christmas this year :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Yarn Along & Almond Star Cookie Recipe

A post of my current read and what is cast on my needles ~ Inspired by Ginny over at {Small Things}



I finally cast on one of the leg warmers for my daughter this week but with all of the cookie making and holiday fun going on around here these days I didn't get very far *grin*. I have started a new book as well. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. I'm only about 60 pages in but it is quite mysterious! The young child stow away, a grandmother full of secrets and a deed to a house an ocean away left to a very suprised granddaughter... how intriguing :)



Since my knitting was rather dull this week I thought that I would share my recipe for Almond Stars. These are one of our favorite recipes! They are little crunchy, sweet, one bite delights *grin*.

You will need:

3 egg whites

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 pkg. vanilla sugar (I use Dr. Oetker 9 gram pkg)

2 tsp. cinnamon

3 1/2 cups of ground almonds

icing sugar

Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Add your sugar and vanilla sugar and beat until stiff peaks form. Set aside 1/4 cup of your egg mixture. You will use this later to brush the tops of your stars with for a little glaze :) Now fold the cinnamon and ground almonds into the remaining egg.

Roll out your dough 1/4 inch thick on a counter that you have heavily dusted with icing sugar and cut out stars rinsing your cookie cutter in hot water frequently to keep it from getting gummy. This dough is quite sticky when you first start but as you ball it up each time to re-roll for new stars you will find it will get much firmer and easier to work with. It is definitely worth the work though!

Spread a little bit of your reserved egg white on each of the stars and bake in a pre-heated oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes. Store in an airtight container :)

My star cookie cutter is roughly an inch and a half wide and I got around 150 of these little guys this afternoon out of one batch of dough. They won't last long though *grin*.

Hope you like them :)

Hugs,

Rosina

Rolling Dough

It was a wonderful day here today full of squishy cookie dough, floury fingers, cookie cutters and rolling pins :)

It was so nice to just pull out the chilled dough that I had made yesterday and let the children go to work. Usually we would mix up a batch and then it would have to be refrigerated and everyone would be anxiously waiting to begin but today it was instant fun.

I set up three stations on the kitchen counters for them so that they each had their own rolling pin, cookie sheet and tons of cookie cutters to use :)

We ended up with nearly 5 dozen cookies in all shapes and sizes. Some we ate, some are in the cookie tin and quite a few are in the freezer *grin*. We have visitors tomorrow so Wednesday looks like it will be the perfect day for phase two... icing! That always makes for some interesting messes *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Birthday to Me

Last night the kids and I had a birthday party sleep over at my mom's house *grin*. Hubby is still away at work so we packed up our jammies and headed on over for movies, cake and pillow fights. Okay maybe not pillow fights but the kids giggled and mucked around in the dark well past their bedtimes!

This morning they woke me up for a special breakfast... a mountain of fresh baked bread and poached eggs. I'm thinking that 'Mt. Toast' was really for the kids but it was sweet :)

L surprised me with a special birthday card that she had made with a little quilled balloon, a lace bunting and a whole lot of hearts *grin*. I'm such a lucky mama to be loved so much :)

This afternoon I thought that I would do a little prep work and whip up some batches of sugar and gingerbread dough to chill in the fridge for tomorrow. We're going to have a baking marathon and having the dough made will make our morning go much quicker :)

Hopefully we'll have time to run down to the post office at some time tomorrow to so that we can get our christmas swap cards off to the families waiting for them :) I just love this little gnome santa stamp that I found to. Isn't he cute!

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend to :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Guardians of Ga'Hoole ~ Owl Cookies

Yesterday I surprised the kids with a special outing into town to watch the new animated movie The Guardians of Ga'Hoole based on the book series by Kathryn Lasky and to get a chance to see a real live owl!! The MARS (Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society) was at the theater to do a little talk all about owls and what their rescue society does and they brought along 'Shakespeare' a Barred Owl who is their educational ambassador. The kids loved it! Both the owl and the movie :)

As soon as we returned the home the kids began pretending they were owls and so far it hasn't stopped *grin*. So I thought it would be fun to make some owl cookies and owl masks to keep on with the owly fun!

I had ran across a picture of owl cookies on craft gossip but they were made from store bought sugar cookie dough and since we don't have anything like that readily available here I thought that it would be just as easy to whip up a batch of sugar cookie dough :)

So here it is... the make your own dough version of it *grin*.
Trust me if you can make cookie dough and know how to wield a rolling pin then this is going to be easy LOL.

4 eggs
2 cup sugar
2 cup unsalted butter

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add one egg at a time and beat really well until the butter mixture is super light and fluffy.

1 tsp. baking powder
5 cups all purpose flour

Add the flour and baking powder to the butter mixture and mix just until combined. You don't want to over mix or it will start to turn your dough tough. Once you've got it all combined, scoop out roughly 1 third of the dough into a separate bowl. Don't worry about being completely accurate, just eyeball it up. This is going to be the center of you owls eye :)

Now add
1 cup unsweetened cocoa
to the remaining 2/3 of your dough and mix until the cocoa is blended in evenly. This is going to be the outer part of your owls eye.

Now comes the fun part of shaping your plain white dough into a big snake shaped log. On a piece of wax paper, saran wrap or a non stick silicone mat (whichever you have will work) roll and squeeze your dough outwards in a log shape until it is about 18 inches long. By the time I had the length my roll was about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. As soon as you have finished wrap your log in saran wrap or wax paper and place on a flat surface in your refrigerator for about 10-15 minutes to firm up so you can handle it without worrying about dimpling or breaking it.

Next is to take your chocolate colored portion of the dough and shape it into an 18 inch long by 8 inch wide rectangle. Of course the kids couldn't resist squeezing and squishing the dough so this was a perfect job for them *grin*.

We did it on another sheet of wax paper and then I put an additional piece on top and ran the rolling pin over it to take all of the humps and bumps from the hand prints out of it :) Do not refrigerate this portion of your dough. You want it nice and soft for the next step!

Your log of white dough should be firm enough now to take out of the fridge now. Unroll it and place it on top of your chocolate rectangle and you are going to roll the chocolate layer around the white just like you were rolling up cinnamon buns :) Use your wax paper on the bottom of the chocolate layer to keep your hands from getting sticky and to aid in the smooth rolling of it. Don't worry it is definitely not hard to do and once it is all rolled up you can roll the whole log around on the counter in the wax paper a couple of times to make sure the two layers stick together nicely and you get a nice round shape. Place the entire log in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes to firm up again.

Now that you have one multicolored log of sugar cookie dough you're ready to put your owl faces together! Take your knife and slice off rounds of your dough roughly 1/4 - 1/2 inches thick...

and place in pairs on your cookies sheet. Make sure that the two pieces touch each other in the center and you will find that there will be a slightly flat side on each of your rounds caused by the pressure of cutting your log on the counter so place those flatter sides together in the middle :)

For the beaks use unsalted or raw cashews. Press them into the lower part of your center seam leaving the pointier part of the cashew out of the dough so that it looks like a hooked owls beak. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees fahrenheit for 10 - 12 minutes or until just starting to brown and firm up around the edges and the centers are slightly puffed up.

As soon as your owl faces are cooled you can use your favorite icing recipe or frosting from a can if you like *grin* and add your eyeballs and lashes. I used reeses pieces because we had them on hand but you could use smarties or m&m's if you like to.

Just in case you want to know what my icing recipe is it's a simple butter frosting of 1/4 cup of butter and 1 1/2 cups icing sugar beat together with 2-3 tablespoons of milk until it comes to a squeezable consistency that you can squeeze through your piping bag. Another super quick way to create your chocolate icing would be to melt chocolate chips or bakers chocolate squares in a heat proof bowl. This works really well in a pinch *grin*. Another tip is if you don't have an actual piping bag you can use a regular ziploc baggy and just cut off one of the bottom corners and voila you have an instant piping bag :)

This recipe made 24 big owl faces and I hate to say it but we've eaten half of them already! LOL.

Sooooo good and super cute :)
Have yourself some owly fun to!

Hugs,
Rosina

Valentine Party

I had been planning to put together a little Valentine's party for the kids but my best laid plans went a little sideways *grin* and I fell behind on the preparations. If you happen to follow me on twitter you may have read my crazy message at 1am on valentine's morning when I was actually baking up a storm until about 2 am while I should have only been dreaming of cupcakes & cookies! LOL



Two dozen cupcakes heaped in pink icing and another couple dozen sugar cookies later I was ready to finish my Valentine's cards for them! Haha, did I mention I was seriously running behind?!

I had found the cutest little pattern for a crocheted heart garland and thought that they would make super sweet handmade cards so I only worked the first 2 rounds of the pattern and they were the perfect size to be hot glue gunned onto the cardstock for little ' I ♥ You ' valentines :) I tucked one on Hubby's coffee maker for him to find in the morning and off to bed I went to catch a few zzz's before I would be forced to open my eyes again *grin*.

All of my late night work paid off and everyone was thrilled to find a tin of sugar cookies, icing and sprinkles waiting for them after breakfast :)

You know it was one heck of a good decorating party if your participants are wearing more icing than the cookies and my little 3 year old was a true testament to that! I think that I'm the only one brave enough to eat his cookies to. There was an awful lot of licking going on during the whole affair. LOL

While they decorated I cut out little tea party sandwiches :) Heart shaped peanut butter & banana bites, scalloped cucumber bites all arranged around a stunning bouquet of red marshmallow roses *grin*.

Oh heck it was just one big sugar fest!

Thank goodness the sun was shining and I could send all three of my sugar pops outdoors to burn off some of that buzz on their bikes! LOL

Hope you all had a lip smacking good Valentine's Day to :)

~ Rosina