Cooking with Jon & Steph - Pumpkin Patch Brownies

While looking for fun Halloween baking ideas on Pinterest recently, I came across this gem:

It looked and sounded amazing! But when I couldn't find the candy corn Hershey's kisses ANYWHERE, I decided to improvise with these fall favorites:

Jon doesn't even like these candy pumpkins, but he LOVED these brownies!

First, you mix the shortbread dough together. The Pinterest/blog recipe has this. It was super easy! Cream together butter and sugar, then add flour and a pinch of salt until doughy.

Then you press it into the bottom of a pan. I found this easiest to do with my fingers :)

I decided this was like the "patch" for my candy pumpkins.

 I lined the shortbread with the pumpkin cuties so that there would be about 1 per brownie. If I were to make these again (which we WILL) I would put in twice as many pumpkins.

I covered the pumpkins with this delicious Ghirardelli double chocolate brownie mix.

I have since learned that there is a TRIPLE chocolate brownie version of this. But seriously, this dessert is so rich, double was plenty!

I mediated all of the baking times from the Pinterest recipe and the back of the box. We baked our brownies in this 12x8" pan for 45 minutes and that was PERFECT.

Over the stovetop, we melted 1.5 cups semi sweet chocolate chips with 3/4 cups heavy whipping cream in a double boiler to make a chocolate ganache for the top, because I just thought that sounded better than melting down candies for the top like the Pinterest recipe suggested. And I hate store bought frosting in a can.

We poured/spread the ganache over the top of the brownies right after they came out of the oven and it bubbled a little at the edges, sealing in the amazingness of chocolate overload.

 

Even though I had to scrape the ganache off the top of mine and let Jon have it, I thought these were DELICIOUS!! (Don't worry, I braved it a couple days later with some lactaid pills, and it is SOOOOO good. And I didn't even get sick. These brownies are a miracle!)

I loved that I renamed them and they ended up being "pumpkin patch brownies" because we ate them after Family Home Evening while watching The Nightmare Before Christmas after we went to the pumpkin patch. It was perfect! I'm pretty sure that these will be made EVERY October from now on.

The best part is they are fantastic warm or cold. The shortbread layer makes a perfect buttery neutral flavor against the gooey brownie and the rich ganache on top.

Heaven. On. Earth.

September - The Month Of...

HOMEMADE CRAYONS!

This project was not originally one that we had thought of at the beginning of the year. But when things like "glass blowing" prove to be monetarily challenging, you get creative :)

Making Kate her own crayons was actually Jon's idea - and I loved it! He found a recipe online for making crayons and it is very simple. You basically melt caranuba wax over the stove and add in pigment (like good gel paste food coloring or other natural plant pigments.)

We had these cool fishy ice cube trays from IKEA so we decided to use that as our mold and make Kate fishy crayons :)

 

We made sure to use a pan that we were never planning on using for food again. You can use it for future projects and wax melting, but otherwise it will destroy your pan. Luckily this one was super old and ready for the recycling anyway.

*sprinkle sprinkle* like waxy snow!

Margo thought the whole thing just looked delicious :)

The wax melted beautifully at a medium/low heat. Once melted all the way you turn the heat down as LOW as possible.

The next step is to pour about 1/4 cup of wax into another container for adding color. The approximate measurement is 1TB of pigment per 1/4 cup of melted wax.

Our first attempt did not go super well. We thought you were supposed to reserve a bit of wax and add the color, then put that wax back in with your melted stuff on the stove.

So these first crayons are not very pigmented.

After reading the instructions a little more closely, we did the next ones with more concentrated doses of food coloring, and they turned out ok!

The best part is that the extra wax on the outer edges of the mold can be re-melted down with the other wax to recycle and use in more crayons.
We made green, red and blue for our first try.
After letting the fishy crayons cool, we popped them out of the molds:

Obviously this is something that we can continue to get better and better at. We decided that next time we'll order pigment online so that the crayons have more color to rub on the paper.

Jon gives this project a rating of: "Unsuccessful, but definitely try again."
Steph gives this project a rating of: "Fun and worth playing with for better results!"

We're really hoping that this is the first step in creating baby Kate's very own homemade line of toddler art supplies ;)

Projects & Updates

 In the last few weeks, we've been making a lot of things.

 My friend Breanna was a great co-coach when we had baby Kate. When it came time to tell her I was pregnant again, I wanted to find a cute way to ask her to be our support team coach with Baby Alston The Second. Think of something along the lines of "will you be my bridesmaid?" and "coach/team awesomeness".

I came up with this!

It started off with a rhyming poem I made up:

And then each thing in the basket had a little tag on it:

The bucket was lime green and lined with a fat quarter that I found at Beverly's which said "it's a boy! it's a girl! it's twins!" That way it covers all our bases since we're not finding out what we're having :)

 

I also made TEAM buttons for Breanna, her husband Ben (aka The Don) and our little family. Mine says "Mommy of 2", Kate's says "The Chubs aka Big Sister!" and Jon's says "Big Daddy".

Mid-September, our 3 wards in Loomis put together a Super Saturday of holiday crafting! I signed up to make this awesome advent calendar. I have been looking for years to find ideas for a Christ centered advent calendar. I like candy and Santa as much as the next person, but Jon and I both agreed that we want our traditions to be centered around the true meaning of the season first and foremost.

First, we painted everything. The calendar is built on an 18x24" piece of wood, which I painted a deep barn red. The little 3x3" wood squares were painted chocolate brown, as well as the long rectangular piece that would eventually go on the top:

3x3" scrapbooking paper squares were Mod Podged down in a 5x5 grid. The top portion as well as each paper square then had a vinyl applique rubbed on. My awesome friend Michelle O'Keefe came and helped me applied the vinyl since she finished all her craft projects super quick :)

We used little gold finishing nails to attach "The Savior" sign and put a little nail in each grid square so that our wood tiles could hang from them:

The 3x3 brown wood tiles that I painted at the beginning each got a unique picture of Christ Mod Podged to it:

 

Deseret Book sells these 3x4" card packs in their teaching helps section of the bookstore. I cut them down to fit the 3x3 tile size,

and then used Jon's japanese screw punch (which he uses for bookmaking) to punch out the perfect hole in the top to hang the tiles on the nails: 

 
Once all the Savior pictures were Mod Podged, I wrote a scripture and activity on the back of each tile. I got these awesome gold shadow gel pens from Beverly's for my birthday, so they worked out perfect on the dark chocolate color of the tiles!

I wanted the calendar to be interchangeable from year to year so that the kids can pick their favorite pictures to hang up and we don't have to do the activities in the same order every time:

 And here it is, all finished and ready for December!!

This month has also brought a lot of fun crafting for friends. This week I finished a stacked charm necklace for my awesome friend Lindsey. She had baby Leila in June and we took her newborn pictures. Here is the actual center charm picture so that you can see it close up:

Here is how the necklace looks all put together. It's hard to see the detail, but we printed the picture above in a really small version. The charm center measures 1/4" across. Epiphany Crafts sells a tool that punches perfect circles to fit in their pendants. You can make them out of pictures, scrapbook paper, or whatever you want! Then a clear epoxy dot sealer adheres on top and I used E6000 to put the picture inside the silver pendant blank. The charms on each side are Leila's first initial and her birthstone (a pearl).

I am so happy with how it turned out and I think Lindsey loved it! I used Leila as a trial run so that we can start selling these in our ETSY store :)

 There are many other projects that Jon and I have been working on, between The Year of Exploration, Halloween, Christmas and baby showers coming up - like my first ever project with minkie which turned out amazing and I'm super excited about!

but I'll have to show you all of those later.

***

In family updates:

Baby Alston The Second is 14 weeks along!

 I've been feeling great, starting to be less tired and less *bleh* as we head into the second trimester. We always called Kate "Sven" before she was born since we didn't know if she was a boy or a girl. This second baby has been nicknamed "Olivander." So far everything is good!

Kate has 10 teeth, with two new ones that cut through Saturday! She now has 4 teeth on the top front, one top right molar, one bottom right molar and 4 bottom front teeth.
I tried to get a good picture of her smile, but she is so wiggly!

 
 Kate has also started sitting in her own mini chair in primary sometimes. We are really excited for her to start nursery in 4 months!

Eating a wheat thin and glaring at me while I try to get a picture of her cuteness :)

Our primary class also loves Kate and will help her walk to sharing time after class:

 At home, Kate loves to stand at the edge of the tub while we fill it with water for her bath times and she tries her hardest to lift her leg up and climb in! She also tries to stand up in the bathtub holding onto the soap dish while we wash her. She is a silly and adventurous explorer.

Kate has also discovered that if she dances in her high chair during meal times, she can hear the food sloshing around in her tummy. She starts giggling and it makes me laugh so hard every time!

Kate loves turning light switches on and off, and has recently discovered this switch nice and low:

which is for the garbage disposal...

I put some tape over it and I'm hoping that helps curb her curiosity. Needless to say, we are also working on listening to the word "no" :)

 Next stop: OCTOBER!