31 Days of Halloween: Day 3 - Easy Halloween Recipe for Witch Hat Cookies

Halloween Recipe: How to Make Easy Witch Hat Cookies

I spend a lot of time trying to avoid processed foods, except of course for when I don't.

Sometimes the cute factor + the easy factor makes me just want to make something with my kids that has no nutritional value.

Like these Halloween Witch Hat Cookies.

I'm sure I saw them on Pinterest last year, but now I can't find the legit source, as this year the cookies are pinned around with spammy sources.

Here's the recipe for:

Easy Halloween Witch Hat Cookies:

Ingredients:
- 1 Box Keebler Fudge Stripe Cookies
- I Bag Hershey's Kisses
- 1 Tube Icing (we used orange)
- Sprinkles (optional)

Directions:
1. Attach one Hershey kiss to the top of one fudge stripe cookie (stripes facing down) with the icing.
2. Put your now complete witch hat on a cookie sheet or other flat surface to dry.

3. Decorate with icing to your Halloween heart's delight. Optional: add sprinkles.

My kids had tons of fun making these, and I think they would be cute for a Halloween party - it's easy enough to make a lot of them especially if you have eager helpers who want to decorate, as evidenced here:

What are your favorite Halloween recipes? Please share in the comments below!

And for a bit of Halloween humor, read Halloween, you have betrayed us. Because if sticking a celery stick in an orange and calling it a Halloween "treat" isn't a betrayal I don't know what it.

 

Giving the People What They Want: 10 Cute and Clever Dry Erase Ideas - Mostly DIY

My Dry Erase Crayons.
Purchased thinking I would maybe
one day make one of these
DIY Dry Erase Boards.

I love Pinterest.  I have almost 100 Boards and over 2,000 pins on everything under the Pinterest sun. I have an entire board devoted to Nutella and another board just about Big Duckie.

And yet the board that gets the most action on Pinterest is.... Cute and Clever Dry Erase Ideas - Mostly DIY.

So if you are looking for cute and clever dry erase ideas - mostly DIY - here are 10:

1. Make super-awesome dry erase table signs - excellent for entertaining.
2. Write with dry erase marker on top of the washing machine anything inside it that shouldn't go in the dryer.
3. Glass + Burlap makes a really cool dry erase board.
4. Glass + Scrapbook paper makes a really pretty dry erase calendar.
5. Use dry erase paint and make an entire dry erase wall.
6. Love this - a dry erase clock to write in what the kids are doing when.
7. The Dry Erase Clipboard - loves it.
8. Bamboo Dry Erase - great design statement.
9. Dry Erase Board with a list of what the kids need to do.
10. And last, I'm a big fan of the Dry Erase Decision Maker. Some days I could really use one of these.

Do you have a favorite Dry Erase idea? Share in the comments below!

And if you're on Pinterest leave your name so I can follow you!

Ziggy Turns Three!

My little guy turned three this week.

His sisters made him really awesome birthday cards filled with all his nicknames (Boodle-pants is a favorite, and no, I don't know where it came from or how it started), the radio station played his favorite song Firework complete with birthday dedication, we rode every kiddie ride at the amusement park, and he ate his weight in ice cream.

All in all, a pretty perfect three-year-old day.

The birthday cards with the nicknames reminded me of this cool project on Pinterest where you write all your kid's favorite things down on a photo on their birthday (or the first day of school or other occasion).

So I made one with Ziggy's favorite things as of three years old.

Can't wait to see what makes the list when he is four.

Happy Birthday, Boodle-pants.

Unlike a lot of Pinterest projects, this one only took about five minutes. I used Picasa, but it could be made using PicMonkey or any other photo editing program.

Red, White & Blue Muffins for July 4th, Memorial Day or Any Day You're Feeling Patriotic

My kids and I are having so fun making red, white and blue treats for Memorial Day that I got inspired to bake one more thing, so I made muffins with strawberries, blueberries and white chocolate chips. And they turned out really yummy.

Here's the recipe if you're planning to do some patriotic baking yourself over the long weekend!


Muffins for July 4th or Memorial Day

Ingredients:
2 cups white flour
1 tablespoon baking power
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1/3 cup blueberries
1/3 cup cut-up strawberries
1/3 cup white chocolate chips

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 F and butter muffin tins.
2. Mix together 1 3/4 cups flour, baking powder and sugar.
3. Add the egg, milk and melted butter to the flour mixture, stirring until just combined.
4. Combine strawberries, blueberries and white chocolate chips together, and sprinkle the last 1/4 cup of flour on top. Stir them gently into the batter.
5. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling each one about 2/3 of the way-up.
6. Bake 20 to 25 minutes.

Once baked, the muffins didn't come out as red, white and blue as I had hoped (in fact, the white chocolate chips had melted completely) so I topped them with an American Flag motif using cream cheese, whole blueberries, and strawberry jelly for stripes.

My oldest daughter pronounced that the muffins "looked odd," but she ate two so I'm still going to count this recipe as a success. And yes, I can admit they aren't quite Pinterest-perfect. But odd?

Happy July Fourth!
Happy Memorial Day!

For more ideas for celebrating the Memorial Day holiday, check out Memorial Day Breakfast: Three Easy Ideas in Red, White and Blue and Memorial Day: A Day of Remembrance.

What I'm Thinking About Sunday Night: Ideas (and More Ideas) for Celebrating Valentine's Day with Kids

I went a little overboard this year making heart shaped foods and homemade Valentines in celebration of a holiday, that quite frankly, I don't care about at all. So why then all this Valentine's Day over-consumption?

I blame you, Pinterest. And I am staying far, far away from you, Pinterest for St. Patrick's Day, Cinco De Mayo, and April Fool's Day to make sure this doesn't happen again.

In the meantime, if you're looking for Valentine's Day ideas here are ideas, and more ideas, and then a few more...

5 Easy-to-Make Long-Distance Valentine's Day Cards - These are all easy (at least by Pinterest standards), and you don't need me to tell you how much the grandparents will like receiving them.

Valentine's Day Cards for the Classroom - These amazing homemade Valentine ideas are all easy enough you can make enough for the entire classroom, and I gotta hand it to the Pinterest crafters: you people really are so incredibly creative.

Perfect Printables for Valentine's Day - Ah, printables. The perfect compromise between store-bought and homemade, all you have to do is print these out to share the love with friends and family, or as is just as likely, all your children's classmates.

Glad I Made It: Homemade Valentine's Day Cards - These cards are the handiwork of my very own kids.

Valentine's Day Breakfasts You'll Heart - Easy recipes for making a fun, kid-friendly Valentine's Day breakfast.

How To Make Heart Fried Potatoes in 22 Minutes - These heart fried potatoes are sooo cute, and cutting hundreds of hearts out of raw potatoes is such a good use of time!

Glad I Made It: Strawberry Hearts for Valentine's Day - The heart shaped food obsession continues with heart strawberries.

4 Valentine's Day Books You're Sure to Adore - Picks range from a zombie love-story to the toddler favorite Snuggle Puppy, so really, there's something for everyone.

Fun-Loving Sing-Along Songs for Valentine's Day - Lots of fun tunes to enjoy with the kids on this silly, sappy holiday of hearts and love.

And if you want even more Valentine's Day fun, from last year I've got handprint crafts and a nice collection of vintage suffragette postcards celebrating St. Valentine's Day.

And last, I leave you with the outtakes of all the other foods I have hearted or tried to heart after a night of drinking too much Pinterest.

And last, Scary Mommy has some pretty great Valentines Day cards, too.

How to Make Heart Fried Potatoes in 22 Minutes

With Valentine's Day a mere two weeks away, I've been making lots of heart-y crafts with my kids. So it seemed only natural that I would want to make hearty-y food, too.

Here are easy directions for making insane adorable Heart Shaped Fried Potatoes.

1. Go to Pinterest and look at all the insane adorable foods people have carved, kabobed and baked in the shape of hearts and decide you too must do that.

2. Choose to make something with potatoes since you do not have any of the ingredients needed for the other insane adorable ideas, and are too damn lazy to go to the store to get them.

3. Find this amazing recipe for Roasted Potato Hearts and decide to make them for family breakfast.

4. Realize the recipe has too many steps and is way too difficult for someone who only has one iCarly (i.e., 22 minutes) to make the insane adorable heart potatoes and the rest of breakfast.

5. Decide to improvise own almost-as-good heart potato recipe by slicing two potatoes semi-thinly, and then using a cookie cutter to cut out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes.

6. Realize cutting out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes is taking forever (which is way longer than one iCarly episode) and switch to a larger heart shaped cookie cutter.

7. Cut out one insane adorable larger heart potato.

8. Accept that even with this major improvement to the insane adorable heart-cutting out process, it is still going to take longer than you are willing to spend cutting out insane adorable heart potatoes. Especially when you are but one mother with seven remaining minutes, and who still has to make the rest of breakfast.

9. Heat oil in a heavy skillet, and fry the pan-full of insane adorable potato hearts you have managed to cut-out in the preceding fifteen minutes of your life that you are never going to get back.

10. Flip the potato hearts, and serve on platter alongside other regular non-heart breakfast foods.

11. Listen to the kids happily exclaim that there are hearts for breakfast! and decide it really wasn't so much work after all.

12. Vow to make even more and better insane adorable heart food next time!

You can see more insane adorable heart shaped food on my Pinterest Board Heart Food for Valentine's Day.

I've also put all the photos together here, because the other recipes on Pinterest look like this, and I so want to fit-in.

What I'm Obsessing About on Sunday Night: Big Duckie and Pinterest

What have I done this week? I will be honest: I have done almost nothing besides obsessively pin photos of ducks to Pinterest.

Thank you to everyone who has emailed me duck photos to add to the Big Duckie Board!

Meanwhile, Big Duckie has also been pretty busy. My brother, sister-in-law and itty niece came over and Big Duckie insisted on joining their family portrait:

Then Big Duckie tried to play basketball (total fail):

And finally, exhausted Big Duckie collapsed into the first Big Duckie size chair he could find:

After a week spent indulging Big Duckie and my Pinterest habit, I'm hoping next week I'll have something else to talk about. Like my efforts towards creating world peace. And also, what foods can most easily be cut into heart shapes for Valentine's Day.

And you?

A Day in the Life of Big Duckie

My daughter Kay - she's six - has a large stuffed animal duck. Quite creatively, she calls her Big Duckie. Big Duckie goes everywhere we go. And today I thought, why keep the joy that is a life lived with Big Duckie to myself? Let me share the love that is Big Duckie with you all.

Here's Big Duckie the day Kay liberated her from the toy store Corduroy Bear-style:

Kay is just a wee bit enthused.

We take Big Duckie on a victory lap around the toy store before leaving:

Then Kay insists Big Duckie must get buckled-in for the drive home:

Now Big Duckie lives a life of leisure. Lounging on the chaise:

Playing the piano (she really has an incredible ear, especially for a stuffed duck):

Going on trips to the grocery store, who doesn't love those tiny carts:

Next installment: Big Duckie plays with Squinkies and makes a duck tape necklace!

P.S. Big Duckie has her own Pinterest Board. I have no idea why.