Cake Plate Treat: Citrus White Chocolate Cookies

Good morning my most wonderful friend!  I hope your New Year's Eve was a fabulous one.  Ours was fairly sedate.  We went to bed before 8pm!  TWS and I are early (!) risers.

AND apparently I should have been making Cake Plate Treats, not blogging about them yesterday :).  Last night TWS harrumphed about absent treats ;).  Precious, throwing me under the bus, stated firmly that the Cake Plate *IS* clean.  (xsighx  Thanks.  You're grounded. ;) )

I mentioned left over Christmas Candy--no go.  Then I mentioned the tin of Danish Butter Cookies which bought me a little time to fill the void in our kitchen :D

I ahem "adapted" the recipe from here: Orange Creamsicle Cookies.  I did not have oranges, I had lemons.  I did not have LOTS of lemons for zest, I had one.  I cut the butter in half, added back in about a quarter cup of unrefined coconut oil, and added a LOT more lemon extract.  And squirted some lemon juice into the dough because it looked a bit dry (and I had rindless lemon halves and nothing to do with them).

Truly I almost never follow the recipe.  I do, though, make sure NOT to write the blogger back and complain about how it did not turn out if I changed even one iota of the recipe :)  Usually my changes are fine, sometimes not so much.

Today the changes were really awesome :)  The lemon was suitable as a substitute, and the coconut oil added a hint of tropical flair.  The key to it, though, was the white chocolate chips.  They added a creamy, smooth depth that elevated the cookie from "eh, beats celery" to "Oh make it again!  Wait, you didn't write down what you did, did you babe...xsighx" (he knows me so well :) )

 Isn't that photo lovely?  Doesn't the deep rose of the tea look happy and beautiful in the cup?  Don't you just love food photography?

Hmmm....I love teacups but they are so small!  I finished the tea in the cup in....maybe three swallows.  Then I went back to the kitchen to make myself a REAL cup of tea.

 

THIS is what I drink my coffee in every day:  a French Onion Soup Bowl.  See the difference?  I don't know if you can tell, but the teacup holds only 4 ounces.  The onion soup bowl holds SIXTEEN!  Sixteen ounces of happiness and sunshine :) I DO have a pretty mug that I will drink tea in, but that still holds 8-10 ounces--enough to sip for a few minutes anyway :)

What about you?  Do you have a favorite mug, tea cup, bowl?   Do you use different vessels for different beverages?

Christmas Cake Plate Treat

Hello my fair friend!

I wanted to share a cake plate treat that I whipped (seriously, SO quickly!) together right before Christmas.  I got the idea off of Pinterest (of course :) ).

I took two sizes of Reese's cups, chocolate kisses, spray can frosting, and sprinkles.  I also used white chocolate chips.

Essentially you use a dab of frosting to "glue" a small cup, then a large upside down cup, then a small upside down cup, then a hershey kiss.  Glue the white chip on top.  Squirt frosting around each ledge (you will see them when you put these together) and then put sprinkles on :)  Super quick.  I did cut the very tip off of the chocolate kisses so that the white chips would stay on better.

 I put powdered sugar all over the cake plate.  Not necessary for eating, but it REALLY made a difference in presentation.

All done!  I knew it was a hit when the kids AND TWS got that sort of "I am too old to squeal like a 5 year old.....but I REALLY want to squeal like a five year old" look of delight :)

Little Special Things

Good morning my sweet friend! 

What a glorious day it is today!  The sun is finally out!  It was only sunny 3 days out of the first 29 for the month of December here, and the bright sunshine is a welcome sight today.

Today I want to share with you a couple of our Little Special Things :).  Nearly every family, I would hope, has little things that sort of bind them.  I find more and more that these tiny little acts of kindness and love are like super glue--just a little dot of time but binds the family tightly together :)

I must confess:  I am not a perfect wife or mother :).  MANY is the morning that TWS needed a shirt or socks, and I prayed down the hallway to see if I, by chance, happened to wash some without realizing it (and thank the Lord, I always found some for him!).  The children have an absentminded professor for a mom so, while sometimes our days are awesome and filled with deep geeky/spiritual/etc thoughts and fun, sometimes I forget that it is youth group night or to put money under their pillow for teeth (nothing like having your 6 year old come in and say "Mom, you forgot the money under my pillow...again." Yikes!)

Of course these are things that I work on, but thank the Good Lord, He has provided ideas for "Little Special Things"--those little tiny habits and traditions that seem, on the surface, to be nothing much at all on my end, but carry a surprising amount of weight in the minds and hearts of my family.   

For example, I remember when I was young and would go to my grandmother's house.  She kept a spare freezer right inside from the carport.  In there went typical things like extra pecans and vegetables, but ALSO there was always chocolate of some sort.  Her freezer was always a place of hidden treasure and happiness.

So I decided that I, too, wanted to do that when we moved back down south (with a carport and a place to put a spare freezer inside the house!).  I buy packs of regular Hershey bars and tuck them into the door of the freezer.

You know what the BEST part of this is (besides 24-7 access to chocolate hee hee! )?  Precious has added to the "event" of getting chocolate from the freezer by breaking each bar into fourths and offering a piece to all of us.  I have gotten into the habit of that too, and find it is a sweet, kind, gentle way of bonding the family.  So a couple of times a week, generally at about 2 or 3 pm when we are all a little slumpy, one of us will go to the freezer, and pass out a little bit of candy to us all.

Another Little Special Thing is our Cake Plate Treats.  This actually stems from two things:  a)I have a glass covered cake plate with no extra storage in my kitchen in which to tuck it away and b)Empty cake plates sitting on the table look so .....sad.  Depressing.  Stingy, even.  I mean, you KNOW that at some point there was a cake or something in there.  And you know that, hopefully, sometime there will be a cake again, but at that moment you missed it and just look at a cold, empty piece of glass.

So I decided to start making sure there is something nice under that dome.  Sometimes it is blueberry muffins.  Sometimes a cake.  Sometimes I just whip up a bag mix of cookies.  Rarely is it anything too involved.  My only rule is that I do not make any more Cake Plate Treats until the cake plate is cleaned :)  Which brings me to the realization of how much and how quickly my family started seeing this as a "thing" for our family....one day The Wonder Sweetie made a big show of play-pouting and looking at the empty cake plate.  I reminded him that it needs to be washed first, so he started leaving notes for Precious to remember to clean the cake plate :)

What about you?  Are there any little special things that you do for your family or friends or even strangers?  Any bits of God-love that make their way into your habits and life?  I would love to hear about them!

Wheat Planting Day!

Hello again my darling friend!

Technology is a blessing and sometimes a huge frustration for me.  After months of not being able to post photos with this blog (and bearing false witness against google!), I have discovered that it was actually Internet Explorer that was being difficult.  So I downloaded a new browser and am excited that I can now seamlessly add in photos to my blog posts again.  Forgive if I am a bit "posty" for the next weeks :)

I am thankful that I can plant winter wheat here!  In fact, the winters do not seem to be a time of "cold and dead" but rather "cool and still busy"!

HEADY with our dried corn success of the past summer, we have decided to plant winter wheat in a test plot.  I had ordered a ton of awesome seed from Canada but received only an empty envelope with a note from customs.  I contacted the person I had ordered the wheat from and he said he had never had trouble, but refunded my money.  

I did manage to get some wheat from Baker Creek (which we love anyway), plus some local wheat at our neighborhood feed and seed (which is what we used for our test plot).  I am saving the "good" wheat until spring planting.

Our Test Plot

 Raking In The Seed

 The Wheat

Update 29 December:  We looked, STRAINED, to see the wheat and thought we might, possibly, not sure, but might have some sprouts.  Or the grass and weeds are just growing.  Stay tuned :)

Winter at Lemonrock And A Big Decision

Good evening my sweet friend :)

I hope Christmas was blessed for you!  Ours was incredibly quiet, which we often prefer.  

Now that the holiday is past, though, I am left at a bit of loose ends of what to do next (DON'T say laundry!).  The ground is too wet to till (almost 3 inches just from this past rain!), it is not time to prune, we already did the dormant spray (by the by, if you want a copy of our schedule for pruning, fertilizing, etc various trees, just let us know), etc.

One project I have been working on is choosing our meat and egg chickens.  We have our "show chickens", our Japanese Black Tailed Whites, with two separate brooders of chicks that hatched since the day before Thanksgiving.  

However, I have been wanting to grow our own meat.  We don't use a LOT of eggs, but we eat a huge amount of chicken--in fact it is our main meat (at least for me).

We are going to build another, larger coop and runs that will house our more-meat chickens and our more egg layers (both being dual purpose).  For our eggies, we are planning on orpingtons.  For our meaties, we have narrowed it down to 3 breeds:  Naked Neck Turkens, Langshans, and Sulmtalers.  We were going to go with Jersey Giants, but realized that waiting 1.5-2 years for them to get to maturity was going to be ENTIRELY too long :).

So if you have a vote of the three, please let me know :)  We have already discarded most other of the more popular breeds (mostly because we want calm roos since we are going to be raising a lot of meat).  BUT I am glad to hear what you have to say!