Amy

Salted Butter Caramel Sauce + Winners

November 28, 2011 by Amy 3 Comments

When I made my first batch of caramel, I was so surprised at the taste. I was ready to taste a more flavorful Kraft caramel, but instead, homemade caramels tasted completely different. Completely. Homemade caramels are in a league of their own.

The same goes for caramel sauce. The homemade stuff tastes NOTHING like Smucker’s, and this stuff is much easier to make than caramel candy. No thermometer needed (Wahoo!), and it comes together fairly quickly. There’s still some of this precious sauce left in the refrigerator, and it’s taking everything in me not to finish that jar with a spoon. Diet be darned!

Salted Butter Caramel Sauce
Source: Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar

6 tbsp. salted butter (in tbsp.-sized slices)

1/2 cup + two tbsp. heavy cream, at room temperature

Directions:

Add the sugar to a 2-3 qt. sized pot, and melt over medium to medium high heat. As the sugar starts to melt, whisk or stir to ensure that the sugar doesn’t burn and heats evenly.

Cook the sugar until it melts to a dark caramel color. Add the butter tbsps. at the same time and stir it in. Then, pour in the heavy cream. You’ll notice that the pot is going to foam up so do these steps carefully to avoid burning yourself.

Remove the pot immediately from heat and whisk it until you get a smooth sauce.

Note: You can either use it right away or store it in the fridge up to two weeks. Popping it in the microwave for about a minute will make it it’s original consistency again.

I’ve chosen the two winners of the Butterball turkey gift certificates. Thanks to all of you who entered!

EDITED:

Due to the lack of response from the original winners, I had to re-draw for the Turkey gift cards!

cara….who said:

I try to get as much done as I can the night before and we rent an extra fridge!

AND

Kayla…who said:

My tip is to make your SIL host so you can just show up with your pecan pie and call it a day.

For the two of you who won, to redeem your prize, please email me within 48 hours at niftyfoodie@gmail.com! Congratulations!

Thanksgiving is this week + a giveaway!

November 21, 2011 by Amy 35 Comments

EDITED:

Since the original winners never emailed me, I had to re-draw for the Turkey gift cards!

cara….who said:

I try to get as much done as I can the night before and we rent an extra fridge!

AND

Kayla…who said:

My tip is to make your SIL host so you can just show up with your pecan pie and call it a day.

For the two of you who won, to redeem your prize, please email me within 48 hours at niftyfoodie@gmail.com! Congratulations!

—————————————————————————–

I absolutely cannot believe that Thanksgiving is this week. It feels like a few weeks ago, I was sweating like crazy any time I stepped outside. Oh wait…that weather is still going on here.

Maybe that’s why I can’t believe it. Ah, life in the South. Turkey Day in 80 degrees is the norm around here. To get myself in the mood, I usually start baking up a storm.

I made these little guys two years ago to get myself in the mood for Thanksgiving. I’d love to make them again, but only two were eaten. Why? Well, because they were “too pretty to eat”. ::sigh::

…

Why I’m losing weight…

November 16, 2011 by Amy 5 Comments

This is a hard post to write. Really hard. Not to mention, embarrassing too.

A couple of weeks ago, I told myself that this was it. No looking back. I need to get healthy. I know I’ve said this multiple times, but now that I’m dangerously teetering towards 300 lbs., I feel that this needs to happen soon.

At my weight, life is different. Much much different.

I get stared at. At first I thought that my zipper was down or something, but I realized people are probably staring at me. And people stare HARD. I’m not a looker, so I can only assume they’re looking at me because of my weight.

I used to be able to walk briskly and talk at the same time. I can still do this, but I’m starting to notice that I feel winded when I try. Seriously…

I wake up with back pain. I’ve never had this happen before. I’m 27…I shouldn’t be dealing with back pain every morning when I never had this problem before.

I’m always tired. ALWAYS. I could take a nap at the drop of a hat. My energy is absolutely drained.

My belly sticks out more than my boobs. And I’m not pregnant.

Constant acid reflux. Again, this is something I’ve never had before, but now I experience it nearly every day. It sucks.

I know some of these are ridiculous, but to me, I feel like my health is at its worst. I’m only 27 years old. I can do this. I can change. I’m ready for everything on that list to change for the better.

Cupcakes with Strawberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream

November 15, 2011 by Amy 8 Comments

When I started my food blog almost 4 years ago, I never expected that I would make so many friends through this. While I’ve only met a handful of bloggers in real life, I consider so many of them to be dear friends of mine. When my friend, Amy of Sing For Your Supper announced that she was pregnant, I smiled and felt like I needed to run to Texas and give her a huge congratulatory hug. I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but I just feel like my friendships online are just as real as the ones I have face-to-face. I was absolutely flattered when Kelsey of Apple A Day asked me to contribute to Amy’s (all sweets) virtual baby shower! I knew that my contribution had to be pink, since Amy is expecting a little girl, so I decided to make cupcakes with a (super pink) strawberry swiss meringue buttercream!

I was actually slightly intimidated here, because this was my first official swiss meringue buttercream. I was armed with online pointers about what to do if everything goes wrong, since sadly, if something can go wrong with a recipe, it usually goes wrong for me.

Much to my surprise, though, the buttercream came together perfectly. I was waiting for the separation, the curdling, the “Oh dangit, I did it again!”, but no. It whipped up beautifully and tasted so so good! As in, I want to make all of my birthday cakes with swiss meringue buttercream from now on. Seriously. If you’ve never made a swiss meringue buttercream (also fondly known as SMBC) before, just try it. If you’re like me, and you’re scared of all of the things that can go wrong, read this awesome blog post by Confessions of a Foodie Bride to be a little more prepared.

As for the cake, this was actually a recipe I’ve made before, which is absolutely fabulous. I think it’s my favorite from-scratch cake recipe to date. The whipped egg whites just make the batter so light and perfect. It’s a good standard cake recipe to try.

If you want to check out what everyone else made for Amy’s baby shower, check out the round-up posts at Kelsey’s blog (the hostess for the baby shower) and Amy’s blog (go congratulate the momma-to-be)!

Strawberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Source: Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

4 large egg whites

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into tablespoons

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 cup of fresh strawberries, pureed in a food processor (using part of the adaptation mentioned on Martha’s website)

Directions:

In the heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, combine the egg whites and sugar. Cook, whisking constantly, until sugar has dissolved and mixture is warm to the touch (about 160 degrees).

Pour the mixture into your stand mixer bowl fitted with the whisk attachment. Beat the egg-white mixture on high speed until it holds stiff (but not dry) peaks. Once it reaches that point and the mixture isn’t cool yet (just feel the sides of the bowl to find out), continue beating on low until the mixture is fluffy and cooled, about 6 minutes.

Switch to the paddle attachment. With mixer on medium-low speed, add butter several tablespoons at a time, beating a minute or so after each addition of butter. (If frosting appears to separate after all the butter has been added, beat on medium-high speed until smooth again, 3 to 5 minutes more.) Add in vanilla. Beat on lowest speed to eliminate any air bubbles, about 2 minutes. Stir in strawberry puree with a rubber spatula until frosting is smooth. If your frosting isn’t pink enough to your liking, add a touch of pink food coloring. 🙂

Sugar Cookie Bars

November 9, 2011 by Amy 1 Comment

As much as I love baking, sometimes it’s good to find a recipe that’s quick and convenient. I didn’t have time on my side this past weekend since we were hosting our housewarming party, so I wanted to bake something that was quick, but would also feed a crowd. This definitely fit the bill.

As you can see, I dyed them a nice LSU gold color and sprinkled purple Halloween sprinkles on top (gotta love Halloween clearance). Geaux Tigers! (Sorry, can’t help it!)

Back to the bars. I decided to add almond extract to the recipe, because I usually use a combination of almond and lemon for decorated sugar cookies. It’s just the perfect combination for sugar cookies, in my opinion. 🙂 I have to say that the texture of these cookies is slightly cookie-cakey, which made for the perfect soft, chewy bar and the icing was pretty classic. I highly recommend trying these bars out if you love sugar cookies, but want something that is as quick as possible. 🙂

Sugar Cookie Bars
Source: mildly adapted from Annie’s Eats (originally from The Repressed Pastry Chef)

Ingredients:

For the bars:

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. almond extract

1 tsp. lemon zest

5 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

For the frosting:

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

4 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

5 tbsp. milk

Food coloring (optional)

Directions:

To make the bars, preheat the oven to 350˚ F. Grease and/or parchment paper line a 13 x 18″ rimmed baking sheet. Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat on medium-high speed until the mixture is fluffy and smooth, about 2 minutes. Mix in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition, making sure to scrape down the bowl as needed. Blend in the vanilla, almond extract, and lemon zest. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Whisk to blend the mixture. Add the dry ingredients to the mixer bowl and beat on low speed just until incorporated.

Transfer the cookie dough to the prepared baking sheet and press into an even layer. Keep a bowl of water near you so you can dip your fingers in and prevent dough from sticking to your fingers Bake 10-15 minutes, until light golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a wire rack and let cool completely before frosting.

To make the frosting, place the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat on medium-high speed until smooth, about 1 minute. Blend in the vanilla, salt, and confectioners’ sugar until smooth, 1-2 minutes. Mix in the milk a tbsp. at a time. Tint as desired with food coloring. Spread over the cookie bars in the pan, cut into bars and serve.

A little more effort…

November 7, 2011 by Amy 18 Comments

This isn’t a happy post. Just a fair warning.

Sometime over the weekend, I straightened my hair for the first time in months. Yep, you read that right. Months.

The whole not straightening my hair wasn’t a ploy to get my hair to be healthier, but rather, it was me just not caring anymore. I used to straighten my hair every morning, because I felt that it made me appear more polished during the day.

Lately, since the weight gain has happened, I just don’t feel pretty anymore. I don’t care enough to straighten my hair or even wear make-up to work anymore. I used to love make-up, but I honestly feel that I’m ugly, fat and make-up/hair won’t undo a 50 lb. weight gain. I’d just be fat with make-up and straight hair.

If you can’t tell, my self image of myself is at an all time low. I don’t really buy clothes or shoes anymore, unless they get holes and need to be replaced. I air dry my hair and pack it all in a hair elastic. I don’t wear make-up. Weighing in at almost 300 lbs. drains me (yep, I’m almost 300 lbs. at the moment…gained a LOT of weight), and I really just don’t care anymore.

I read fashion/beauty blogs, and I think man, those girls are gorgeous. Just gorgeous. However, they’re also thinner. I read plus size blogs too, but those girls are like size 14-18. I’m a size 26. I’m the second to LAST size that the average plus size store carries. Talk about a boost…yeah, right.

And yes, before you ask, I’m trying to lose weight. Starting C25K today, actually and have been logging my calories on MyFitnessPal. However, I’m 50 lbs. away from my wedding weight, where even then, I still felt fat. Not super encouraging, but I know I have to do something about this weight.

With the holiday season approaching, I want to so badly just be happy. I want to smile and it not feel forced. I want to walk in public without feeling like someone is watching me in disgust. So, I’m going to put in a little more effort this holiday season and see how things go.

I bought two sweaters yesterday. Two sweaters that were not replacing torn sweaters, mind you.

I re-organized my make-up and threw away the old stuff.

I have the straightener and blow dryer on my counter ready to go.

And today, for the first time in a long time, I wore mineral foundation, eyeshadow (one shade, mind you), eyeliner and mascara to work.

The effort took 10 minutes, but I find that I’m sitting up a little straighter today and also thinking about healthier lunch choices. Maybe it’s the first day drive to success or maybe, just maybe a little bit of make-up is making me care a little more about myself.

We’ll see.

A week in pictures

November 6, 2011 by Amy Leave a Comment

NaBloPoMo has had me brainstorming more post ideas and I thought that I could share some cell phone pictures that I’ve caught throughout the week.

For Halloween, Millie was a yellow submarine. I actually bought the costume last Halloween on clearance, and miraculously, it still fit her. Well, except for the length. Ah well. She was still adorable!

We had the fence on our house installed sometime last week. It was a huge goal of ours to find the next house with a great yard for our dog, and finally, she has room to run around and play! It’s so awesome to give her a yard to play in since the new place we moved to doesn’t have a dog park. 🙁

This is a picture of LSU’s campus, which I took on Saturday. The campus was so quiet…gotta love away game weekends. 🙂

This week, I ordered some new food coloring. My Wilton dyes were dried out and I’ve been really wanting some Americolor dyes, since I’ve heard such great things about them on blogs. I can’t wait to use them!

Does this photo even need a caption? And no, it’s not a cell phone picture, but it really needs to be shared. LOL! GEAUX TIGERS!

Fabric Organizing

November 4, 2011 by Amy 1 Comment

It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been sewing for 2 years. I remember when I got my first machine in Christmas of 2008. It was sitting pretty in a box for a while, until my Mom majorly helped me out with the machine on Thanksgiving of 2009. I learned how to thread the sucker and practiced some stitches on an old dish cloth. (Thanks Mom!)

Since then, I’ve been slowly purchasing fabrics. Pretty fabrics. I would end up buying fabric, because it was cute with no project in mind. So of course, I started to see a small stash grow. I had a decent sized IKEA basket where I was storing the fabrics, but unfortunately, that wasn’t enough space. Not nearly enough. It just never looked organized, so I had to do something different. 🙂

So, I looked on the Internet to see what others were doing with their fabric, because I know people have MUCH more fabric than I do. That’s where I stumbled on this idea where you wrap fabric around comic book boards. Genius!

How simple is that? When it’s stacked side-by-side, it sort of looks like a little fabric library. I love it!

For the 1/2 yard cuts, I ended up cutting a board in half, to give the fabric something better to wrap around. Then, I ended up placing them in a smaller basket to keep them all together since the shelves on my bookcase are too deep for the 1/2 yard cuts.

I just love that I can easily see all of the fabric that I have and just as easily pull only what I need now!

How do you organize your fabrics?

Our Garage/Moving Sale

November 3, 2011 by Amy 3 Comments

Moving is truly the best way to declutter. When it came down to packing everything we own, there were some, well, a lot of times where we’d stumble across some items we completely forgot about. Sometimes it was like Christmas morning, like when I found a $50 Walmart GC in an envelope somewhere. Other times, I would look at an item and wonder why the heck did I buy this?

I ended up starting a garage sale pile while packing, not thinking much of it. However, the pile grew until four of our kitchen cabinets were full, as well as a few large boxes. Crazy…

Since it is the Fall in a college town, we decided to schedule the sale on a bye week for the football team, which was last weekend. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect, and we were happy to see that quite a few people showed up to our little sale.

Check out the before/after of the sale! We were super stoked to make over $300 in just 4 short hours. 🙂

If you’re new to garage sales, here’s a few tips I’d like to share based on experience. 🙂

A few days before:

Advertise on Craigslist and your local paper. Consider starting your garage sale earlier than most, since the early birds are the ones with the major money. 🙂 We started ours at 7, but people showed up at 6:30 while we were setting up. Yes, coffee works miracles!

Purchase garage sale pricing labels and signs at the Dollar Tree. WAY cheaper than Lowes or Wal-Mart! Don’t wait until the night before, especially if you think it will be a major garage sale weekend, because Dollar Tree sells out fast!

The day before:

Price your items. You don’t want to worry about this when you’re setting up that morning, because people like to show up early and it’s best to be organized and have the price tags on there already.

Put out your garage sale signs and write the information BIG and BOLD. If you’re using posters as signs, get a bright colored sign! You want to grab attention as people are driving by!

Go to the bank and get money for change. Get a few 20s in change too, just in case the big spenders come. It’s also nice to buy a counterfeit pen for those 100s and 20s. You really just never know.

The day of:

Set up everything neatly and in categories. It helps to have everything sorted so people who know exactly what they’re looking for can find it! I can’t tell you how many people said our garage sale was the cleanest they had seen that day! 🙂

If someone haggles (within reason), go for it! Do you want this junk back in your house? No. I like to think of garage sales like someone is PAYING YOU to get rid of your junk. Trust me, you’ll probably end up giving to Goodwill anyway if it doesn’t sell and with that, you end up with nada.

A couple of hours before the garage sale is over, mark EVERYTHING down that you still have.

An hour before it’s over, mark down again. (And just to note, towards the end, we started giving away stuff for free with purchases. I didn’t want to make the Goodwill trip, so I kept thinking, these people are doing us a favor by taking this crap.)

Any other tips you have for holding a garage sale? 🙂

Wonky Blocks

November 2, 2011 by Amy 1 Comment

This quilt has been a work in progress since December of last year. It was a project where I ended up cutting the fabric, stashed the blocks away and forgot about it. I have so many projects like this just lying around in my craft room. However, I told myself I can’t tackle anything new until I actually finish some of these sewing projects that have already been cut. We’ll see how that goes.

I also told myself I can’t buy anymore fabric. Ha!

A few months before all of this packing and moving stuff happened, I sat down and got to work on these wonky blocks for this quilt pattern. Stupid me thought I totally memorized ALL of the instructions. Cut a third of the fabric in a wonky, slanted line, move one piece of the stack from the top to the bottom, and then sew back together.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I tried to cut 27 pieces of fabric all at once with my rotary cutter. What a mess. Don’t do it…trust me. I’m surprised I didn’t slice a finger off!

After I cut/resewed the pieces back together, I referred to the instructions thinking that there’s gotta be a better way. Well, yeah…the instructions said to do this in 3 groups of 9. Dangit!

So, of course this ruined every idea I had of having perfect blocks with 9 different fabrics in them. Oh well.

For the next four cuts, I grouped them in 3 groups of nine and tried my best to make sure that the squares had varying fabrics in them. I don’t think I got one block right. Lesson learned…I really should read instructions better. Ugh..I’m such a rebel!

The more I look at these blocks, though, the more I like them.

They’re much more random looking this way, and I think they came together quite beautifully in this quilt top!

Now, all that’s left is to sandwich the quilt, quilt it all together and sew the binding on! 🙂 Time to dust off the sewing machine and get this project going again!

Amy

Footer

Archives