I Don't Need to Taste to Believe

Merry Christmas!!!!! I absolutely love Christmas time, for all of the obvious reasons. Baking, cooking, family, singing, shopping, wrapping, baking, and above all, remembrance of  the birth of our Savior <3.
The title of this post comes from one of my current favourite Christmas songs, Peppermint Winter by Owl City, which sums up pretty much what I love about Christmas!

Yesterday I spent most of the day (10:30-5:30 to be exact) baking. First I made Peanut Butter Fudge from a recipe that my friend Colleen posted. I usually do not like fudge simply because of how sweet it is, but I'm convinced that peanut butter can make most desserts better, and the fudge is great! You can see her recipe here.

The rest of the day was spent on Gingerbread. Gingerbread men, women, trees, and one beautiful house!

I used the recipe for Hard Gingerbread that I found in Cooking Down East by Marjorie Standish, it worked out really well, as far as I know. It was the first time I have made gingerbread!

Hard Gingerbread

1/2 cup lard (I used shortening..)

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup molasses

1 tsp baking soda dissolved in

1 tbls hot water

1 beaten egg

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

2 tsp ginger

2 tsp salt

4 cups sifted flour

Start with sifted flour. First, measure 3 cupfuls into sieve. sift together with spices. This gives you a chance to sift these together, then the remaining 1 cup sifted flour may be added, if you need it. This dough is extremely stiff. It should be firm enough so that it may be patted by your fingers into a grease cookie sheet.

Melt lard and butter together, add sugar and molasses and stir. Make sure this is cool, then add soda dissolved in hot water, add beaten egg. Add sifted dry ingredients. Mix until smooth. Add remaining cup of sifted flour, if necessary. Only add flour until the dough is firm.

Using buttered 12- by 18-inch pan or cookie sheet pat the dough as smoothly as possibly into pan.

Place in 350 degree oven. After gingerbread has baked for 10 minutes, sprinkle top of dough with granulated sugar, continue baking for 10 minutes longer. Cool in pan, cut into squares.

I changed a few things to fit my purpose better, I rolled the dough out on counter instead of pressing it into the pan, and cut it out before it baked instead of after. The gingerbread men only took about 15 minutes instead of 20.

Gingerbread House: quick how-to.

1. Cut out squares of paper to the dimensions you want, so you can then use them as outlines when cutting the dough. 2 gable pieces, 2 outside walls, and 2 roofs. One mistake I made was to make the point on the gable a little steep, so it was harder to get the roof to set.

2. Cut out the dough and bake it. Use a lot of flour while rolling the dough out, it will be so much easier while your moving the piece to the pan that way. Make sure to leave room for a lot of expansion on the pan.

3. Using royal icing and a piping bag, 'glue' three of the sides together, support it for a few minutes, but then it should be all right to stand on its own. Pretty soon after add the fourth wall. Let it stand on it's own while it dry's, but watch out for the walls randomly falling. The first time it happened the house was sitting on the edge of the counter, and the whole piece landed on the floor. I had to glue the pieces back together.

4. Add the roof. I did it one side at a time, and held it on for quite a long time. In the picture below you can see broken wall  :).

5. Decorate! I only had a small amount of candy, so my house was pretty bare.

15

Yesterday was my 15th birthday!! Wooohooo!

It's not really a mile stone, but that's all right. 

To celebrate I had some of my friends over for a few hours and watched My Fair Lady. I absolutely love that movie, mostly because of the music, but also because of the plot. About a year ago I realized my love for musicals... Now I'm hooked.

We also ate tacos and slurped on root beer floats (instead of a cake).

It was pretty much a super relaxing and fun day, my friends rock. That's it.

Here is the art part of this post, I'm trying to decide what to paint on the little canvases (picture above). And I think it would be totally cool to paint a self portrait of sorts, but since I started painting I have never ever ever never... ever wanted to paint a person. Or more specifically a face. I think I was just afraid to.  But I decided to try it! Results? Ehhhhh... I'm gonna practice.

The lack of arms is a little eerie... and the nose is too long. I will succeed!

And maybe in a few years I will be able to make it resemble the model.

When in Doubt... Make a Trifle

I usually have pretty good success when it comes to baking, what can go wrong when you follow a recipe? Yeah, but sometime things go wrong, and it's not pretty.

My dad came home a few days ago from being away for 6 months, over those months he had his birthday.  I decided to have a cake ready for when he arrived since I wasn't able to make anything on the actual day.  It was a cake I had made a few times for him before, Jewish Apple Cake.  My grandmother gave us the recipe, and you bake it in a bunt pan. Here it is... Beautiful right?

It's not my best work.

Here's what happened: It was baking beautifully, and when the timer went off I tested it with a toothpick, not done yet. It went in for another 10 minutes then I put the toothpick in again. Done. But apparently not quite, toothpicks are only so long and bunt cakes are deep. When I flipped it on to a plate what came out was the bottom half, which was oozing and dripping raw batter. The top half was still in the pan... So it all went back into the oven, the top half in the bunt pan and the bottom in a glass baking dish. 

I really wanted to just dump it, but my brother informed me that "the batter is really delicious!". 

What you see in the bowl is what I was able to scrape out of the bunt pan.

I ended up doing the only thing left to do: make a trifle :).

We bought some vanilla  ice cream and I made it look on purpose!

My last two posts have been about failed cooking attempts... Really, I can cook... 

The Rat Made it Better

This year as part of my school I am taking French as a foreign language. For some reason my French book told me to make Ratatouille, although it didn't help me learn French, I suppose it was so that I could be more educated in their culture. Ratatouille is  French Provençal recipe, Provençal literally means Provence, which is the south-eastern part of France, right next to Italy. Just like in the movie, Ratatouille, most French grow up eating this classic dish. Since I love to cook I was pretty happy that my foreign language homework involved cooking! Here is the recipe that came from my French book:

Ratatouille 


You can serve it warm or cold with lamb, chicken or pork. The secret to this dish is to cook all the vegetables separately before combining them.

3 green squash/zucchini
2 eggplants
3/4 cup olive oil
4 large tomatoes
2-3 large Spanish onions
3 medium cloves garlic
3 TBLS thyme or herbes de provence
1 bay leaf

Wash and dice the squash/zucchini and the eggplant. Do not peel them.
Drop the tomatoes in a pan of boiling water for 20 seconds. Rinse with cold water. Peel and seed them.
Sauté onions in 3 TBLS of olive oil until transparent. put them on a plate. Sauté the vegetables separately, using about 2 TBLS of olive oil for each.
Pour 2-3 TBLS of olive oil into a clean frying pan. Mix the vegetables together and add along with 3 crushed garlic cloves, thyme, and bay leaf to frying pan. If you are adding cooked meat, add it now.
Cover and cook slowly for approximately 40 minutes. Just before serving, crush the last garlic clove to add a fresh taste of garlic to the dish. (the last garlic might be a little much for children, unless they have French blood.)

So I followed the directions and made this delicious sounding recipe. The only thing I changed was instead of dicing the veggies a sliced them... Like in the movie  you know... (I'm a big Ratatouille fan :).  It was my first time cooking or eating eggplant, so I didn't really know what I was doing, and when it was all done... I really did not like it... At all.
Maybe it was the amount of Thyme, or the tough eggplant, or my lack of French blood.
If you have ever made it, or decide to try it out, let me know! And please tell me if you know what would make it taste better, because we have a large container of the stuff in our fridge now.

Melted Flowers

I recently stumbled upon a simple and really pretty idea that uses synthetic silky fabrics to make hair pieces, pins, really anything that could look better with some flowers on it, I decided to go with bobby pins.  Here is the result!

  If you really want to know how to make them I suggest going here, She explains it better than I probably could.

First off: find some synthetic silk textured fabrics, it just needs to be able to melt, and not catch on fire. These are the ones I used, scraps that would have gotten thrown away or donated.

 Next I cut the fabrics into circles of various sizes, the yellow circles you see is construction paper I used as a guide.

 The rest is pretty self-explanatory. cut the fabric so as to make petals, but don't round the edges, the melting will do that.  The melting to the best part, but after a while can be painful. A little tea candle gets hotter than I thought... And the red fabric caught on fire quite easily, but I suppose the black edges add something?

Step 1: Preliminaries

Hi.

I don't quite know how to start, besides to say that my name is Anna... I'm new to the world of blogging and photography, so bear with me as I get used to things!

You may be wondering what the point is for the title "Artfully Meandering". I chose those words because they completely sum up what I do for a lot of the day. Wander around in the proverbial world of creativity. Whether it be painting, crafting, baking, or sketching, my goal that (optimistically) always remains is to make what I create look beautiful in one way or another. I don't usually succeed, but sometimes I do and those times are awesome.

So created this blog. It will become a record of sorts for all the projects I set out to complete. However colourful, time-consuming, useless, random, warm, pretty, or delicious they may be. At some point I am going to try to make this site look beautiful also, but my speciality is not computers.

Instead of writing about myself, the photos below will pretty much cover everything :).

I couldn't tell you about myself and leave out my fantastic friends. Of course, here are only a couple of them, but I'm pretty confident the rest will appear on here later!

Thanks for reading!