Food Adventures with Alivia!

Hello, friends!

As you know by now, I oft am running around working and visiting my man and that means I don't get much time to hang with my friends. It's a little sad, really, but my friends are great; the bestest of the best and I always seem to work it out. :)

Alivia is one of the bestest of the best, for sure!

She came by one evening this past week to hang out, eat some pizza, make some cake batter truffles, and drink some Silly Cow Farms Hot Chocolate! It was a fantastic time, fun and funny and just a nice break from everything else in life. :)

I love Alivia. She's pretty much the greatest! Heehee!

I sprinkled the sprinkles while Alivia coated the truffles in almond bark. Teamwork, that's what that is.

This is her "spider face."

After we made the truffles, we found our favorite mugs (per the instructions ;) ) and made us some Silly Cow Farms Chocolate Truffle hot chocolate. Yummmmmmmmmmm. I was so excited to see this when Alivia brought it over. I had actually seen this hot chocolate on a blog somewhere down the line and thought it was the cutest and coolest thing. Now I'm excited to know it can be found here! Awesomeness all around!

The truffles were pretty good too! They were a lot like cookie dough without the eggs. The end result truffle is really good with its coating. I think all around it was a great success. :) Tasty tasty! Here, you will see an interesting phenomenon that we noticed. As the inside of the truffles warmed up from being chilled in the freezer, it expanded and poked through the weakest part of the coating. Silly!

(Alivia, I did that thinking about it much too hard thing and asked Kyle what caused it to happen and he was like "duh" and told me. And I was like, "....duh." Haha!)

I hope that wherever you are and however busy you are, you get chances to hang out with friends. :) I cherish every moment I get. And Anna, Alivia and I look forward to the next time we can all hang out SO much. We need to do a bean dip and movie sleepover for sure. 

Friends of 2FT, this slumber event is somewhat of an old tradition. Do you have awesome traditions with friends? What do you do?! We'd love to hear from you, so drop a line! 

Until next time, stay excellent! 

- Jenny - 

A DIY Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!
I can't believe it is already Christmas eve and that we are about to hit our one year blog-i-versary.
It hasn't been the perfect first year of blogging, but it has been fun and I have enjoyed it. I look forward to continuing and, hopefully, improving.

This year was my first Christmas without school... ever. So I decided to use the opportunity to DIY more things for Christmas. I usually DIY gifts (as you may have noticed throughout this year..), but this year I decided to do more than in the past. I painted three mugs (and used clear coat to increase the lifetime of the paint, as I updated in the DIY painted mugs post), made a good number of baking soda and corn starch ornaments, and made peppermint fudge and mocha truffles.

Everything turned out really well!

First, the ornaments!
I used this baking soda and cornstarch clay recipe. I followed the directions and they turned out pretty well. Some of my ornaments experienced some cracking on the back, but it wasn't enough to make me hate them. I think it may have been slightly due to how long it took me to get from rolling the dough to baking the ornaments. To poke the holes in the top, I used a straw.

Once the ornaments were baked and cooled, I painted them using acrylic paint. Once the paint was dry I coated both sides with a clear varnish that I found in the same aisle as the acrylic paints in my local craft store.

Red Hot Chili Pepper symbol for my 'brothers' to commemorate our RHCP concert experience this November.

These were made for my boyfriend's parents. They are painted to look like their dogs. :3

This is a pair of matching ornaments. One I made for myself (the one with the funny business near the top of the star) and one for Anna! :)

That's right, the deathly hallows = awesome.

And this is one of my personal favorites - The one I made for my man. :) <3

On to the candy!
I decided that I would make some candy for my boyfriend's parents in addition to their ornaments. I settled on these two recipes: peppermint fudge by Shugary Sweets and mocha truffles by Better Homes and Gardens.

These turned out fairly well. They weren't as pretty as I was hoping but they sure are tasty. I had to fudge some of the ingredients though (pun intended). The fudge recipe calls for Andes peppermint crunch baking chips, but I could not find any and I checked three grocery stores. So I used Hershey's candy cane flavored kisses, they have little bits of candy cane in them too, so it worked out great! Also, the topping with the peppermint marshmallows and candy quik didn't pan out (couldn't find peppermint marshmallows and accidentally melted the marshmallows in the candy quik the first time...), so I used white chocolate and regular marshmallows. It's not as bright white but it's tasty and it works. :)

As for the truffles. They are delicious and they turned out well. We were running a little low on time so we were less patient than needed to deal with coating the truffles in white chocolate, so we ended up with swirls of dark chocolate in the coating from the insides melting a bit. But they almost look like they were made to look that way. ;)

Overall, it was a success and it's all quite tasty!

I hope you all have a great Christmas. I'll be back before the week is out with a post for the new year!
God bless and may your holiday be filled with love, family, friends, and warmth.

Stay excellent!
- Jenny -