The Christmas Castle

So I know it’s a little early, but John and I decided to make gingerbread houses for our date night last weekend.

Then John decided he wanted to make a gingerbread Washington DC temple.

Not to be outdone (I’m a pastry chef, for crying out loud!), I then decided to make a gingerbread castle.

But then we realized that we would not have enough gingerbread dough to make both. And John hadn’t exactly planned out the specifics of making a temple of gingerbread. So we made a castle.

The original plans called for towers at each corner. But there still wasn’t enough dough for that, so it got one tower. On the inside. We’re making multiple batches of this stuff next year for all of our architectural plans. ;)

I had some really old royal icing that I hadn’t thrown out yet (but needed to…) and since I figured we wouldn’t be eating our castle I used that to pipe the brickwork. But it was really runny…so it’s not my best piping. But hey, it’s a medieval castle and their bricks were not perfect either. ;)
Instead of using icing to build the structure, we made a caramel syrup for the glue and it was amazing! It hardens very quickly and is really sturdy. We’ll be doing that again next year for sure.

All we had for decorating was the Halloween candy I’d gotten on clearance. So I put some sweet tart skulls and bones in our tower dungeon. You know…because we could…
And we used laffy taffy to make the wreath. Which I don’t recommend. It wasn’t very stable and by the next morning, it looked like this (should have dipped the whole back in caramel, rather than just the top and bottom…):

Oh well. You live and learn. Just wait till next year!

How ‘bout them apples?

This month has been kinda crazy for us. Between putting together Halloween costumes and having something going on with family almost every weekend, we haven’t had too much time to spend as just the three of us. But yesterday we had time to do just that. And it was so nice!

We made our first trip over to Larriland Farms. It’s a really neat pick-your-own place. It was so cool! Apples are in season, so that was mainly what we went to pick. We got the little man alllll bundled up (it was in the low 50s and windy!) and we were on a mission to pick granny smith apples.
“Nathan! Look at ALLLLL the apples!!”
There were so many apples! We were really impressed by the abundance. There was no scavenging for apples, they were all over the place!

We ended up with about 9lbs of apples. Don’t worry. We had grand plans for those apples.

Since they were right across from the apple orchards, we decided to check out the broccoli crops and came away with two HUGE heads of broccoli.

Too fun! We also drove about a mile north to the pumpkins and picked out pumpkins for Nathan’s first Halloween ;) (though I don’t think we have any idea how we are going to decorate them. John says he’ll leave that up to me and my dear friend Pinterest. ha!)
Seriously, is he not the cutest ever?!

We had some very tasty broccoli with dinner that night and for our date night we made…(drum roll)…

 

CARAMEL APPLES!

 

Told you we had grand plans.

 

(Okay, so even after making a bunch, we still had like 10 apples leftover…but they are pretty tasty on their own!)

We used THIS recipe and it. was. amazing. I may have had horrible flashbacks of when I burned my face with lava hot caramel back when I was a pastry intern. But I got through it burn free!

We got everything set up while the caramel was cooling to the perfect dipping temperature.
We had lots of yummy toppings! I was particularly excited about the toffee bits. John was particularly excited about the crushed Oreos.
We had to work pretty quickly once the caramel came to temperature. It got really thick there at the end and it took a while for all the excess to come off. But we ended up with some leftover to dip apple slices in. Guess what all my snacks are going to be. Here they are, all dipped and yummy! (Sorry for the bad lighting…nighttime…artificial lighting…ick…)
Getting our chocolate drizzles ready!
One of John’s apples had a minor problem with the white chocolate not sticking to the Oreo crumbs… ;) It still tasted good though.
Don’t they just look delicious?! So long Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory! We don’t need you anymore! ;)
Yum!

We so have to do this again…

Cheese and Jellybeans

and of course, more vinyl ;)

Okay, so I’m a week late, but we hit the ground running after last weekend was over so no time for blogging.

So anyway, last weekend we went to the Jelly Belly warehouse in Pleasant Prairie, WI. (I know, what a name, right?) It was totally goofy. They give free tours every 15 minutes or so and you ride a little train around the warehouse and make stops to watch videos about the company and how they make jelly beans. It was pretty fun, but we were in the first car, and we could totally see out “conductor” reading off his script ;) But we had a good time. At the end of the ride, we got a free bag of jelly beans and perused the jelly belly store, where they had free samples! ;)

We also saw these awesome jelly bean art pieces. All made of jelly bellys!
Did you know that when Ronald Reagan started to make jelly bellys super popular (he did get them to the White House) Jelly Belly developed the blueberry flavored jelly bean so that they could make a red white and blue mix?

I saw one of my favorite things there before we even got inside! :)
We met up with one of John’s old mission companions and his family there too, as they live just outside of Milwaukee. It was really fun for John to see him again and it was cool to meet him and his family. This is his companion and one of his little boys :)

After Jelly Belly, we stopped for dinner with them at a place called Mars Cheese Castle. What is Mars Cheese Castle? Well, let me just show you ;)

With a freeway sign like this, what would you think?Ta da! Ha ha ha, crazy huh? It’s basically a glorified grocery store…that has mostly cheese. But since it was Saturday, there were free samples! So we walked around and had cheese samples, I had my first ever cheese curd (aka squeaky cheese) and had some dinner at the little café they had in there. All in all…a kind of weird experience. ;)

On our way out, there was a tour bus parked in the parking lot…which is apparently owned and operated by teddy bears

An interesting night, to say the least ;)

On another random note, I’ve added more vinyl to the apartment!!!! LOVE. In the bedroom there was this blank wall space that I really wasn’t sure what to do with. I was thinking maybe a large picture that we have, but I was worried it would look too crowded with the frame sticking out and the dresser and the bookshelf right there. So, in a stroke of (what I would call) genius, I realized I could put a monogram there! I’m in love with monograms, by the way. I have an M monogram in the living room on a tile, but you can do first name monograms TOO. So I did an A and J! (I know, cute, right?) I’m getting quite handy at putting together large pieces by breaking them down into the limited cutting space I have, so here’s what I put together!
I love it! I think it totally brings that space together :)

AND by way of information, I only have FOUR weeks left of my internship! That also means Christmas is FIVE weeks away! We actually got a Christmas tree this year and we’re so decorating it this weekend after Thanksgiving! YAY!

Flowers and Parades

I know. I totally got rid of the St. Patrick’s day theme on the blog too soon. But do you see those adorable pictures of us there at the top? Yeah, I just got those from my mom and I was too excited to wait until after St. Patrick’s day to redo the get up. C’mon. We’re so cute! You can’t really blame me. ;)

Anyway, we had some St. Patrick’s day fun here in our cute little city. A parade! It wasn’t quite as fun as we expected it to be…mostly because it was FREEZING! And we got there a little later than we wanted (totally my fault. you see, I was working on my new blog design…and I get really into it. And when something goes wrong…I can’t let it go until it’s fixed…and things did go wrong…anyway…) so we couldn’t see a whole lot and we didn’t get any free candy! Oh well. ;)

There was a motorcycle ‘gang’. This guy looked pretty hard core
We thought that guy with the bright green mohawk was pretty cool ;)
Look at all the people!
There were a couple of bagpipe groups (John’s favorite) but he started taking a video…then they stopped playing…and then they were leaving when John finally snapped this one…

We didn’t stay too long. It was freezing and windy. After the parade, we headed to the Garfield Park Conservatory. So fun! (And FREE!) Our friends the Monsons had been and blogged about it and someone at church had told us about it, so we decided to check it out! It was so fun to see all the amazing plants in the middle of winter! :)

So here are lots of pictures! John caught me in mid-yawn here (how RUDE! ;)
Oh, much better
I loved these white flowers. SO pretty
Tulips!! I miss Holland…
Banana? Banana! BANANA!!!!
John was really excited to find pineapple
Ha ha what a silly boy I have ;)
The tiger fern was so cool! See the stripes on the leaves?!
I don’t know who did this, but I love it.
A CHOCOLATE TREE! Yes, for cocoa beans. I thought it appropriate given the last three weeks ;)

So there you go! We had a really good time, even though it was freezing. This week is St. Patrick’s Day!! I’ve been told the Chicago river is dyed green for the occasion! I’m so excited, I cross the river everyday on my way to school! Pictures to come, I promise :)

Hope everyone is having a good weekend!