May12

When life gives you Dandelions…make some jelly!

Posted on May 12, 2013 by artzcool

Springtime in Canada is my absolute favourite time of year. There is nothing better than those first few sunny days of the season, where you can finally put on your sandals, and go outside with no coat! The other thing I love about springtime is the dandelions. I know, I know, they are supposed to be a weed, but they are my favourite flower…just not on my lawn of course.
Here is what the park around the corner from us looked like yesterday!

Every year since the kids were about 2, for mother’s day, I take photos of the kids in a field of dandelions, and we make dandelion chains, and bouquets. This year, on instructables, I found a new idea…dandelion jelly! Dandelions are actually an edible plant, they have a strong, almost bitter taste. Many of the leaves are used in salads, and the flowers can be eaten too.
So back to the jelly… here is the link to the original recipe, although I did make a few changes. Instructables Recipe for Dandelion Jelly
I started the jelly by having the whole family help pick. We tried to pick the larger flowers, and we picked flowers from the center of the field.

Warning…your hands will look like this, and they don’t wash off easily..

We collected about 10 cups of flowers in total. This was enough to make two batches of jelly.

Now for the tedious part.. you have to separate the yellow petals from the green leaves. The green part of the dandelion is the bitter part.
After a little bit of experimenting, I found the easiest way to get the petals only, is to break the flower open with your thumbs

Then, pluck the petals out of the center. I have to warn you…this part was time consuming, and the kids got bored of helping pretty fast. But, I ended up getting about six cups of petals.

The next step is to make a sort of a tea, by mixing the six cups of petals to about 8 cups of water in a saucepan, and letting it boil for about 15 minutes.

Then, I strained the petals in a strainer with cheese cloth.

Now for the jelly making part! Three cups of the boiled mixture plus 6 cups of sugar, and a pack of certo equals some deeelicious jelly!
Mix everything together in a large saucepan and stir. I also added a couple tablespoons of the actual flower petals, i thought they looked kind of pretty in the jelly.
Note, I had to let this boil for about 10 minutes before it would set. Normally, you only have to boil for about a minute or two.

After boiling, I always let the jam/jelly sit on the stove and cool for a few minutes before pouring into the jars because if the jam or jelly thickens a little, all of the fruit, or petals won’t float right to the top.

Also, while I am giving away all of my canning secrets, I might as well share with you an ancient (OK, old) Italian secret my mother in law taught me about how to seal jars. I make at least 50-75 bottles of jam every summer, and i have never had a jar go bad, and I have jars in my cupboard that have been there for 3 years (mind you, I won’t eat them, but I just keep them to see how long they will store for) Anyways, as I was saying, to seal the jars, wash and rinse the jars, then with the lids off, put the jars and lids, into the oven at 300 degrees for at least 10 minutes. Take them out of the oven to fill them, then screw the lids on tightly, and put them back into the hot oven and leave them there overnight to cool. Trust me, this is way easier than boiling the jars!
Look at the finished jelly, I love the colour!

It tastes pretty good too, the taste is similar to camomile… great with cream cheese and crackers! I feel like I should be making more…there’s gotta be trillions more flowers in our park!

About these ads

May11

Berry good lip gloss!

Posted on May 11, 2013 by artzcool

Standard

This was recipe number two for the brownie group I worked with. We had a spa night this week where we made homemade spa ideas for Mother’s Day… I highly doubt all of the mom’s will actually see the lip gloss…the girls really seemed to like it.
There were five or six girls in each group. Each recipe makes enough lip gloss for about 5or 6 small containers.
You need the following ingredients:
2 tablespoons of beeswax (I grated my beeswax so it melted faster)
8 candy melt chocolates (the circles of coloured chocolate)
4 teaspoons of virgin coconut oil
4 teaspoons of liquid coconut oil (I just added this because I have tonnes of it…I accidentally ordered a gallon on-line….long story)
8 teaspoons of Vaseline
Several drops of berry candy flavouring

Start by adding the beeswax and candy melts to a shallow saucepan first because they take the longest to melt. It is fine to use one of your everyday saucepans, as there is nothing harmful, in fact, the only ingredient you can’t eat is the Vaseline.
Next, dump everything into the pot except for the candy flavouring.

The girls were not impressed with the way it looked at this stage.
But, keep the heat low, and it will look like this in a couple minutes.

Don’t forget to add the candy flavouring…and take a big sniff, it smells berry good!
Then, pour it into a shallow, small container. I used salad dressing containers, but you could also reuse old cosmetic containers, even lipstick tubes. I put the containers in the fridge to harden a little.

Finally, all that’s left to do is add a label. I used mailing labels, and I just cut them down a little.

May7

Oatmeal cinnamon milk bath

Posted on May 7, 2013 by artzcool

Standard

As part of my volunteer role with the Girl Guides this year, I have been on the lookout for simple, easy, but original ideas for the girls. When we thought of having a spa night for the girls, I searched for a few recipes that would be inexpensive, and simple. So, here is the first recipe in our spa theme that the girls will be making as a gift for Mother’s Day. As usual, Dylan or Sam gets to test out many of my new lesson or recipe ideas….before I try it with a group of 20!

As you can see, I bought everything from Bulk Barn. I love that place!

I modified the recipe in terms of quantities because I needed enough ingredients for 21 girls, but I also want each girl to measure and mix her own ingredients.
So I bought the following quantities (which is enough to make 24 baths!) 6 cups of powdered milk, 3 cups of baking soda, 1/2 cup of ground oatmeal, 6 tsp of cream of tartar, 12 tsp of corn starch, 6 tep of cinnamon.
But, if you were only making enough for one batch, you would need: 1/4 cup of powdered milk, 2 tbsp of baking soda, 2 tbsp of ground oatmeal, 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar, 1/4 tsp corn starch, 1/4 tsp cinnamon.
I started by tossing the oatmeal into the food processor, and grinding it a little finer. I also saved a few larger pieces to sprinkle on top.

The instructions are really pretty simple, we tossed everything into a container, and shake it baby, shake it all you can, shake like a milkshake, and put it in a can… or just give it a quick stir, whatever works for you… Sam, as you may have guessed chose to shake vigorously…

That’s it. The most challenging part is to package it up so it looks pretty. You could put it in a pretty bag with a drawstring, or a mason jar. For the girls, we will be storing them in plastic containers. I printed out labels for the containers, then we will put everything in a cellophane bag.
I will post the other two recipes, for Berry Good Lip Gloss, and Lemon Sugar Body Scrub.

Happy early mom’s day! -I will try to post the next recipe and instructions tomorrow.

May2

Peanut Butter Cups – No bake -don’t have to dirty a single dish!!

Posted on May 2, 2013 by artzcool

Standard

Ok – So here it is… Peanut butter cups that are made from four ingredients; chocolate chips, peanut butter, icing sugar and a bit of butter! Wait, it gets even better… I found a couple similar recipes on line, but I have adapted the recipe to be even better…not only does they taste amazing (trust me, they are gooood!) But I have modified it so that the only thing you have to wash after making these is the spatula I used to scrape the peanut butter out of the jar!
So, like I said, four ingredients needed: 1 cup of peanut butter, a couple tablespoons of butter, a half of a cup of icing sugar, and about a half of a cup of chocolate chips.

I started by adding a couple handfuls of chocolate chips into a sandwich bag, and melting it in some hot water. I lined a muffin tin with cupcake liners.

Then, I cut a corner off of the sandwich bag and Dylan helped me squeeze a little chocolate into each cupcake liner.

Here’s a tip: If you tap or bang the cupcake tin, the chocolate will settle and spread out evenly across the bottom of the liners.
We stuck the chocolate in the freezer and while we were waiting, I used a cup to hold open another sandwich bag and filled it with the peanut butter, icing sugar and butter. I zipped it closed, and gave it to Dylan to mix up. (In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the sandwich bags are my brilliant idea to avoid dirtying any dishes…it’s also a whole lot more fun to mix stuff by squishing it!)

So after we got tired of squishing the peanut butter, we took the cupcake pan out of the freezer, and cut a hole in the corner, and squeezed out a little peanut butter filling onto each liner. Once agaain, the trick here is to bang or tap the tin to settle the peanut butter.

Then put it back in the freezer…

</a
Then I melted some more chocolate chips in another sandwich bag, and squeezed out som chocolate for the top.

Now for the best part…toss out the sandwich bags, and eat!

Apr29

Getting keyed up

Posted on April 29, 2013 by artzcool

Standard

It’s been a while since I have had a chance to spend time working on my piano… But I have been trying to put in a little time on it when the kids are watching tv, or after they are in bed. For those who didn’t read my previous piano post, to make a long story short, I got the piano for free, I just had to pay to have it moved. But, it needed some work. I have really been meaning to clean out the basement and it’s amazing how you can justify projects like restoring a piano, when you don’t feel like doing a real job like organizing the basement! The piano keys need to be rainbow…that’s more important, than any kind of housework, right??

I had to start by picking off all of the old keys. I used an exacto knife, a kitchen knife, and a scraper. Some of the keys just popped off, others had to be chipped off and broke into tiny pieces.

I lightly sanded the keys with sandpaper to remove any slivers, or uneven parts.
When I first got the piano, I had bought a set of replacement keys, because I was planning on repairing the chipped keys. (That was before I thought about making them rainbow, of course) So I was able to use those as the patterns or templates. I decided to use a fimo type clay that you bake in the oven as the material for the keys.

Last summer, I bought a pasta maker at a garage sale, intending to learn how to make pasta, but I have never used it, so I thought I would try it on the clay…it worked amazing!

So I rolled out all of the colours, then I used a plastic stamp to press in a swirly design for texture. I added the stamp to cover up some of the fingerprints or marks, because I thought it would be really hard to keep each key perfectly smooth. I thought the swirls would cover up any imperfections (well, that was my plan anyways…)

I used a sharp knife to cut out each key, using my replacement keys as templates.

Then, I laid them out on the piano, and trimmed the top and bottom.

Once I had all of the keys trimmed to the right size, I moved them to cookie sheets and baked them in the oven at about 310 degrees for half an hour.

Then I brought them outside to seal them with a coat of clear satin varnish spray paint.

As I was playing around with the keys, I noticed that the sides and fronts of the keys were unfinished, so I took a chance and used a black wood stain to coat the tops and sides of each key. After the stain dried, I used a nail file to sand between the keys if they were sticky.

Then, one at a time, I carefully glued each key down with a silicone glue. I was probably the most careful for this step because if the keys were not lined up properly, it would effect the way the piano plays. So I did need to get out the exacto knife a few times to trim a sliver off the sides of the keys.

But check it out!!!! I am really happy with the results and the kids love it…the cool part is that now they can learn songs and notes using colours. All we have to do is colour in the music with the key colours!

Apr24

Zebra cake!!

Posted on April 24, 2013 by artzcool

Standard

Reblogged from Artzcool's Blog:

As I previously posted, Sam has been very specific in her birthday cake requests.
This is the sketch she gave me...

So, she wanted the bottom layer to be zebra skin to match her room.
I treated myself to some new cake pans yesterday, so I baked the cakes last night. I mixed all the fondant colours yesterday too, so I am all set to go.

Artzcool's Blog

Are you crafty, want to be, or just like to watch?

When life gives you Dandelions…make some jelly!

Berry good lip gloss!

Oatmeal cinnamon milk bath

Peanut Butter Cups – No bake -don’t have to dirty a single dish!!

Getting keyed up

Zebra cake!!

Follow “Artzcool's Blog”