I made a button

And I'll even share it with you. Since Saturday it seems that everyone and anyone that attended, watched or listened to the General Relief Society Broadcast has been enamoured with President Uchtdorf's talk on the forget me not flower. I've seen this image floating around FB and Blogger land.

 So I have taken it and linked with President Uchtdorf's talk. If you want the button on your sidebar, you can get the code off of my side bar.

ABC

So this morning I thought I'd make some muffins to have for after school snack and to freeze for lunches. I got out a bag of frozen bananas and thought that banana muffins would be delightful. I then turned to my handy dandy 4H cook book and turned to the banana muffin section. I noticed that there were a few recipes that I hadn't yet tried and decided to give a new one a try. And then I saw the A.B.C. Muffins recipe and read through it. It sounded different and yummy and I had all the ingredients on hand(which is usually the case with the recipes from the 4H cook book). First I had to go dig some carrots out of my garden for the "C". I then got some apples from the garage that I had picked off of a neighbours tree for the "A". I already had the frozen bananas in the microwave defrosting to be used for the "B".

Here's the recipe

A.B.C. Muffins

1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup bran
2 eggs beaten
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup apple juice
1 cup grated apple
1 cup mashed bananas
1 1/2 cup grated carrots

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and bran together; set aside. In a seperate bowl mix eggs, sugar, oil and apple juice. Stir the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients. Make sure to stir out any lumps. Add grated apple, mashed banana and grated carrots. Stir thoroughly. Bake at 325F for 15-20 minutes.

As I am typing this up I have realised that I did not add any baking powder, I only used baking soda. Also I didn't use the apple juice I thought that the mixture looked moist enough. I have to confess, I didn't follow the directions as stated. I mixed the apple, carrots and bananas together(a big thanks to Krista for the food processor she left us when she headed back to Texas, it was a real time saver today) and then I added the eggs, oil and sugar. I mixed that all together and then added the dry ingredients. It looked perfect the way that it was so I just left out the apple juice. The whole time we were making them Kymberly kept wanting to know when they would look like the letters "A", "B", and "C". I tried to explain that  apple began with "A" and banana began with "B" and carrot began with "C" and that is why they were called ABC muffins. But she wanted them to look like the letters.

The muffins, that don't look like ABC's

Because I am a spaz, I dropped the first pan out of the oven on the floor and about half of them dumped out on to my very unclean-just-made-applesauce-sticky-messy floor. The other half survived and luckily, though not pretty, they still taste yummy.

the surviving muffins I dropped

James Playing the Piano

I could hear James playing on the piano while I was helping Kathryn get started on cleaning out her fish tank in the kitchen. When I came back into the living room, I found this.

That's right he was standing on the piano and playing it with his feet. What a little monkey!

She's at it again

So I decided that I wanted to expand my garden. When we moved into this house and dug out a garden space there was no fence separating our yard from our neighbours. We left about a 6 foot section of grass between our garden and their yard. Last spring our neighbours put up a fence. So a few weeks ago while I was outside pondering over gardening stuff I started thinking that maybe I should dig out that section of grass all the way to the fence.
It might have been smart to do it last week when the temperature was only in the teens, but I didn't. No, instead I thought I'd get a start on it today in 32C very dry heat.

Anybody need some sod? I have square chunks you can just come and take. I'll have more as the week goes on. That is hard work. I did get about 1/4 of it dug today.

Remember when I did this

My very helpful "helpers"

Today was peach canning day. I had 120lbs of peaches that needed to be peeled sliced and put in jars. I started the job while James was napping and Kymberly was busy talking to herself and her toys in the living room. After I had been at it for quite some time Kymberly asked if she could help me can peaches. So I got my handy dandy step stool and pushed it up to the sink and showed her how to peel the peaches. She was a good helper, but true to her ways she was amazing at getting water EVERYWHERE. No problem. I just put a towel down on the floor beneath her to keep the mess to a minimum(not that canning peaches isn't already a messy job). She would come and go helping here and there. Then James woke up. He crawled around on the kitchen floor entertaining himself as he always does. But then he spotted the step stool. He LOVES to climb the step stool. So he did just that.

He LOVED splashing in the water, adding to the water mess his sister had already made.

Just what do you think he's going to do with that peach?

Eat it of course!

Once I let him have one peach and he wanted down from his high chair he climbed right back up the step stool and went fishing for another peach. He was fast and it wasn't all that easy to keep him from taking a bite out of every one he caught. Finally Kathryn came home from school and I had her to help keep him busy so he would stop trying to steal all the peaches.

It was a fabulous afternoon of canning. When all was said and done I had put up 51 quart jars of peaches. Pears will be next, as soon as I buy some in the next week or so.

Fun Cake

The other day on One Pretty Thing I came across this fun cake tutorial. I knew I had to try it out. I originally thought that I'd make it for Kathryn's birthday that is coming up later this month. But I just couldn't wait. So on Saturday when my canning peaches plan came to a halt because the peaches weren't all ripe enough, I decided that I'd use that time to make a cake for my new baby niece.

The finished cake

The cake from the tutorial

My unbaked cakes...not nearly as pretty.

The inside of the cake from the tutorial

The inside of my cake...not quite the same, but still pretty.

I made it a truly neapolitan cake...well kinda. The white cake is obviously vanilla, the brownish-black is chocolate and the pink is raspberry.I was excited to use the raspberry flavour that I had bought on a whim at the bulk barn, thinking that it would be fun to use sometime. It was a big hit at the family dinner on Sunday and everybody was super impressed. Somebody suggested that it would be fun to do one for Christmas with peppermint icing. I'm totally going to do it....in fact I can see a lot of this kind of cake being made for any and possibly every occasion. It was super easy to do and it just looks so COOL. And maybe one day I'll get mine to look as neat as the one from the tutorial.

I may be on a roll in the cool and fun cake department. Remember Kymberly's, or how about Tansley's, or James' was pretty fun and tasty too.

Food for thought

Here is an interesting video that all parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and mentors should watch. It is long(over an hour), and the picture quality is very poor, but the information and ideas just make sense. I have already thought of some things that I could do differently with my children...with one in particular, and maybe she wouldn't act out with violence towards her sisters as much. He talks about how children's behaviors are directly related to attachment, particularlily their attachment to parents or other adult figures, or the the lack of attachment to them.

If you don't have an hour to watch it now, bookmark it, save it whatever you need to do, and watch it later, I think you'll find it interesting too.