Wow! How exactly is it November already? I’m so excited for some blog posts I have planned this month and to approach the holidays in a peaceful and joyful spirit. Continue reading
Traditions
Fall Family Bucket List
It doesn’t quite feel like fall here in Phoenix, but since the weather did at least give us the gift of temperatures under 100 degrees (and no current natural disasters… praying for all of you going through those and trying to rebuild!), I figured it was time to dream up a bucket list for the next few months… not sure we’ll do all of it and I am quite sure we will add to it, but it was sure a fun family activity to talk about this and get it started! Continue reading
A letter to my son on his third birthday
I usually write these in scrapbooks or cards, or in our traditional birthday book each year… but I wanted to do something a little different for my not-so-little-anymore guy, especially with all the changes that happened this year so… Continue reading
The Second Child Syndrome:
When I was pregnant with my son, so many people made fun of me for things like taking bump pictures every single week and keeping up diligently with not one but two baby books. Everyone warned me that the more I did for my first child, the more any subsequent progeny would just look at with added jealousy because I wouldn’t do any of it for them since I’d be too busy chasing around baby #1.
Well… sadly they were partially right… but I’m fighting back! Continue reading
The First “D” revealed and a Year End Wrap Up: Cooking
I’ve learned a lot from consciously trying to improve my cooking and try new recipes this year. There have been ups and downs… recipes that were so forgettable I didn’t even blog about them, epic failures that we threw out, and huge wins that we will keep cooking again for years. Continue reading
Cultivating Memories
As we head into the holiday season, I’ve been reflecting how best to intentionally spend my time. It feels like there’s extra pressure this year to make it special as it’s the last Christmas my son will be an only child and that makes it tempting to try and do ALL THE THINGS. But I don’t want to do all the things and feel the consequences of an already difficult pregnancy under the added stress of exhaustion. And for that matter, I don’t just want the holidays to be the time we’re consciously choosing ways to make memories with our kids. Continue reading
Christmas Traditions: A follow up
One last Christmas post as I will not be blogging tomorrow or the next day as I celebrate Christmas and then the second day of Christmas with the two sides of my family. I talked earlier this month about traditions and how I’m excited to see what traditions we create as the years go on. Here’s an update on a few more we’ve got this year: Continue reading
Baking #18: Happy Anniversary Cake SMASH
He was excited to finally cake smash…
So, I wasn’t originally going to write about this as my baking project, but after how much fun we had, I thought I should share. With how busy we’ve become since having a baby, we were fiercely protective of celebrating our anniversary. We even turned down jobs to keep the day open so we could celebrate together. However, while May 12th is our anniversary and my poor husband has SO many celebrations he has to make happen in May between birthdays and mother’s day etc. that we decided to stay home and celebrate with a home cooked meal. He did dinner and I did dessert. At our wedding we had some AMAZING cupcakes made by a dear friend and some truffles which were perfect for our celebration. We didn’t have a traditional wedding cake, and we did not Continue reading
Baking #16: Already dreaming of Thanksgiving… Parmesan Cheesy rolls
My husband and I were sick last week, hence the lack of posts. It’s the first time we’ve been sick at the same time since the baby was born and boy was that a miserable experience. So we are still playing catch up but I wanted to get a blog in. I’m going to have to try to be short but I think this recipe needs a little background… Continue reading
Baking #12: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! (42 projects in 52 weeks)
St. Patrick’s Day Onesie! We figured we’d stick to our Catholic roots instead of trying to pimp the baby by asking strangers to kiss him…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!! I won’t lie, this is usually a holiday that doesn’t get much attention from me aside from maybe throwing on something green if I have it around. However, when you have a kid you suddenly feel like you better do SOMETHING to mark the big events of the year since the months are flying by so quickly. So I decided I made my little guy a custom onesie and decided I would bake something for the occasion. Why not celebrate a little?
I was originally planning to make green sugar cookies for this week, until I got a brilliant text from a friend telling me I should make Irish Soda Bread for this week’s project. After looking up a few recipes, my first instinct was to say nope, I don’t have the ingredients I need for this and even with the magic of ring slings or other baby carriers, a trip to the grocery store is still a 45 minute venture that I am just not into today. And then I mentally kicked myself. The whole point of the 42 things in 52 weeks part of this blog is to make myself try new things, things I would not normally do! I bake sugar cookies all the time. Bring on the Irish soda bread.
In case you didn’t know- the soda in soda bread refers to baking soda. Not soda pop. Baking soda takes the place of yeast as far as what makes the bread rise!
But I still wasn’t going to the grocery store so… I improvised. After all, what’s more Irish than resourcefulness? (Don’t answer that, I have a feeling
it could get culturally insensitive really fast… someone once told one of my best friends that she looked “as Irish as sadness” true story. Of course, we were living in New York, people just say stuff there…)
For example, I had heard that that instead of buttermilk you can mix regular milk with vinegar. Great… check!
BONUS: My Trek Mix is now effectively Nuts About Chocolate Trek Mix. DOUBLE WIN.
Then recipes called for dried currants or raisins etc. and I had none of those. At first I thought well, it’s optional. Then I remembered- I don’t have what it called for but I DO have trail mix… not the kind with raisins, but there were dried raspberries in there! Those should work, right? same idea…
I used my trusty kitchen aid to whip up this recipe in no time. It’s pretty basic ingredients aside from those two tricky ones I didn’t have in the house. Since the trail mix only yielded me about 1/3 the amount of dried fruit you are supposed to have and the recipe made enough for two loaves, I figured I would make one with the raspberries and one without. Here’s the before and after shots:
Let me just say that of all my baking projects I’ve done so far this year, THIS is the winner for leaving my kitchen smelling AH-MAZING. It probably helped that i took my son outside to play before the AZ weather makes that difficult in the coming weeks, but when I opened the door to check on the bread, I couldn’t help but smile at how good it smelled.
We wanted to try some warm so I sliced off a piece of the larger loaf without dried fruit since i was worried the pieces could be just big enough to pose a choking hazard to my son. He LOVED it, I can’t wait to share some tonight.
Happy St. Patrick’s day, all. I’d love to hear how you celebrated 🙂
Alphabet Resolutions 