More Halloween fun!

A friend on Facebook posted this recipe a while ago, and they are just too adorable for words!!  Bakedbree (the blogger who posted the recipe first) does photography as well, and her shots make these cookies look so adorable and appealing!  I just had to add them to my recipes-to-try list :)  Be sure to check out this one (and her other recipes!) over on her blog.

Candy Corn Cookies

• 1 cup butter room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 Tablespoons orange juice
• 2 teaspoons orange zest
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• orange gel food coloring
• yellow gel food coloring
• sanding sugar

Directions

1.  Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

2.  Add the egg, orange juice, orange zest and salt.

3.  Slowly add the flour and baking soda.  Beat until combined.  Divide the cookie dough into three and line a loaf pan with parchment paper.

4.  Add the first third of the dough to the loaf pan pressing it evenly in the bottom.

5.  Add a few drops of orange to the second third of dough and press that into the pan.

6.  Do the same thing and make yellow and press it into the pan.

7.  Wrap the cookie dough and refrigerate until firm (at least two hours or overnight). 

8.  Unwrap the cookie dough and slice into 1/4 inch slices.

  

9.  Slice the dough into triangles.

 

10.  Dip one side of the cookie into the sanding sugar.  Arrange on the cookie sheet and bake in a preheated 375 degree oven for 7 to 10 minutes.  Cool on a cooling rack.

My Notes and Variations

• I made a double batch but only have one loaf pan.  So I used my 8x8 pans to set the striped dough.  My cookies aren't quite as long as the originals, as a result, but still triangular and a more bite-sized cookie.  Gotta make use of what you have!
• We don't have sanding sugar easily available here.  I used just granulated sugar instead.  Not quite as much of a crunch, but still a little bit.  When we get back to living in a real city, I'll be able to try it with the coarsely granulated stuff :)
•  Working from two loaf pans, keep one in the fridge chilling while slicing the other.  As the one you're working on warms and becomes softer, move it back to the fridge and swap it out for the second pan.
• I can definitely see that the flavor on these can be altered easily.  Using almond or mint extract, for example, instead of orange zest, and milk instead of orange juice.  Making them mint cookies and then using red food coloring to make them peppermint striped, as one idea, would make for some very cute Christmas cookies!

I'm particularly fond of muffins!

Pumpkin Bat Muffins to start out the holiday (well, brunch really, but still...)  And anytime you can quote Oscar Wilde, it's a good start to the day!

The recipe is really the "Healthy Pumpkin Muffin" recipe, not the "Pumpkin Bat Muffins," but I'm using my cool new muffin tray, so thus the bats.  These muffins aren't particularly sweet, like some pumpkin muffins, but they are very fall-time-tasting, with pumpkin and cinnamon and applesauce and so forth. And as in most things, less sweet means healthier, so it all evens out!

I found the recipe over on Bakespace, a cooking community, and have copied it here with my notes and comments and pictures.  The original is courtesy of Elly  (Bakespace user ELLYKA), so thank you very much, Elly! Gotta give credit where it's due!   And as a side note, Bakespace is a pretty good site to browse through, if you're looking for some new ideas, or some variations on some old ones :) 

Healthy Pumpkin Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. cloves
• 1/8 tsp. nutmeg
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce (you can use vegetable oil instead, but as these are healthy muffins...)
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3/4 cup lowfat buttermilk
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1/3 cup raisins (optional)
• 1/3 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 and grease a 12-cup muffin tin.
2. Sift together flours, baking powder and soda, and salt. Stir in spices.
3. In a separate bowl, beat egg with brown sugar until well combined.  
4. Stir in vanilla, buttermilk, applesauce and pumpkin puree.
5. Pour wet mixture into dry mixture and stir until just combined. Fold in nuts and raisins, if desired.
6. Pour mixture into muffin cups and bake approximately 18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. 

Variations

• I don't like raisins in my baked goods, and usually don't like nuts in them either, so I didn't include them.  If you do like them, enjoy :)
• I used "pumpkin pie spice" instead of the spices listed above.  Instead of the individual spices, I substituted a little over 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice.  Next time I make these, I'll probably up it a little to 1 1/2 tsp - I just like a little more cinnamon and spice taste than what I had here :)  If you haven't seen it in your store, pumpkin pie spice is already mixed cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, etc.  Besides pumpkin pie spice being only one can to stock in the pantry, and only one to measure out from, I'm not as fond of cloves either, so another bonus for me :)
• I didn't use much whole wheat flour, but mostly all-purpose. I was just about out of the whole wheat so filled in the rest of what I needed with the all-purpose.  Still tastes good and rose properly, but probably not quite as healthy.
• I used one of the icing decorating tubes to decorate the muffins a little.  They have a cream cheese flavor, which goes well with the pumpkin and spice flavors.  It's rather like the icing and cake combination on carrot cakes.  The icing does run a little (it's not a decorating gel) but it tastes good and adds just a little decorative oomph.  As you can see in the picture above, the icing does run, especially if the muffins are still warm.  I gave up trying to draw a bat (that's what the squiggle is supposed to be) and stuck with the smiley faces.

The bat muffin tray was a lot of fun too.  I mixed the batter a little more when I added the wet to the dry mixes, to make it smoother - fills in the corners of the shaped tray a little better that way.  For the shaped trays, you have to make sure that the tray is very well greased, so the muffin will come out of all the nooks and corners when they are done.  Also, if you want the bottom of the muffin to be flat (i.e., the top of the muffin in the tray), you don't need to fill these as high.  Next time, I won't fill the muffin tray as high, and spread it a little more inside the cup - some of the wings weren't quite as filled out.  Also, I didn't let them cool quite as much as the round muffins before I iced them, so the icing eyes ran a little after I took the picture below.  Oops.  Oh, well, I'll just have to make them again! 

Nutritional Information 
(based on 12 servings - with the smaller bat muffins, I actually made 18 muffins)


Calories: 143
Fat: 3g
Carbs: 27g
Dietary Fiber: 2.4g
Sugar: 2.2g
Protein: 3.8g 
WW points (if you're interested, as I am): 3

While I'm thinking of beading...

Here are a few more little things I've been fiddling with!

Some sets of ringed markers, first.  The sushi beads continue to crack me up.  This set has blue accent beads with the sushi (I've also made ones with orange and green).  And I love these shiny purple and silver beads.  The set of beads that I got had beads in these colors in three different shapes, and I love them - so pretty!  The third set there is very spring-time-y, robins and bird houses.  I love the little robins :)

These two sets were made for me, inspired by the set I made for the Fall-time Swap. One is removeable, one isn't.  And if you look closely, you'll see that the "accent marker" (the odd one in the set) has the colors reversed in each set :)

And a bookmark, with kinda a Christmas-y feel, all red and gold.

 

Stitch Marker Swap!

Found a group of Ravelry for those who like making handmade stitch markers, and who like swaps.  So, combine the both, and ta-da!

The first swap I participated in just came through: the Fall-time Quickie :)  So, thank you very much Sandra, for my lovely little bunch of goodies!

These below are the markers I received in the swap package.  I love the little stones in them, but I really love the big leaf on the accent marker.  Fall time for me means leaves changing color, so out here in the desert (where we really don't even have leaves) I miss that a lot!  For some people, fall is corn or pumpkins or Halloween - for me, it's leaves.  So these were perfect for "fall" for me :)

Here are the stitch markers I made for my swap recipient.  I found a few other little fall-time goodies to include as well, but wanted to show off the markers I'd made to send :)  Hopefully she likes her package too!

Review: Sexy Beast

One that ended up on the queue after one of the "Top 100 Performances" lists came out, recognizing Ben Kingsley's performance here. So, rather a random one otherwise: Sexy Beast.

Plot:  Gal, a former safe-cracker, has retired with his wife Deedee and their friends Aitch and Jackie to settle in sunny Spain.  The quartet spends their days enjoying sunbathing, barbecues, lazy hunting trips, and other leisurely escapes after years in the London underworld.  Until Don Logan, a childish, violent and rather unforeseen disruption, appears from their past to convince Gal to take on one more job.  Though Gal keeps turning him down, Don doesn't take no for an answer, and the negotiations escalate, leading to... well, watch the movie! :)

The acting is indeed well done, and Ben Kingsley's performance is the highlight.  Ian McShane is good as the master organizer of the heist, but then he's always good as the icy-cold sort of characters.  It's all in the eyes - that dead, cold stare is just so good.  But it's Ben Kingsley who steals the show.  He's childish and aggressive and foul and sociopathic, all wrapped up in one bundle who thinks himself so much smoother than he really is.  One of those people who thinks he's so much bigger, smoother, cooler than he really is.  He really makes the movie worth watching - a different Don would have left a much lesser movie.  I liked a bit of trivia from IMDB's page on the movie - that Kingsley would use his acting of Don to vent "all the anger and tension he had in him, and then he'd be meek as a baby the rest of the day."  I can definitely see it'd be hard to have any aggressive feelings left in you after a full day as Don!

The music is a lot of fun, too. Just an edgy, upbeat sort of soundtrack - dunno, just fun.  Not much more to say :)

The acting's really the highlight of the movie, though. The writing has a lot of... well, oddities, for lack of a better word. For starters, what the heck is the rabbit monster??  There were lots of little things, too, which just didn't flow smoothly.  And the heist just seemed like an after thought, after all the build-up in the first part of the movie.  Left a weird feeling.

Another thought is really more about the advertising, rather than the movie itself.  Since I don't remember the actual trailers, I'm referring to plot summaries (online and on the movie packaging itself), posters, tag-lines, etc.  The advertising really made it seem like a heist film, but in actuality, the movie spends a lot more time on the relation and confrontation between Don and Gal.  Honestly, I think that's part of why I think the story felt so odd.  You think that a movie is a heist movie, then you're expecting something like The Bank Job or Ocean's 11 or The Great Train Robbery or similar.  You aren't expecting something where the actual heist (and all discussion and prep and everything else) is barely 30 minutes of the film.  Had they built up as more a confrontation of the characters (which it was), I probably wouldn't have felt so open-ended.

Overall:  3 of 5.  Some very strong acting (worth a watch for Ben Kingsley alone), some fun points, but rather a weird movie.  Not one for the shelf.

U is for...

"Unblocked lace is so unimpressive!"

This is a running joke with Zach from when I was working on I Do for the wedding a few years ago (almost 3 now!!).

With the lace pattern being such a long repeat, I would get excited on a regular basis as I finished a set of rows or reached a landmark (the elbow, for example) or something similar. Being such a lacy pattern, it's hard to see the progress in the piece when it's just a scrunchy white tube.

I would show Zach and get that "I'm supportive but kinda at a loss about what I'm supposed to be excited about" sort of enthusiasm as a response. I would laugh, "I know, I know, unblocked lace is so unimpressive!" So, in the course of that project, he got to learn about blocking and life lines ("what's this extra thread doing here?") and other knitting odds'n'ends.

Now it's just a running joke, since I like lace patterns, and depending on the yarn, pattern, etc. you can't always see what's there to be appreciated. So, if it's one of those patterns that you can't really see the amazing lace that I'm so excited about, Zach will just grin and say in mock sympathy, "Unblocked lace is just so unimpressive!"

Random result from Long Beach trip

Straight hair!  At least temporarily!

I needed a haircut anyway - gotta trim up the dried-out, desert-and-pool-wrecked split ends, even if I'm still growing it out.  And since the stylist was playing with it anyway, I asked if she could straighten it too.  So, one flat iron and nearly an hour later (I've a lot of hair!)... ta-da!

I don't think it's a look I'll do often (maaaaaaybe once in a blue moon), especially as it's still long.  It's just TOO MUCH time!  I wasn't kidding when I said it was nearly an hour!  Maybe when it's shorter, it won't take so long.  Still, it's an interesting experience, having long straight hair.  Laughing with Anne, "I feel like there's nothing on my head!"  Her response?  "Welcome to the world of the fine and flat."

And here I am with the Welcome Home Committee, too!

Oh, and just for bragging purposes, the shirt I'm modeling in these pictures is the participants' shirt from the marathon this weekend :)  They had separate sizing for Mens v. Womens.  Finally, a technical race shirt that FITS!!