Walk of Fame/Chinese Theater in CA

Over President's Day Weekend, we (Jimmie, Geoff, and I) had the opportunity to visit Steph & Marc in Burbank, California.  It was SO much fun! We took a million and ten pictures so it's hard to narrow them down. Sorry there are so many! ...Hah, wait.  No I'm not.  I love pictures and I loved the trip.  Enjoy :)

We went to the Hollywood sign!

(where it was super sunny so these are kinda funny looking, haha oh well!)

We did the Hollywood Walk of Fame...here are SOME of the stars we took pictures of :)

These are my absolute favorites:

 The KING

 Love 'em

 Let's Groove Baby.  

 Don't know who this is?  He's done a lot but in one word : NCIS Writer = WIN

 Beautiful- She will be missed.

 Classic.

 Needed a picture with this one: Tom Hanks is one of my favorites

 But not as favorite as DENNIS QUAID. 

Tom Hanks, Dennis Quaid, Steve Martin= Top 3 Favorite Movie Actors 

 Also a winner!

 LOVE her.

Not even words for his incredible-ness.  Still miss him!

 If you don't know what Alan Menken did--look it up.  

Chances are, you're VERY familiar with much of his unbelievable work :)

 REGIS!!! 

Oh Phil.  Love you.

We also went to the Chinese Theater which is where the footprints

and handprints are!  Here are a few!

 JACK.

 Denzel Washington!

 Ol' Blue Eyes

Absolutely adore her.  

 Ahhhhhnold.

 HARRY POTTER!

 Taylor, Kristen, & Robert.

 Aww! Look at how little her hands and feet are!

...and this is the new one! West Side Story!

Okay okay, I'm sorry.  This is way too long!  I'll post this now and add the awesomely fun pictures from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in a separate post later!

Valentine's Day

This year for Valentine's Day we decided to do fun and creative gifts.  I was planning on making a nice dinner at home but our kitchen sink clogged the night before and we didn't wanna have a huge pile up of dishes.  Because I had class until 9:30, we just ordered a heart shaped pizza :) it was pretty funny

The bad thing about it...is that I'm trying to work out and eat healthier! I'm even drinking smoothies with Baby SPINACH.  This is a huge milestone for me... I don't DO spinach, greens, or lettuce of any kind.  It took some experimenting with flavors.

Obviously, I was pretty dang excited to give this a shot and buy the spinach.  I also am trying coconut water which is apparently very good for you.  I haven't tried it by itself, but its good in smoothies.  The Greek yogurt...not a fan of it.  Maybe it was just the kind that I bought, but it was suuuper bitter.  Ick!

ANYWAY, back to Valentine's Day.  As mentioned previously, I told you I made a Pinterest item for Valentine's day:  This is similar to the Dinner Menu that I made a while back.  It's a picture frame with scrapbook paper behind the glass.  The stickers on the scrapbook paper say, "I Love You because..." and then we can leave messages to each other with the vis-a-vis marker like the picture below.  It's pretty fun :)

The other thing I gave Jimmie is the funny thing.  It's no secret, Jimmie is very particular about his food and the presentation of it.  With that said, let it be known that he, along with many people actually, hate soggy cereal.  I think most people hate it, but he thinks it gets soggy very very quickly.   I saw this on Pinterest, found where they're sold, and bought it for him :)  Here's several pictures of the bowl and the packaging, because it's hard to explain.

 It's red.  So I figured it worked for Valentine's day and would be really funny.  I think it's great because Jimmie gets crispy cereal and as you can see from the side of the box, it's good for all kinds of things like chips and salsa, fruit and dip, or any main course with a side.  Cool, huh?

Jimmie's gifts for me were much cooler in my opinion and I was STOKED about them.  As much as I love chocolates and flowers and stuff, this year's Valentine's Day was my favorite :)

First of all, I'd be happy with ANY chef's coat, but a personalized one from Cake Boss?! Love it.  I was FREAKING out.  I feel so professional now. LOVE.

And this is a funny shirt that says "I'm the Boss".  The fonts are the same as the ones in the title of Cake Boss, and it says Cake Boss in the corner.  

I never had time to make a Valentine's day cake or cupcakes though! Soon I'll break the chef's coat in, and you know me--you'll hear all about it :)

Happy Belated Valentine's Day everyone!

Cakes and Craziness!

This week has been INSANE!  Realistically, if this week had been at any other time, I would have handled it just fine.  However, it followed and even more crazy week so I began this week with little to no energy.  Basically- It's a huge miracle that I've made it through this week in relatively good health, mentally stable, and completed all that I needed too.  And thanks to Jimmie, our house has managed to stay in order :)

I'm kind of on an energy kick right now so I'm taking advantage of it and posting while I can and then getting done as much homework for next week as I can tolerate.  That's because this upcoming week should be very fun and relaxing and I'd like it to stay that way!  Valentine's Day is on Tuesday and on Friday, Geoff, Jimmie, and myself are heading on down to Burbank to visit Steph and Marc for President's Day Weekend! It should be loads of fun and will be wonderful to be able to get away and have a short vacation while visiting family.  We're not really doing anything for Valentine's Day because I have class until 9:30 pm on Tuesday! Instead, of going out we decided to have a nice dinner at home and use that money to go to the Miami Heat vs. Utah Jazz game on March 2nd!  It should be lots of fun... Jimmie's only slightly excited, as you can imagine :)  We're both looking forward to it a lot and got a good deal on tickets!

Anyway, today was one of the more crazy days of the week. I ended up staying up til about 2:30am trying to finish up a group project due today and then had to wake up at 7:30 in order to get ready for class.  This is because each class a different person is assigned treats and this week it was my turn. I had previously promised a girl in my class who's birthday it was that I'd make her a cake.  So I woke up bright and early and made a Devil's food bundt cake, drizzled it with chocolate frosting, and filled the middle with strawberries.  This is essentially the first cake that I ever really made where I learned I loved making cakes long long ago.

You're probably expecting a picture.  Well you won't get one :)  because I forgot to take one.  But it looked great and the whole class was essentially drooling over it.  It was pretty funny.  I made the cake but did not assemble it until I got to the McKay building because it would have been hard to successfully carry an assembled cake up the giant hill by the SFH.  When we served the cake, I had one of the first pieces and then went to another room to work on our presentations for the class.  When I came back a few minutes later..the cake and strawberries were gone.  I mean like, entirely gone.  This is all that was left ... so I guess it was a hit!

And as most of you probably saw, I was able to make a cake on Sunday as well for the Superbowl!  I really had no idea what I was going to do with the limited supplies I realized I had, but I think it turned out alright.  Congratulations to the Giants on their Superbowl victory.

I've so missed making cakes!  And now that Cake Boss: The Next Great Baker is over...I can no longer live vicariously through their cake making!  So you'll probably continue to see cake pictures, so long as I have an occasion to make one.  Can you say "Valentine's Day"?  Here I come.

Weekly Dinner Calendar

So yesterday I spent some time doing different crafts, mostly my ideas were from Pinterest.  One of the things that I decided to make is an erasable dinner calendar.  All it is-- a picture frame, scrapbook/decorative paper, scrapbook or any letter stickers that you have, and a wet erase marker.  (I got "Vis-a-Vis" expo wet erase... they're with the dry erase, but they're like markers for overhead projections etc)

So here it is before I wrote our menu.  The writing here's just the stickers on scrapbook paper beneath the frame.

This isn't a great shot of it, but here's the finished product.  It looks hard to read in this picture, but it's really not in person.  When you want to erase it, just use a wet rag or paper towel and clean it off.  It comes off no problem, and then you make next week's menu :) 

We have ours on a little easel-like stand sitting on top of our microwave in our Kitchen, and we like it quite a bit!

I did a couple other crafts yesterday, but I can't put them up yet because they're for Jimmie for Valentine's day.  So those wont be up for another couple of weeks :) Oh and if you're trying to understand what Wednesday says.. it says "CougarEat before play".  We're going to see a play for my drama class on Wednesday and we've got about 20 minutes between my class and the start of the play, so for those of you who don't know, CougarEat=eating on campus.  It's like BYU's food court.

Well now that it's written... time to get started making dinner!

Cake Pops for Geoff's Birthday

Happy 24th Birthday to Geoff!

 We decided to give the Philly Phanatic a balloon :)

The idea for this banner is actually from the TV show The Office;
I didn't know if Geoff would remember that it was but either way, I knew he'd appreciate the humor in the lack of excitement and the formal tone that it takes. 

So this afternoon Geoff came over for birthday dinner and for desserts, I decided to try...

CAKE POPS.

So I thought I'd give some instructions and tips for those of you who have considered trying them out

Materials Needed: Cake Mix, Frosting, Candy Melts, Lollipop sticks.  Optional: Styrofoam, sprinkles, cream cheese

Step One: Bake a box cake as you normally would.

Step Two: Once it has cooled, break it up into crumbs.  I did this by cutting it into squares and scraping the pieces and crumbs back into the KitchenAid.  Then I mixed it on and off with the whisk attachment to break up the big pieces. 

Step Three: Once the pieces appeared to be relatively even, add frosting and mix until you get a good enough consistency to roll it into a ball.  You don't need too much, and unfortunately I don't even know the measurement of how much I used. 

Note: I've heard that you can add part cream cheese-part frosting to the mixture to make it not as overwhelmingly rich.  

Step Four: Using your hands, roll the cake mixture into even sized balls.  The cake mix that I used made about 35 cake pops.

Step Five: Melt the chocolate candy melts as instructed on bag

Step Six: Individually dip the end of the lollipop stick into the chocolate and then place insert into a cake ball.  You want the stick to be about 1/2-3/4 of the way through the ball.  As you can see from the picture, the chocolate will form a little ring of chocolate around the stick and the cake.  This helps the stick and the cake stick together better.

Step Seven: Dip each cake pop into the chocolate so that it is completely submerged.  You should have enough chocolate to be able to do this in one dip without having to scoop more on with a spoon or spin it around in the chocolate.  Adding too much chocolate from scooping, twisting, or turning will make it so that the cake will most likely fall off of the stick

...As you can see, I ignored this step the first time.  My solution?  Put the chocolate into a tall glass instead of a bowl so that you have more depth to work with.  Worked like a charm. 

Step Eight: After dipping the cake, lift from chocolate and gently tap the lollipop stick on the side of the glass, while slowly turning the stick.  This will allow for the excess chocolate to drain off and form an even coating.  

Step Nine: Once the extra chocolate is off you have 2 options.  For a more flawless and rounded finish, stick the end of the lollipop stick into the Styrofoam to allow to dry.  If you don't have Styrofoam, they can also dry laying down, but as you can guess, the wet chocolate will form a flat edge against that surface.

Step Ten: Adding sprinkles- If you choose to add sprinkles to your cake pops, you must do it at the right time.  

-Adding the decorations immediately after dipping will be too heavy for the wet chocolate and pull the coating down.  

-Don't wait too long though because apparently the top hardens  first and you'll result in this balding look...

 -You need to wait until the chocolate coating is in between hardened and wet. This generally does not take too long.  Here's one that turned out pretty well.

The reason why most of these just have green sprinkles on them is because I decided to try Mint Chocolate dipping candy.  I wanted to be able to tell them apart from the super rich ones that I didn't care for quite that much.  The mint seemed to cut the richness down a bit and I'd suggest it for sure :)

Anyway, that's really all that I can think of on this for now.  If you have any questions, let me know! It was quite the experiment, pretty fun if I do say so myself! Give it a try :)

Experimenting with Cookies

So one of our wedding gifts from the Sikahemas was the Wilton Cookie Pro Ultra II. I've been super excited to try it out but wasn't able to get it back to Utah until we came back from break.  We thought it was a pretty neat thing so we decided to take a video as we started forming our cookies.  It took some experimenting to get it right but I think they turned out pretty cool!  The cookie gun came with several recipes so the dough was a great consistency and tasted delicious!  I'm going to try the chocolate ones next time :) Here are some videos for y'all!

Here are some of the different shapes!

And they taste great too! :)

Match Game on Christmas Vacation

Well we made it through another semester!  Jimmie will be starting his job for Myler Disability on Monday and I started the Winter semester of my Junior year on Wednesday (the day we flew home from New Jersey!) We had a lot of fun with both sides of the family!

One of the things that I found especially fun was play Match Game with the fam. In the first round Jimmie was Gene Rayburn (the host).  Dad and I were contestants named Sir Isaac Newton and Helen Keller, respectively.  Our panelists were Nathan who played Nipsey, Megan who played Richard, Evan who was Yoda, and Mom who was Betty White.

Here's the basic run down of how you play this game.  Assign 1 person to be the host, 2 contestants, and as many panelists as you can.

Might I add, your host must be technologically inclined and have a computer :)  So that they can play this Intro Music as you GET READY TO MATCH THE STARS and introduce the panelists.

The game goes just as it does on the TV show.  To find the questions, we just Google "Match Game Questions" or "Match Game Sample Questions".  The host will read the question and then cue this think music so that the panelists can write down their answers on pieces of paper.  Once everyone has dinged in, the contestant gives the answer and the panelists reveal theirs, trying to match.  On the game show, the panelists drop their used answers into a slot after they've been given.  We play on these couches so that we can drop them in the slots in between the cushions and collect them from under the couch afterwards :)  We like authentic.

For the Bonus round where you try and get the top answer we turn to Google.  For example, you can pick any two word phrase or like name such as "Harriet _______" or "Star _____".  You type the first word on Google and the automatic drop down box will tell you the top 3 answers.  For example, when you type Star into Google (don't hit enter) the top 3 answers are (3) Star Wars, (2) Starfall, (1) Starbucks.  Some are better than others, so just think of words til you find a good one.

And that's how you play!  Sorry if that didn't make sense, but it's really all just a really fun work in progress.  Making up these game shows is better than any of the boxed versions you're gonna buy.  Have fun!  If you're still confused or feel up to watching the video of our family playing, let me know :)  I recorded our first round--it's hilarious, but kind of long.

Here are some pictures from Christmas and Christmas Eve

We took a ton of videos while we were out there but I thought this would be a funny one to share with the siblings.  Here is a video of Mom & Dad opening their combined gifts from the kids.

I thought it was a pretty hysterical reaction on Mom's part :)

If you don't want to watch the whole thing--Just skip to like 2:38

Thanks for a good year everyone!