Project: Picture Perfect

What you need:

Large picture frame

Woodstain

Sandpaper

Hanging wire

Clothespins

Hot glue gun

Coffee

Let's start by staining the clothespins; all you do for this is brew a pot of coffee and let your clothespins soak in it overnight.

Now you'll need your picture frame.

And your sandpaper.. Now you can start sanding down spots of the frame. Don't worry about it being perfect, it's supposed to look old and dingy.

Grab your wood stain and a paper towel. Start blotting it on over some of the sanded areas (again, doesn't have to be perfect). 

Now let it dry a little and wipe the whole frame down with a damp rag.

After the frame has dried, turn it over and begin hot gluing hanging wire at random angles across the frame.

Using clothespins, attatch your favorite pictures to the wires wherever you want them.

Hang your completed masterpiece in a place where everyone can see your amazing handiwork!

Project: Nutella-filled, cream cheese-iced, chocolate cupcakes

Let's make cupcakes! 

For our next project, we decided to make cupcakes filled with Nutella spread and topped with delicious homemade cream cheese icing.  Is your tummy growling yet?

     We will begin by following the directions to make a Swiss Chocolate Cake using a mix.  (We were being lazy).  We were excited to use Lindsay's brand new mixer she got for Christmas!

 

Unfortunately, one-half of our team is mentally incompetent/clumsy. *Cough* Lindsay *cough*.  We lost 11 cupcakes in this battle.  The process of cleaning this up would require a whole new blog post....

 

See how sad it is? :(

After our little mishap, we continued baking successfully.

We allowed the cupcakes to cool as we prepared to fill them with Nutella goodness.

We filled a cookie press with Nutella spread and injected the middle of each cupcake.  This was slightly difficult with the mini cupcakes, so be careful!

To create the cream cheese icing, we combined powdered sugar, cream cheese, butter, and vanilla.  The recipe can be found here.

Again, using the cookie press, we topped each cupcake with our delicious homemade icing.

 

Voila!  Our masterpiece is complete!

Cream Cheese Icing Recipe

Cream Cheese Icing:

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 4 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

In a large bowl, beat together the butter and cream cheese with an electric mixer. With the mixer on low speed, add the powdered sugar a cup at a time until smooth and creamy. Beat in the vanilla extract.

Project: Gingerbread House

As our first awesome project, Lacey and I have decided to attempt to make a gingerbread house..from scratch (Gasp!) We figured this would be pretty easy, I mean, why wouldn't it? It's only a gingerbread house! Or so we thought..

First, we made the dough. Simple enough. Then came rolling and cutting the pieces out (we got really into hand cutting-out cool people/ trees/ reindeer). And let them bake..they smelled amazing! 
 
Now to let them cool (and not eat them all!) 

Note: it doesn't taste as good as it smells..really..

And let the icing and decorating begin!


This is what they were supposed to look like..


And well..here's our's.. :(

Well hey, at least we had fun!

So, if you'd like yo try our project, we've included the recipe here.