paint cut paste

i thought this might be a nice place to share our family recipe, passed down through generations, for buttercream easter eggs. mostly because this blog serves as a record for N to have (i print my blog into books for her to keep,) and so that my mom, sister, and i don’t have to frantically call each other every spring asking for recipe details. this is one of the easter rituals that has been passed down for YEARS in my family, so let’s archive it here and share the sweetness!

every easter when my mom was a kid, and when i was a kid, it has been tradition for us to find a large chocolate-covered buttercream easter egg, with our name on it, in the center of our easter baskets. these eggs are like diabetes in a ball – they are SUGARY SWEET through and through. this isn’t like a piece of candy you can bite into and eat. it’s one to slice ever so thinly and eat over time… if you can exercise restraint.

we don’t put the egg in N’s basket as though a bunny brought it. rather, it’s something we make together around easter time and enjoy and share with friends on easter sunday. here’s the secret family recipe… shhhh…

stir together:

• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk*
• 6 cups or 1 1/2 lb. of powdered sugar

use hands to form mixture into egg-shaped orbs of whatever size you wish. set aside.

for the chocolate coating melt (over a double boiler) a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips with a tablespoon of vegetable shortening. on my first attempt this year, i tried to use milk chocolate ghirardelli chips first, and it just clumped into a ball instead of melting nice and smooth. had to try again with the old stand-by semi-sweets and it worked fine.

once liquified, spread spoonfuls of this chocolate directly on wax paper to serve as the bottom of the buttercream eggs.

place buttercream orb atop this chocolate, then spoon chocolate over top of the orb until it is coated. you can smooth it out with the back of the spoon.

once it is hardened (you can expedite this by putting it in the fridge) you can decorate the eggs with royal icing or any icing that will harden (not gels.) this year, i got lazy and just used that cake mate brand icing in a tube.

voila! you’re finished. garnish your easter baskets and share with your loved ones and friends and co-workers. the recipe makes PLENTY!

bookmark or pin this for next easter. or you can make these in other shapes for other holidays, i’m sure! let me know what you come up with!

*as you’ve noticed by now, pretty much any “secret family recipe” in my family involves sweetened condensed milk. remember our snow ice cream recipe? perhaps that’s why i’m a vietnamese coffee fiend!

here’s a festive treat to try – peppermint bark popcorn!

all you need is:

• a bag of microwave popcorn
• peppermint bark
• candy canes

just pop the popcorn and put it in a large bowl. then melt your peppermint bark in a double boiler. okay, ours looks weird because the peppermint bark we had in the cabinet was both white and dark chocolate with crushed candy canes in it. ideally, if you wanted to make this look wintry and lovely, you’d get the white chocolate peppermint bark. you can add some peppermint extract if you want it mintier.

then crush a candy cane or two (or 4 mini candy canes, which is what we did) in your food processor. quick, easy, and LOUD.

sprinkle the crushed candy canes onto your popcorn, then pour on the melted peppermint bark. then stir it until it’s evenly coated.

lay it out on wax paper to dry.

pardon the gross photos - nighttime creation, once again. grr, winter.

then enjooooy it by your tree with a little nog and some great holiday specials on tv (which is just what we did.) or you could serve it at a holiday party for those near and dear.

you could even package this up in cute tins to make for a great holiday gift!

this isn’t a new idea or an art project, nor is it rocket science. it’s just something i happened to pin and then actually do last week (woah, a follow-through on a pin!?!) and it made N say, “this is the BEST dessert ever!” (really?!) i just froze bananas after making them a little fancier. yep, that’s it. imprintables offered a pinworthy photo of their version, giving a nod to the red thread.

a couple years ago, i introduced N to one of my breakfast favs of having thin slices of frozen bananas in cereal. the milk freezes around each slice making it extra yum. since i knew she loved frozen bananas, i figured i’d put a stick in it and dabble on a tad of chocolate and sugary goodness and try to pass it off as dessert.

all i had laying around were these short (half-sized) popsicle sticks, but i figured they’d do. i sliced a banana into about 5 pieces. i dipped just the flat end  of each piece into a little chocolate syrup and then some nonpareil sprinkles.

left handed dessert-making while right handed iphone photo taking. you bloggers know the drill. woah, i need a manicure!

i put them onto a plate covered in plastic wrap and froze them. i took them out of the freezer about 10 minutes before we were ready to eat them so they’d soften a wee bit. when i served them for dessert, N was PSYCHED! my husband thought frozen banana tasted like a pudding pop of sorts. score! everyone feels like they’re eating ice cream, but it’s a fruit serving (with a smidge of chocolate this time.)

i just had to share the simple sweetness with you all.

okay, so who among us hasn’t repinned this okra stamping tip junkie pin yet?

idea from newhouseproject.com featured on tip junkie

i pinned it a while back, and like most of my pins, considered it collected among zillions of ideas i may never get to. until tonight when i was cutting up okra — one of N’s absolute favorite foods of all time!

when i cut the tops off, i put them aside in a bowl. then gathered up some random scrap paper, squirted out two paint colors of N’s choosing, and let her have at it while our homemade gluten free pizza baked in the oven.

i probably could have cut the okra to have smoother, flatter surfaces. i probably could have picked out the seeds to make cleaner prints. i probably could have added a medium to my paints to thin them out. but i did not because i was frying okra. and that’s okay.

okra really is so cool looking.

the prints turned out kinda cool regardless of my jagged cutting and haphazardly thrown together while okra burns in the oil on stove art project.

a few days later. we made them into thank you notes and a birthday card.

we’ll likely try again another day with less of a time crunch and more planning. regardless, the fried okra was delish!

ever since i saw this brilliant post on wise craft two years ago, i’ve totally wanted to make our own everyday placemats! i finally got around to it last week!

i don’t know about your home, but we really benefit from having some sort of wipeable, plastic placemat on the table at mealtimes. we use cloth napkins everyday and when we entertain, we use cloth placemats, but for everyday use, cloth placemats just don’t cut it. while i realize i could achieve this look (and you could too) by laminating beautiful cardstock or paper art work, i wanted the heft of cloth layers for our placemats.

where did those pretty patterns up there come from? well lately, i’ve been OB-sessed with spoonflower, so i could not resist (though i tried) picking a few patterns from their web site to use for ours. the visuals are important to me, especially for something we’ll see so often and will likely be burned in N’s brain if we use them for years of her childhood. because we are very seasonally oriented in our home (from our seasonal altar to food to centerpieces to decor,) i decided to choose one fabric for each season. i made eight placemats total: four with spring on one side, summer on the other. then four with autumn on one side, winter on the other. i got the spring fabric from etsy (i was seeking a hip snail print, as snails are a huge sign of spring here in our backyard, as they SWARM it all season long) and the other three seasons’ fabric was carefully chosen from spoonflower to also be personal to our family in some way.

when the fabric arrived, i was thrilled to begin! (a project with beautiful fabric that requires NO SEWING? this is my kinda creation!)

(i didn't need the pins. they just made the pic cute & were in the box with my fabric scissors.)

i followed the instructions on wisecraft: i began by cutting four 11″ x 17″ rectangles out of each fabric. (i freaked about the measurements here being exact and lining up because i didn’t read ahead in the instructions, but you don’t need to freak at this part. there is a time later when you’ll trim them down again.) i must have looked stressed during this part of the project because N kept rubbing my back and saying, “i like the way you’re concentrating here. good, good, you got it, good.”

then i ironed each rectangle of fabric. (first time i’ve used my ironing board in N’s life – she had to ask what it was. sad, right? uh, i like to tell myself that we mostly wear comfy knitwear and it’s not needed.) after they were wrinkle-free, i used thermoweb heatnbond lite to adhere spring to summer and fall to winter. wisecraft gives a thorough explanation of this process on her blog here.

after they were bonded, right sides of fabric facing out, i trimmed them down to 10.25″ by 16.25″ each. (aaaah, all lined up!)

next i did a little research on the laminating process. i found a teacher supply store locally that only charged 65 cents to laminate something that is 11×17 – score… or so i thought. BUT when we visited the store, i learned that the laminate was very thin and the placemats would still be flimsy like the cloth. so, i decided to go to fedex/kinkos (as wisecraft recommended – no need to try to reinvent the wheel to save a few bucks here.) i found it very user-friendly.

even though each placemat cost $4.50 to laminate at that size, we went this route considering the fabric investment i’d already made. they offer a thick plastic sleeve to put the cloth into. after it’s centered in the sleeve, just run it through the laminating machine that seals it together with heat. i feel like they’ll hold up for years!

about an hour after we laminated them, they were on our table and dinner was served — summer style!

even though this was a mom-made project, i have to say that N was with me every step of the way and takes immense pride in telling everyone “can you believe that WE made these placemats ourselves?!”

N came up with this idea while at whole foods on friday. while in the produce section, she said, “let’s make veggie art!” i asked what she meant, and she said she wanted to “build a bird out of fruits and veggies when we get home.” um, okay.

i remembered having this play with your food book waaay back in the day, and we have done our share of food-related art posts here, but i was just psyched that this was fully her imagination and doing. when we unpacked the groceries, she picked some items she’d make a bird out of.

she instructed me to cut the tip off the carrot for a beak and to slice some thin carrot slices for legs. then she asked for toothpicks.

i had to help her push the sharp toothpicks into some of the harder produce, like the bird’s sweet potato body, but she was able to do most of it.

apple head + carrot beak + sweet potato body + raisin eyes + carrot legs + banana wings = brilliant bird!

then we ate the bird with our lunch — it’s the only way we vegetarians are gonna get any poultry!

(hen shirt is total coinkidink)

it is a 4th of july weekend tradition in my family to make homemade ice cream. this dates back to my early memories of a huge tub of ice and rock salt and a crank on our back porch as a kid. these days, it’s a lot easier!

not only do we now have fancy ice cream makers for such endeavors (like how we made our lavender honey ice cream creation last summer – yum!) but these days there are ice cream makers that kids can operate. yep, the ice cream ball. have you seen this thing?

it rocks! all we had to do was put ice and rock salt (or sea salt, which we used) into the outside chamber and ice cream ingredients into the inside chamber, play, and eat! N chose vanilla for her ice cream flavor (she’s a simple lady) so we gathered our ingredients.

N stirred everything together in a bowl to pour into the ball. (hers is purple, of course.)

then we ventured out into the yard to roll the ball back and forth to each other for 20 minutes. this was a fun time of singing “big rock candy mountain” and “red red robin.”

we also played “i’m going on a picnic and i’m going to bring…” while going through the alphabet. i still remember the sequence: apple, blueberry, cat, dalmation, egg, flower, gummy bear, horse, ice cream (of course!), janice (from electric mayhem), kite, love, mom, newt, octopus… etc. you get the picture. once we had the ABCs all loaded up for our picnic, we went inside to see if the ice cream had solidified, and it had!

the edges were quite frozen, whereas some of the ice cream in the center of the chamber was still a little soft-serve-ish. didn’t matter. we served up some into our bowls, and also put some in tuperware to bring over to our neighbor, who was curiously watching us roll the ball back and forth.

deeeelish! happy 4th of july to all and happy two year blog-iversary to paintcutpaste.com yesterday! (this treat was even better than having a gluten-free birthday cake!)