Hello, Cupcake

So I've seen a book that has been talked about on many of the cooking blogs I read. Hello, Cupcake. I have been interested to check it out. Luck for me, it was available at my local library. Yea!! So of course I had to go get it. It is a great book!!! There are tons of great ideas and the best part, you don't need any special cake decorating tools.


There are tons of different ideas I want to try out before my book is due back at the library. I decided to try a very simple and fast design, so I did the pumpkins. What do you think?




I'll post pictures of my other attempts later. If anyone tries out the book, let me know how it goes. And if anyone has any ideas of other great books, please share! Have fun baking.

You Can Cook Scholarship

Gourmet Mom on-the-go shared a $25,000 scholarship opportunity for your children related to making a PB&J sandwich. It's for kids between 6 and 12 years of age. Go to Jif.com to get all the info. And make sure to check out Gourmet Mom on-the-go's post for some ideas she is willing to share. Or use them to inspire your ideas. I would have D enter if he was old enough. Too bad. And check out all the fun posts at GourmetMomOnTheGo.blogspot.com. She is full of tons of ideas. I plan on trying some of them in the future.

Contest Dates: August 4, 2008 and November 14, 2008

German Pancakes....Sort Of

At MakeandTakes.com, she calls the Pop Up Pancakes. They are basically German pancakes, baked in cupcake tin instead of a casserole dish. I suppose you could use any German pancake recipe, but I used the recipe from Makeandtake.com. All I changed was I used 1/2 cup all purpose flour and 1/2 cup of ground wheat that my father-in-law ground up for us. They still turned out wonderful!

We also made some mini-cakes in my mini-cupcake pan. Those were fun. I baked them for 7-8 minutes instead of 15. We tried all sorts of topping on your pop-ups. My favorite was syrup. My husband's favorite was butter and jam. We didn't have any fresh fruit/berries. I think that might have been the best, maybe with a little whip cream. Yum, yum! Just a note: if you've never had German pancakes before, they don't taste like regular pancakes. They are a little more egg-y but still really good.

To my Sis: You should try making them for B. And if she is still stuck on round pancakes, let her know I'll make her some next time you guys come down. My mother-in-law has the pan.

NOTE: If you've never checked out Makeandtakes.com, you should. She is way creative and has tons of fun ideas to try out.

Museum Day 2008

Two post, two days in a row. Crazy! But I have to share a post I found. I know I have talked about imommies.com before. Today I found a post about about Museum Day 2008. It's an opportunity to go to museums all over the county for free on Saturday Sept 27th. Click here to read the post from imommies.com. It will explain how to get your free pass and give you a link to to find out what museums are participating in your area. If baby D where older I would definitely take him to our local activitiy. It's Fort Beuanaventura. The exhitbits include fur trade era merchandise, information and exhibits. Entrance into the park and 1/2 hour of free canoe rental available for card holders. Doesn't that sound fun!

Christmas Candle

This Christmas candle was a project we did for Super Saturday at my church. It is way easy, cheap, and I thought it would be a good family tradition. All you need is a candle, candle holder, and puff paint (or something similar). We got all of our supplies from Walmart. You place 24 dots of paint on the candle. Make sure you figure out how much of the candle is in the candle holder. You don't want to place any of your dots too low.

The count down starts on December first. You light the candle and let it burn down to the first dot. Be warned, I have been told it takes longer to burn down to each dot than you think it will. So don't think it will be a quick 2 minute activity right before bed.

As you let your candle burn, you read about Christ. I have a paper that has 24 different events in Christ's life, the scripture reference of each event, and what we learn from the event.

Example: Day 1-Raising the daughter of Jairus- Luke 8:41-56- Jesus Christ was compassionate
Day 12-Was baptized- Matthew 3:13-17- Jesus Christ was obedient to God's law

If anyone would life a copy of all the day's let me know. I will send you copy. You could also come up with your own tradition with the candle, such as ready a children's Christmas book every night or talking about Christmas memories.

Storing Kids Papers

OK, so here is a problem all parents have: What papers from school do we save and how do we save them? This is a solution I heard on a Manic Mommies podcast. A person called in the idea. Unfortunately I didn't catch the lady's name, so I can't give her credit. I'm sorry about that, but she had a brilliant idea. She buys on of those large accordion file folders. (Mine actually has 13 slots which is perfect) Each slot is for a year in school. Whatever you decide to keep has to fit in the slot. It will help you get rid of a lot of paperwork and pick the most important to save.

Another idea I heard a long time ago (I can't recall where) involves how to save you child's art. You can make a small scrapbook to save your child's favorite art, but if you have a hard time throwing away any of their art, scan in onto your computer. Then you can save a jpg file of the art. Save it on a disk, and you will have it forever.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Grocery Shopping List

OK, I hate grocery shopping. I'll confess, my husband does it most of the time. But sometimes I have to go. And it is even harder when you have to take the kids. Here is an idea to make shopping with your kiddos a bit easier and maybe teach them a bit too. Make shopping into a game. With your preschoolers, make a grocery list using pictures. You can use your grocery store ads. Cut out pictures of items you will be purchasing and paste them on a paper. This allows your children to help find the items. Once they are older, have them add up the price of items. Once they are even older, allow them a set amount to "spend" on some groceries. Allow them to figure out how much they can buy with that amount. The grocery store can be a great place to teach kids about how to be responsible with money.