Felt Ruffle Christmas Wreath

So my wreath obsession continues!

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, I needed to try to get my apartment in the Christmas spirit (which is made more difficult by the 70 degree weather outside). I found this awesome looking ruffle wreath on Pinterest (http://www.designsponge.com/2009/12/diy-project-kristens-ruffly-felt-wreath.html) that I really wanted to make.

In the instructions, they say to use a 12inch styrofoam wreath, but the problem is that it's way too small for my door. You wouldn't be able to see my apartment number, and I wouldn't be able to see out the peep hole! Both important things. So, also using Pinterest and the awesome tips that site leads you to, I learned that you can use pipe insulation foam to use as a wreath!

Now, it's not a perfect circle, but it's pretty close. To make sure that you don't have the kinks with this, you just open up the slit, and tuck it in tightly, and then duct tape the ends together. The only thing that worries me with using this method, is that it'll sag, and keep sagging as the days go on. You'll see this a little later.

So I ended up getting about 4 yards of felt. This was WAY too much. It was on sale, so I figured better safe than sorry, and I'll probably end up using the extra as a tree blanket once I get a Christmas tree in here. I also decided that I wanted the wreath to be a tad more Christmasy, and a little glittery, so I also got a few fake poinsettia flowers to add to the wreath.

You want to cut three inch circles for your wreath. I used a glass which ended up making the process a lot quicker. I highly recommend that over using a paper template or something similar.

I got a lot of circles. A LOT. I decided to do it in sections to save my hands: draw, cut, pin, draw, cut, pin.

Now, to make the ruffles, you fold the circle in half, and then in half again.

And then you stick a pin at the corner of the ruffle, and then into the form. After sticking in a few pieces around the foam, fairly close together, you want to fluff them to make it nice and pretty!

In the middle of my cutting and fluffing, I had a little kitty get lost in the felt.

As far as the poinsettia's went, I just cut them off the stems and jammed them into the foam, and it worked perfectly! It also saved me from making even more ruffles because they took up some space. Now, initially, I made a little felt hook on the back of the wreath, hoping that would be the best way to hang it.

The problem with it, was that it hung way too low on the wreath hanger and you couldn't see my apartment number. So, even though it messed with the appearance of the wreath, I just put it on the hook.

 Here's a close up of the ruffles!

It took me 4.5 hours and approximately 350 circles of felt. It was a huge undertaking, but it turned out just how I wanted! Now, I'm worried about the sagging. You can already tell that it's more oblong now, and part of that might be from the weight of the felt, and hopefully it won't keep getting worse. If it does, I'll have to research a way to make it more stiff. But for now, I love it! 

Gingerbread Mini-Donuts

Cupcakes have been the trend for quite awhile now, but now it looks like donuts are becoming the new popular food. I've been seeing recipes for donuts and mini-donuts everywhere, and now baking pans are popping up everywhere and being bought. So of course, being sooo on top of trends, I bought some pans and decided to make some donuts!

I found this awesome baked gingerbread mini donut recipe, and seeing as how it's Thanksgiving weekend, I knew it was the perfect flavor for this time of year.

You start by mixing all the dry ingredients together. Now, I doubled the recipe to make a little more, so I'll tell you the normal recipe. Combine one cup flour, 3/4 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, a pinch of all spice, a pinch of cloves, 1/4 tsp salt, and 1/4 cup brown sugar.

Once that's all combined, you mix together the wet ingredients: 1/4 cup applesauce, 2 tbsp maple syrup, 1 egg, 1 tbsp milk, and 2 tbsp melted butter (like I said, I doubled the recipe, hence why there's two eggs in the picture).

After adding the wet ingredients into the dry, I put it into a plastic bag to pipe into the pan. 

I may have cut the hole too big because it was pretty difficult to pipe it in well. But it worked well enough!

I baked each batch about 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

Then once the donuts are done, you need to make the frosting/glaze!

Start by melting 2 tablespoons butter with 1/4 cup brown sugar over medium heat.

Once it's all melted, let the mixture boil for a couple minutes, and then add 1 tablespoon milk. After that's mixed in, add 1/2 cup of powdered sugar and another tbsp of milk.

Once everything is mixed well, reduce it to low heat, and let it simmer while you dunk!

Oh man, they were SO delicious. Absolutely perfect with a mug of pumpkin spice coffee. The gingerbread flavor wasn't too strong, it was just right. They also made my apartment smell like gingerbread! Since the donuts are baked and not fried, they have that perfect cakey texture. I'm definitely excited to make more donuts in the future!

Thanksgiving Baking

Yesterday was one of the biggest eating holidays there is. With all the turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, rolls, and deviled eggs, you end the day pretty stuffed. BUT you can't forget about dessert!

The classic Thanksgiving dessert is pumpkin pie. This year, I decided to do a different take on it, and made apple butter pumpkin pie! Everyone knows how much I love apple butter, and that plus pumpkin? How can you go wrong? You can't! I've made this recipe in the past, so I was looking forward to making it again.

Now, I suck at making pie crusts, and until I get a food processor, I refuse to try again. So instead, I did cheat and used pre-made pie crusts. I used a 9inch pie pan, and laid the crust into the pan, and attempted to crimp the edges. It didn't work too well, but it's good enough.

Then, in a bowl, I combined one can of pumpkin, half a cup of apple butter, half a cup of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves.

I then slightly beat 2 eggs and another egg yolk to add into the bowl of ingredients.

After the eggs are combined into the other ingredients, I stirred in half a cup of whipping cream.

Once the cream was completely combined, I poured the filling into the crust. I then used strips of aluminum foil to cover the crust for the first half of baking so that it wouldn't burn.

I baked the pie for 20 minutes at 375 degrees, and then took the aluminum foil off, and baked for another 35 minutes.

The apple butter gave the pie a deeper color, which I loved. And it also mutes the pumpkin so it's not overly pumpkin and makes it a tad sweeter, and adds in an extra spice flavor. I loved it!

I also made my usual sugar cookies! These cookies are great because they're not overly sugary.

First you combine four cups of flour with two teaspoons of baking powder and set aside.

Then in your mixer, cream 3/4 cup butter that's been softened to room temperature with 1.5 cups of sugar.

You want to have it mix for a couple minutes until it's light and fluffy. Then add 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla.

Once that's all mixed together, you add in the flour mixture in thirds to create the dough!

Now, once again, I had dry dough on my hands. There was no way in it's current state I'd be able to form the dough, roll it out, and cut it into shapes. So I used my handy water trick and added in about half a cup of water. This helped bring it to the perfect consistency! Once the dough was formed, I rolled it out in sections (making sure to flour the counter and my rolling pin so that it wouldn't stick), and cut out some cookies! I decided to go with the leaf cookie cutter seeing as how it is the fall.

You don't have to spread the cookies very far from each other on the cookie sheet, because they don't spread out or get much bigger in the oven.

I baked each batch for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees until they were a perfect light golden on the bottom. It's been pretty exact baking every time I make them, so I don't even really have to check them.

The frosting is super simple, I just use confectioner's sugar and water. I don't have any exact measurements for this, I just add more confectioner's sugar to make it thicker, or more water to thin it out. I just used a spoon to frost the cookies, and I did leave some without frosting in case that's what people preferred.

It was some long baking but definitely worth it. There was something very calming about rolling out cookie dough (totally strange, but I think it's a good sign that I picked the right hobby if it makes me feel that way). And the leftover pie in my fridge is totally worth it!

Vinyl Decal Canvas Wall Art

The wall behind my couch was in desperate need of something. Big empty walls are never very attractive and just look too minimalist for my taste. So of course, I trolled Pinterest to find some inspiration.

Now, I don't know if it's because of Pinterest, or it just being my taste, but I have developed a slight obsession with flowy tree branches with birds. So when I saw this:

I just knew that that's what needed to be on my wall. Not only did I love that branch and the bird, I loved the different sized canvases and how they created an interesting dimension.

Now the problem? The person who made this used her own machine to make the decal she used. Now, I really have no need for that kind of machine, so at first I thought that I could, you know, try to free hand paint the image. Luckily, I nixed that idea fast, because as crafty as I can try to be, I most definitely am not an artist.

So then began the internet searching obsession. I was using Pinterest and Google, and checking sites such as Amazon and Target. The problem with the ones I found on those sites was that those decals weren't customizable. I wouldn't be able to change the size or the color, and to really make my vision come true, I needed to be able to do that because the ones I found were either too big or too colorful.

And then I turned to Etsy, which I really should have done in the first place. The problem I had with most of the ones I found on Etsy were that they were too....branchy. They were too winter branch like, meaning they had barely any leaves and looked too stark. I wanted something smooth  and lush looking. A lot of the ones I liked were also way overpriced in my opinion.

I finally did find one seller whose design I liked and she was willing to cut down the size to what I needed. So I ordered this branch with two birds in a white decal color, and then waited for it to arrive so I could begin putting this all together!

I bought my canvases from Michaels because it was the only place that had the size of canvas I was looking for. The two wider ones I bought were 16x20, and the longer ones were 12x24. I wish that I could have found some that were longer than 24 inches to give the whole thing a longer look, but you make do with what's out there!

Now, as far as the paint color goes, I was waffling for awhile. Green? Purple? Brown? Blue? I quickly nixed the blue because with a green chair, purple ottoman, and beige couch, adding another color in to the mix would be too much. The brown would have been fine since my tv stand and end tables are brown, but I decided that would be too drab in the end. I almost went with purple, but I decided that if I made it purple, I might grow tired of it a lot faster. So the winner was green! Which is no surprise since it is my favorite color. But the thing with the green is that it has more staying power and is a color that will stand the test of changing tastes.

When I went to AC Moore to pick out my paint, I initially got this medium dark green color. On the little example, it looks like it was a sage green, which was the color I was going for to meld with my furniture. However, after two coats on my canvases, I realized they lied about what the color looked like. It was too....green. It was too bright, it was just too much green and would not coordinate with my style at all. So back to the store I went and I ended up getting a more olive green color, which ended up being the exact shade I was looking for! So I repainted the canvases and I was very pleased with how the color turned out.

Putting the wall decal on was a bit more difficult than just peeling and sticking like you might think. The decal came in pieces, so I had to cut each out, lay them out in the correct placement, and then peel and stick each individual section on to the canvases. This was especially difficult since there wasn't a clean separation for where the canvases separated.

I laid each piece on the canvases, one by one, and smoothed out the air bubbles before pulling off the transfer paper. Whenever a piece overlapped canvases, since I kept the canvases flush to each other while transferring, after pulling off the transfer paper, I just took some scissors and sliced down the division. This ended up working really well! I thought it was going to be a disaster, but not at all.

After it was all transferred onto the canvases, I hung them up on the wall! And now the big reveal!!!!

I love it. There's something about that feeling of accomplishment once you finish a project like this. Even though it was a fairly simple idea and fairly simple to execute, I love the fact that I created it, that I made put it together, and even though it has a few imperfections, I love that it's unique to me!

Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes. You read that heading correctly. NUTELLA CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. My mouth waters at the words.

As much as I love baking with apple butter as a star ingredient (bars, pies, breads, etc.) I'm pretty sure that Nutella is THE best special ingredient you can use to bake. There is just something about that creamy chocolate hazelnut spread that smells/tastes/looks amazing. I never realized how much I could do when it came to baking with Nutella. I've made Nutella Swirl Pound Cake, Nutella mini-brownies, and now, Nutella chocolate chip cookies (and I've saved a handful of other Nutella recipes to try in the future).

I've been having a serious craving for some homemade chocolate chip cookies because they're so much better than the kind you buy in the store. So when I saw this recipe, I knew I had to try it, and as the smell from the oven wafts through my apartment, I'm pretty sure that was a great decision. It's a very simple recipe with few ingredients, and all ones that I had on hand.

You start with 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, and 1/2 tsp salt. Set it aside.

Cream 1 stick of room temperature butter (8tbsp), 1 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar.

Once that is smooth and creamy, add two eggs and 1 1/2 tsp vanilla and mix until completely incorporated.

Then you mix in the flour mixture. I mixed about half of the mixture in first, and then once that's all incorporated, I mixed in the second half. This made sure that there were no flour pockets...or flour going all over my kitchen.

Now, in the past, when cookie dough was slightly dry, I just took it as it was and assumed that's how it was supposed to be. Obviously, I have consistently been wrong, so this time I decided to try something I had read online. I ended up mixing in a little less than 1/4 cup of water into the dough. This was perfect and got it to a nice consistency that I knew would spread how I wanted it to.

Then I added in a heaping 1/4 cup of Nutella, and mix it in for just a few seconds until there's Nutella streaks throughout the dough.

The final step is to add 1 1/2 cup chocolate chips. Mmm. More chocolate!

After putting the dough in heaping tablespoons onto the baking sheet and bake for about 10 minutes at 375 degrees.

And then you have yummy delicious sweet Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies!