Week 48: Thanksgiving, Wake football.

Every year Justin and I celebrate 3 Thanksgivings in 48 hours. We usually drive 2 hours, have lunch in Jonesville, drive back to have dinner with my family than it's back to yadkin county to celebrate with the Shores. This year things were different. Justin's grandma decided to have Thanksgiving the Sunday prior to Thanksgiving this year. This worked out great! It meant we could spend more time with each of the families instead of spending half of our time driving back and forth. We spent Saturday afternoon-Sunday in Jonesville. Had a nice and quiet Thanksgiving morning, had dinner with my family. Friday we spent with the Shores in Boonville. It was a very nice change of pace.
Saturday some of Justin's family came down to go to the Duke Wake Forrest game. I have been to many Duke Football games but never to a Wake game. Duke got killed but it was a very entertaining game. I also got some great ribbon fries. I had never had them before, they were very tasty. Overall it was a very good Thanksgiving break.

My baking of the week was a thanksgiving cake. I also maybe a couple of pumpkin pies but I didn't take any pictures of them.

Thanks for reading!

Week 47: Baby pictures and Kate's cake

I have enjoyed scrapbooking for several years and I love looking through pictures. For a long time now I have been meaning to try to put together a scrapbook with pictures of my childhood. When we moved from Brazil we left our albums with my dad's family and they some how all got damaged and thrown out. So what I have left to work with are a little over 100 pictures grandma has and a box of negatives (that my dad sent me many years ago). This week I started the long process of individually scanning the pictures my mom and grandma have. I figured this would take a while but had no idea just how big of a project this was going to be. They are all on the computer now, on a back up CD and on Snapfish as I want to make sure they are not lost again. I have started to scrapbook them. It's been a lot of fun so far to go through the old pictures and get to scrapbook pictures begining with when mom was still pregnant. Unfortunally, there are tons of things missing. For example we have pictures of my first birthday but the rest of my birthdays are missing. The next phase of this project will be to get a negative scanner, upload all the negatives (100s of them), get them all printed then scrapbook it all. It's going to be a long process but I am looking forward to it. It will also be fun to get to sit down with my mom and figure out how old I was in the pictures what she remembers from them etc.
Here is one of my favorites so far:



The baking of this week was Kate's cake. I have been babysitting Kate and Luca for a couple years now. I decided to go with a simple multi color flowers:

Thanks for reading!

Week 46: GPS and candy apples

This past week I got to make candy apples which I had been wanting to make for a while. They are pretty simple to make as long as you have a good candy thermometer that can tell you when you reach the hard crack point. I opt to leave out the cinnamon and food coloring for the recipe I found online and was really happy with the results. The left over sugar coating stuff we used to make caramel popcorn as Justin doesn't care for candy apples.
The main experience of this week was getting a GPS system. Justin's mom had told me that once I started driving she would get me one. It's a Nuvi and it's really cool. I am sure it does what most GPS system do but I think it's really cool that it can tell you want your current speed is as well as what the speed limit is. I did find that it can be really distracting though. So, I need to use it more on my daily routine so I can get used to what it sounds like so once I need to use it I can follow it's directions without getting too distracted.
I did for the first time this week have to drive in places I didn't know and ofcourse it was raining pretty hard but I did find where I was going and was able to do it without freaking out.
Overall not a lot to share about this week but I am looking forward to what the next few weeks may bring as Christmas gets closer and 2010 will be here soon.

Thanks for reading.

Week 45: Parties, Scrapbooking, fondant cakes

This past week was a busy one. I started to teach the SDU classes, which means I got to teach 3 nights in a row. We also had 3 parties to go to between Friday and Saturday afternoon.
The SDU class went ok, the students didn't know what to expect to it started off a little rocky but things got much better and I am enjoying getting to teach the class. (The second night of class went really well and it felt like the students were enjoying themselves and starting to feel more confident in their decison making which is pretty great!)
The first party we went to this week was Eva's 4th birthday. At the party I got to roast hot dogs over the fire for the first time. It was fun and they were tasty. We also roasted marshmallows and had a pinata. The kids had a lot of fun and Eva really liked her cake and cookie pops.
She asked for a big round cake and for the icing in the to be purple, she wanted the rest of it to be a surprise. So I made a yellow cake with purple icing covered it with carolina blue fondant and played around with different techniques for the details.

The next party was the Portmanteauga party. Chris had been talking about having this party for a while. For those who are not familiar with the concept portmanteau is a word that is form by blending two words. Examples: Jazzercise (jazz + exercise), Pictionary (picture + dictionary), Cheeseburgers (cheese + hamburger), Fudgesicles (fudge + popsicle). We got together, the wiigue and some other of Chris's friends, for a great night of games and food. We had some great snacks like Count Chocula, NUTrition and gogurt. And we played Scattergories, which I had never played before, but had a lot of fun with. We were our Wiigue shirts, Katie came as bridezilla in a toga and Justin and Scott wore jhorts.
The final party of the weekend was another first for me, a co-ed wedding shower for April and Jeff. The party was at Michelle's place and it was great to get to see some of my Cru friends.
I had the pleasure to make a cake for the shower, my first wedding shower cake. I ended up doing a really colorful cake to look like gift boxes. Luckily it traveled well.
My baking experiments this week were the 2 cakes. I got to use the spiral fondant tool I hadn't used before as well as play with color which I usually don't do much of when it comes to fondant.
Thanks for reading!

Week 44: Halloween

Growing up in Brazil we never celebrated Halloween. When we first moved to the US grandma's church didn't celebrate it so this year was the first time I have ever celebrated Halloween.
So, this week was full of first time Halloween related experiences.
We started off the day by going to the Halloween festival at Downing creek, we went to it last year but this year Justin dressed up for the festival.
At the festival they had a guess the pumpkin weight station, and I own the pumpkin! The pumpkin was 25lbs, and I guessed 23 lbs. I came up with my guess by picking up the pumpkin then picking up Lili and deciding it weighted a little less than Lili (who did not want her picture taken).
After the festival Justin headed back home and I went to IBS with Howard, the 3rd time I've been to IBS this year. This time I only got glass pearls for my costume.
We decided to get an early dinner with Chris as we didn't really eat lunch. At dinner we ended up deciding that as Chris' parents have never had trick or treaters and as I had never been trick or treating that on the way to Katie's party we should stop by their house. They were really excited to see us! As we didn't have a halloween bucket we used our popcorn buckets. We left with almond joys, snickers and homemade treats! The next new esperience was going to a Halloween Party. Katie and her roomate decided to have a 20s themed party. I borrowed Margie's flapper dress and her gradmother's head piece.
I made my necklaces and were my wedding pearls. Justin got a hat and suspenders to go with his suit.

My baking experience of the week was making a cake for the party. This cake was A LOT of fun to make. I love how it turned out! I am not usually proud of my cakes, but this is possibly the cake I am most proud of so far. The top 2 layers are vanilla with vanilla butter cream and the bottom layer is chocolate with vanilla butter cream. it's all covered with fondant, the black fondant was homemade the rest was store bought. Homemade fondant tastes a lot better than store bought, but it's a pain to work with. The flower is gumpaste.
Thanks for reading!