a holiday lull

[From Rue]

My apologies for what has been, and what will be, a very slow December here on percentblog. Between work, craft fairs, personal commitments, and celebrations posts will be few and far between.

On a more productive note, the latest issue of Rue Magazine is out and features many holiday celebrations and gifts. I will be headed back to the East Coast for a week with my family and couldn't be more thrilled. There may be a post or two before I go, but if not, happy holidays.

Happy Fourth of July!

I have no flag cakes or adorable picnic spreads planned, instead plans consist of just showing up at friends backyards with drinks and store bought snacks. So today is the perfect day to share with you a recent "project" aka evening of fun times for my friend, the talented Karen Kanan Correa of The Future Brite.

The shoot consisted of a a slow-motion camera that captures 2,000 frames per second (typical video cameras capture 60) and some illegal-almost-everywhere-in-the-Bay-Area sparklers. Highly illicit stuff, yes, but we headed to the one town they are permitted and found some public land, though I forget the name of the park. I absolutely love sparklers and fireworks so am glad to have had an excuse to play with them before the Fourth.

The video is now "in production" but you can hear The Future Brite here. Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Valentine's Day

[Eero Saarinen's Love List to his wife in 1954]

Originally found on List of Note.

bake it, gift it: snowball cookie recipe

Yesterday I posted my "make it, gift it" DIY button rings that I made for a Holiday Gift Swap. Today I am sharing my recipe for the The Great Food Blogger's Cookie Swap from Love and Olive Oil and The Little Kitchen.

I wanted to make a family recipe, one given to my grandmother from her friend and my mother's godmother. This recipe goes by many names, but the one most appropriate for the season is Snowballs. They are also called Viennese Crescents when shaped slightly differently and Mexican Wedding Cookies when made with vanilla in place of the almond extract. I think the almond gives them a great not-too-sweet flavor. 

[The dough]

It's important to note that the dough is very very crumbly. You will be forming these with your hand and have to really squish the dough together. I was taking a fistful of crumbly dough to end up with the cookies you see below.

[Before baking]

[Cookies just out of the oven]

Snowballs
½ cup butter, softened

¼ cup confectioners’ sugar 

1 cup all-purpose flour 

1 tsp. almond extract 

¼ tsp. salt

½ cup blanched slivered almonds, ground

Mix all ingredients together.  Shape into small balls, about 2-4 bites per cookie. These do not rise or change shape, so you can fit about 20 on a baking sheet.  Bake at 325 degrees on greased cookie sheet for 20-22 minutes.  When mostly cooled, roll in conf. sugar before serving. 

Yield:18 cookies

Recipe is easily doubled. Cookie size can also be reduced, decrease baking time accordingly.  

[Ready to coat in powdered sugar]

[All done!]

make it, gift it: DIY button ring

[Vintage button collection]

A few weeks ago I posted my excitement about participating in the Great Food Bloggers Cookie Swap and the Holiday Gift Swap, both organized by some awesome bloggers. The deadline for mailing out treats for both was recently and I wanted to share what I created. Today I have a diy instructional for my gift- button rings.

I knew I wanted to make jewelry and making rings from vintage jewelry and buttons is an easy diy that anyone can do. To start, you need one or more buttons (or other bauble such as a rough gemstone, cocktail earring piece, etc) and a ring blank. Ring blanks are available at craft and bead stores.  

[I decided to create a layered look with the large tortoise shell buttons and various small gold and colored buttons.]

[You'll have to remove the back of the button if it doesn't lay flat. Use pliers and just work it back and forth.]

[Use E-600 glue (from a hardware store) to secure the ring blank to the button. I added a strip of fabric, also glued down with E600 to add stability. If your ring blank has a large flat surface then this is not needed, but if your ring is only circular, like mine, then it is helpful. ]

[Your ring is ready! Here is what they looked like before being mailed.]

 

[I added fun bows to the packaging, just because I love gifts.]

Thank you so much Freshly Picked for putting together this awesome showcase of crafters! Over the past week, I've received adorable notecards, holiday coasters, and a necklace from a repurposed tie. I'm looking forward to the last few arrivals and to sharing my Great Cookie Swap recipe with you tomorrow.

how to: make a sparkly wreath in 2 minutes

And for basically $0.

Okay, definitely less than $2.

I started getting warm and fuzzy Christmas feelings, oh, a month ago. This was bad since I have a strict no carols/decorating until after Thanksgiving policy. It is now after Thanksgiving. But unlike my friend Lara and her amazing trove of Christmas treasures, I have no decorations. This is my first Christmas away from home where a) I am not in college or b) my roommates are not (undergrads) in college.

Nonetheless, I am inspired to start decorating. And today I made a wreath practically for free. How? First I started with a set of silver cupcake liners. These come with a silver liner and a white liner inside. At first, I thought, "how ridiculous!" Then I thought, "wonder if that's metal's toxic? yay for white liners!" So to make this wreath, in three easy steps.

Step one: gather your silver liners (before or after use; I went with after.) The number you use changes the size of your wreath, I used 13.

Step two: take one liner and flatten it.

Step three: Assemble in a circle and tape on the back. I just used Scotch tape. Use liberally, it won't be showing.

Okay, I guess there sort of is a step four.
Step four: Hang your wreath!

holiday sale! use coupon code "thanks"

sharing the holiday spirit with blog swaps

I'm very excited to be participating in two internet swaps- a Holiday Gift Swap and the Great Food Bloggers Cookie Swap. You don't have to be a professional crafter or baker to participate so sign up!

The Holiday Gift Swap is open for sign ups through Friday, November 4th. You'll make five items to send out to five participants (on November 7) and you'll get five goodies to keep or give as holiday gifts. The goal is to simplify your holiday shopping while allowing you to give homemade artisan goods to your loved ones. The Great Cookie Swap is similar, but you send and receive three batches of a dozen cookies. Sign up by Friday, November 18 and send your cookies out by December 5th.

Which swap do you want to be part of?

dragon day

Today is Richmond is a beautiful spring day but a little part of me misses Ithaca. That's because today is Dragon Day.

Every school has it's own strange traditions and holidays that started long ago. At Cornell, that's Dragon Day, a long running event that started to coincide with St. Patrick's but is now the Friday before Spring Break. Students that schedule early departures miss out, as I did freshman year. This isn't a holiday that is talked about for months, like Slope Day, instead it sneaks up on most people until the weeks prior when behind the architecture building strange construction starts to happen.

The architecture students spend days building a large dragon, typically pulling an all-nighter the night before to finish. (All-nighters being the lifeblood of architecture.) They then dress in costumes, often with elaborate but non-dragon related themes, perhaps have a beverage or two and parade the dragon around campus. When passing the Engineering Quad, the dragon should be confronted with the engineering student's challenger, typically a phoenix. Sometimes this happens, sometimes not. This year, the phoenix was particularly impressive. Well done, engineers.

[From Cornell's Flickr stream]

The dragon is then supposed to be taken to the Arts Quad to be burned, but my senior year due to new environmental air regulations, burning the dragon was banned. The architecture students compensated by building a last minute fire-friendly all natural wood/straw egg to burn. It appears the burning may have been dropped from the day's event. (Possibly for the best, there were many costumed architecture students running rather close to the fire in past years.)

Though always only an observer of the day's events, I have fond memories of stopping by the coffee shop where I worked in the bottom of the architecture building on Dragon Day to serve coffee to the last few dragon-makers and make illicit beverages concealed in innocuous cups for my friends and me to enjoy while watching the parade.

Cornell has a website up for today and Wikipedia, of course, has more information on the event as well as a great photo gallery of past dragons.

holiday recap

A few images to hold onto the holiday feeling on the 12th day of Christmas:

[Taking in the festive decorations in Charleston]

[Holiday shopping]

[Snack break.]
From the simply named Cupcake, which succeeds where most cupcake places fail-
the icing is not too sweet and the cake is not too dry.

[The wrapping station- on my grandmother's Ping Pong table.]

[Errr, and my hastily done wrapping..]

[And now... 2011!]

makin' whoopie

Sorry for the lack of posts. Holidays plus several day of being sick have put me behind but I want to share my favorite new recipe from this season- Peppermint Whoopie Pies. They'll be great for Valentine's Day too, especially if you put food dye in the icing. A friend sent me the recipe and we had a baking night at my house.

I didn't do a great job reading the recipe ahead of time, so I used a brown sugar substitute and made my own buttermilk, but the cookies still turned out great.

[Vanilla and Peppermint]

[Just the icing with the peppermint chips was delicious]

[We couldn't quite make them pretty, but we make them delicious]

holiday potluck

When I moved in with my current roommates, they informed me they do an annual Thanksgiving Dinner for friends the week before Thanksgiving. We didn't get to it in time this year, so instead had a general Holiday Potluck. We decorated with Christmas lights, Hannukah lights and random orange lights. Not the most cohesive but the important thing was that we cooked- and ate- well.

[Our turkey, stuffed with carrots and onion]

To continue wrapping all the winter time holidays together, my roommate Julia made latkes using a recipe from her Dad (aka the one from Epicurious or that you get if you google latke recipe.) It is very good. We made far too many but they were all eaten.

[This is what 5 pounds of potatoes looks like once it's been shredded. Check out the sweet cupcakes in the background to celebrate of the UofR women's rugby team.]

My house supplied the turkey and asked everyone to bring side dishes. Not content to sit on the sidelines, I decided to make appetizers. Originally planning on keeping it simple, I made Sage and Brown Butter Cashews and bought brie and fruit. I decided to turn the berries into a Blackberry and Raspberry Compote, making up the recipe as I went. I've posted what I did below.

[Sage and Brown Butter Cashews]

A highlight was the candied bacon, which was a last minute addition. TheKitchn wrote that not eating it all immediately would be very tough. This proved true as the first batch was consumed while half the party guests were out picking up the last few items on the list. Lesson learned: thin center cut bacon is better than thick but cook it on a drying rack or something that drains. Coat heavily with brown sugar.

[Candied bacon]

Blackberry Raspberry Compote
1.5 cups blackberries
1 cup raspberries
2 tablespoons honey
1/3 of a lemon (eyeballed)

Put in a sauce pan and heat on low-medium heat. Mash the berries up a bit and once there is a decent amount of juice in the pan, bring to a low boil. Let simmer 10-15 minutes. Pour over brie.

[Super bad picture. Super yummy brie.]

weekend review: independence day

A pictoral history of my Fourth-of-July Eve and the grand day itself. The first few were taken via camera phone (insert Beyonce's Videophone here) so are fuzzy but the first is so cute and the second two so badass that I couldn't resist.

July 3: The Farm

[That's right- I learned to shoot a gun. Both a pistol and hunting rifle. Don't mess with me.]

July 4: DC

[Cupcakes like the ones I meant to make...]

[Thifting! I only bought the box... and a few things I'll share later.]

[My accidentally patriotic fro-yo]

[The End]