Hanukkah '15

The kids were excited for Hanukkah this year, and we enjoyed our small celebration! We ate matzo ball soup and latkes, lit the menorah, read the Hanukkah story and played dreidel games! 

Apple Picking 2015

We had a beautiful, fall day to pick apples this year. With a little bit of help, we went home with more than enough apples to make applesauce and apple butter for ourselves, friends and family. This year, the kids also wandered into the corn field bordering the apple trees and came home with some ears of corn for the rats. We always enjoy this time of year! 

I made corn-husk dolls for the kids.

The kids helped drive the tractor with our load of apples back to the car.

L.A. 2015: In -N-Out

YUMMY!!!! I instantly regret that we only went once because who knows when we will next get to eat the best burger ever! As always, I chowed down on my single animal style and loved ever bite! 

Spa Birthday Party Cake

Here is Kyrie's birthday party cake. She had her party at a children's spa, so keeping with that theme, we decided on a nail polish bottle cake. At first, we wanted to make an upright polish bottle, but I couldn't find a cake box to accommodate the height (and didn't want to make my own box). So, I had to alter the plan and instead made the bottle spilled on its side. 

The biggest challenge for this cake was putting together the nail polish bottle. I was thinking that I would need to use some dowel roads to hold the cake together, but it came together quite easily with no worry that it would fall apart. To make the cake, I used a giant cupcake pan, a round pan and one cupcake. I cut one side from the giant cupcake so that the cake would lay on its side and then pieced together everything. The round cake had a strawberry filling. 

Overall, this cake was not that difficult. I took the process slowly and was pleased with how it turned out! 

Halloween Treats

The kids spent an afternoon preparing some spooky-good treats for family to enjoy on the day of the grand parade. Grandma Ida had them help prepare three different treats: owl cupcakes, ghost pretzels and Hershey Kiss acorns. They had a lot of fun putting them together, and everyone enjoyed gobbling them up on Saturday afternoon!

Degen showing off an owl cupcake.

Ghost pretzels

Hershey Kiss acorns

Apple Picking

Every other year, we are grateful for the opportunity to head out to the country and pick all the apples we want from a friend's orchard. We had a gorgeous afternoon, sunny & cool, this year and spent a few hours wading through tall grasses and climbing trees to find the best apples we could to make applesauce, apple chunks and apple butter! 

We all started out strong taking our bins from tree to tree, but about halfway through, the kids stopped for a snack and then decided they would rather run races up & down the gravel road and play adventure in the weeds than pick. It was all good! Darren & I worked to find the best trees he could climb and he tossed down apple after apple to me to drop in the waiting bins. We collected about 4 large bins of apples- I have no idea how many apples or pounds of apples that is, but it is a lot. 

In the next few weeks, I will spend long weekend afternoons in the kitchen peeling, processing & preserving all those apples we picked. The fall is a great time for canning, and I love when the smell of apples, sugar & cinnamon fills the house. We will can enough to keep and enough to give as gifts to family & friends. I love that our apple gifts all start with our family working together on a sunny afternoon!

Tree climbing is a must if you're apple-picking.

Kyrie is very discerning about which apples she picks.

We Be Jammin'

Well, really 'Jellyin,' but you get the idea. My second year doing jelly. Our berry bushes are not producing much this year, but the grocery store had a super deal on blueberries, so I decided to make some blueberry jelly.

I love my food mill for jelly prep! I put it on top of a large measuring cup so that I can keep track of how much juice I have for recipes. 

The juice goes in the pot with sugar & pectin to cook.

I am lucky to have several canning books at this point. I had trouble finding a jelly recipe specific to blueberries (though there were several for mixed berries). I found one recipe for blueberry jelly that asked for liquid pectin, which I hadn't used before. So, I bought a box of liquid pectin to use. It seems okay, though I feel like it is a softer set than what I typically like to have for my jellies. In the same book, I found a split recipe using blueberries (syrup & butter). Since I used my juice for the jelly, I saved the pulp to make the butter. 

Blueberry Jelly

I have made several batches of apple butter, which I love. I put all my apple leftovers in a crock-pot and leave it to cook down for about a day. Though the recipe that I used didn't tell you to cook it in a crock-pot, I did anyway and it turned out beautifully! For those of you who might not know, fruit butters use fruit pulp and cook/set without the aid of pectin. Being able to use the crock-pot makes the process super-easy, and I love that it uses up all the leftovers that would normally end up in the compost heap. I hope that I can do more fruit butters in the future. 

Blueberry Butter