Dolls

Over the weekend I was going through the crafty shelves and I ran across this poor little dollhouse doll. She's really pretty, but she was wearing a super poufy polyester blue dress with lots and lots of lace. She's such a cool porcelain doll and is in perfect scale for a dollhouse, but the dress had to go. So I made her this one.


It's nothing special, but she seems way more comfortable. The doll also had a lace headband glued to her head, which I peeled off. Now all she needs is a dollhouse to live in.

The most important part of any doll is her shoes...
This is another little doll that I don't think I've shared before. She's a wooden clothespin with a little wooden knob glued on for a head. Her arms are pipe cleaners. She isn't the right scale, but I still like her.
It's tough to take pictures of tiny dolls, even though they stand perfectly still. Here I was trying to take a picture of her little red bow painted on the side of her head.

Anyway, they were two small projects that were easy and satisfied my strange need to make teeny tiny things. Is that an inherited trait? I kind of think so.

Go Cardinals!

Well. I have been a diehard Arizona Cardinals fan since at least...this morning. To celebrate our team's Super Bowl appearance Rob and I had a cookout today with some good friends.
We grilled out hotdogs, burgers, brats, and italian sausage andhad all kinds of other yummy football food.

We had Kelly, Sam, Liz, Lauren, Anna, AJ, and Katherine over to watch. We had a great time watching the game and watching the commercials.
Unfortunatley we lost. It was a great game though and we were ahead briefly in the fourth quarter. I'm strangely disappointed for somebody who has been cheering for the team as long as I have.
Go team! Go Arizona! We're going to have a great season next year, for sure.

Trip to the Zoo

Rob and I took a trip to the Reid Park Zoo this afternoon. We've been meaning to go for a long time. I have a thing for otters and as soon as we heard that the zoo has an otter exhibit, it was on the top of our to-do list.
It turns out our little Tucson zoo is completely awesome! There are way more animals there than we expected and the habitats are really nice. Some of them are smallish, but they are all laid out well and the zoo is really good about shade. I don't know how they did it but most of the habitats face east so they're much cooler and many of the viewing spots are shaded or in little tunnels so the visitors stay cool and still get a great view of all the animals. It is much more intimate than other zoos I've been to. It may not be as big or swanky, but the animals seem healthy and they were all visible.

Here I am in the aviary:


And here is our new friend:




The giraffe enclosure was fairly large, but this guy was hanging out right next to the sidewalk so that everyone could admire his pretty spots. And his weird tongue. He got so close he managed to lick the camera of a guy next to us. Nice!

We are definitely going to come back. They're building a new elephant habitat, so we look forward to seeing what that looks like. This trip we walked around the whole zoo and tried to see everything, but we've decided that next time we're going to pick out an animal or two to watch the whole time. Or maybe we'll just do one area. They have the zoo divided by continent of origin, so it would be easy to spend a lot of time looking at the South American animals or the African ones. Or just the otters. I'd be happy spending the day with the otters.

If you live in Tucson, we highly recommend the zoo, our hidden gem right in the middle of town. If you're not from Tucson, come visit and we'll take you there.

Pretty Things on my Table

I have some pictures of pretty things to share. First are these beautiful flowers that I got two weeks ago when my friends came over for book club. They started out a little bit brighter and a little bit taller. I've only changed the water twice and trimmed them once. Pretty good for $5 worth of flowers, huh? They're so fluffy and fat, I love them.

There are also these..

Oh man. Man oh man. They are cream-filled coffee cake cupcakes and I've eaten approximately a million of them. I made a batch on Wednesday and then couldn't stop eating them, so I sent them to work with Rob to get rid of them. Well, I couldn't stand it and I had to make more last night. Coffee cake is one of my favorites, not too sweet, not too fussy, perfect with coffee (duh). I made these trying to copy the TastyKake Koffee Kakes (I hate that they spell everything with K's. It's like Kwik Mart. How annoying.)
I used to write recipes on Fridays on here. Do you want the recipe for these?

Coffee Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Filling
Cupcakes:
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter (softened)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup sour cream or plain yogurt (I used yogurt. Come on, you're going to eat ten of them, make 'em a little healthier)
2 tbsp buttermilk

Topping:
1/4 cup light-brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (maybe a little more)
2 tbsp butter

Filling:
4oz cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
4-5 tbsp butter (softened)
1 cup 10x sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
milk (as needed to obtain a nice texture)

Here's what you do:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Make batter as follows: Mix butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and egg. Mix well. Mix all dry ingredients together and add to the butter mixture slowly, alternating with the sour cream and buttermilk. Scrape the bowl often to keep all the goodness in. Mix everything well. Divide equally between 12 muffin tins. It doesn't look like a lot, but it will make it. They won't be huge cupcakes.
Mix all ingredients for the topping together and blend using a fork or a pastry knife. Try to make the mixture crumby in texture. Pour the topping on top of the batter in the greased (did I say greased before? Grease them.) muffin tins (don't worry about being neat) and put them in the oven for around 15 minutes. Or golden brown.
I bake at high elevation, so I would always be cautious of my temperature or time guidelines.
When the cupcakes are out and cooled a little bit, mix together the icing ingredients until it's smooth and delicious. Add enough milk to keep it smooth, but don't let it get runny.
This is the tricky part. Getting the icing inside the cupcakes took a little creativity. I'm sure you could do it with a knife and a baster or something. Or a turkey injector. I used a cookie press with an icing attachment. I shoved the nozzle down into the cupcake and filled it with icing until the top kind of domed up. When you take the nozzle out, the icing sort of wells up through the hole and makes the perfect little white dot on top like a Tasty Kake. Incidentally, I think putting icing in the middle of cupcakes and watching it erupt out is an excellent way to illustrate the pressures of vulcanism and magma chambers under a stratovolcano. Just sayin'.
That's it! Eat them up with a glass of milk or cup of coffee. Yum!!

Meet Tolstoy

We have a new little friend that lives with us. This is Tolstoy, the African Dwarf Frog. He lives in the aquarium where the late Bart, Mr. Fishie, Lucky, Dusty, and Ned used to live. I went to the pet store to get more fish (they call me the Fish Killa') when we saw these little guys swimming around. They are really cool because they basically act just like fish. They are entirely aquatic and don't need any land to rest on. I don't get it either, but apparently all they need to do is come up to the surface to breathe once in a while. He mostly hides under his little sherd (like he's doing in the photo) but sometimes he swims around or hops on the bottom. Every now and then it will really seem like poor Tolstoy is dead because he'll just float at the top or along the bottom with all his little limbs splayed out and not move for a long, long time. We looked it up and it turns out that this weird behavior is entirely normal for Dwarf Frogs. They call it their "Zen Pose". Isn't that adorable? He's just chillin'.
We feed him Frog Chow, which he doesn't seem to ever eat. We assume he's eating because he isn't dead, but we may have to try out the dried bloodworms (ew ew ew ew ew) if he continues to be so picky.
We're thinking of getting Tolstoy a bigger house so we can get him better hidey holes and a heater. And fish friends.

coooooookies

I made some cookies today for my favorite husband. He really likes peanut butter cookies, but the creative Blythe women have encouraged me to branch out and make different stuff. Well, only slightly different in this case. Instead of our usual peanut butter cookies, I made these with brown sugar and chocolate chips (I know. I'm a daredevil). Do you want the recipe? It was really really easy:Wednesday Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies:
1 cup creamy peanut butter (I used Peter Pan, but usually I like the more peanutty store brand for cookies)
1/2 cup brown sugar packed
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg slightly beaten
teensy handful of flour (maybe 1/4 cup)
1 cup chocolate chips (plus 1/2 cup for snacking)

I mixed the peanut butter with the sugars and the vanilla and then added the egg. It was seeming a little shiny and peanut buttery, so I added the small amount of flour until it seemed more doughy. I wouldn't add much, but I think just a little flour makes a cakier cookie. When I liked the look of the dough, I added the chips and drop them in large spoonfuls on a cookie sheet with a silpat. I think Peanut butter cookies smell weird when they cook, and the Silpat seems to help with that. I smooshed the dough balls with my favorite cookie fork* in a criss- cross pattern (of course) and then baked them at 375 for 10-ish minutes.
I cooled them on a rack and then ate them all. Ok, that's not true, I shared with Rob. Afterall, they were for him.

*I have big love for this particular fork. It is very narrow and has extraordinarily long tines. It's silver and has a semi-fancy handle. I got it at a thrift store, so it is the only one like it. It is so perfect for making cookies and for beating eggs and squooshing the edges of pie crust, etc. I would be so sad if I ever lost it. Do you have any funny tools like that? Anything that seems really ordinary but is indispensible for what you like to do?

I'm back

I'm back from a very long hiatus from blogland. I have lots of new things to tell you about and lots of fun things to look forward to. I promise to try and blog often now that I am home. I missed my blog when I was in Mule Creek and when I was away on GeoJourney. It has been kind of hard to make the decision to come back after such a long gap. What do I talk about? Where do I pick back up? I have decided that I am just going to blog as if I never left. I don't want to talk about the last few months, so we're going to move on. New Stuff. It's December now, so there will be lots of holiday stuff to post and lots of travel pictures to share. So, if you're still out there, I'm back and I'm ready to blog.