All ye craft mavens out there

Christmas is lurking around the corner. Halloween being over marks the start of my Christmas decoration planning. Us Canucks celebrate Thanksgiving earlier than our American neighbours. It's celebrated before Halloween and so once the ghouls and monsters are taken down, stars and snowflakes and angels and colourful lights can be put up. I know, I know. Christmas isn't all about decors. But it certainly helps build a festive atmosphere. And truth be told, it's that time of the year when I can go overboard with my decorations.

I'm not sure about you, but I want to put up something new and a bit different every year. It can be a new colour scheme, a new spool of ribbons, whatever. This year, I've decided to make Christmas tree ornaments. Combining my love for baking and my preference to customize things, I've made salt dough ornaments. I'm planning to make a few more batches to give away.

And because Christmas is about sharing (among other things), I've decided to share the how-to of this fun project. If you have a budding craft maven at home, this might result to hours and hours of fun in the kitchen. So here goes....

For the dough, you will need flour, salt and water. I used 2:1:1 ratio - 2 parts flour, 1 part salt, 1 part water. Mix the dry ingredients and add the water slowly. You don't need to put in all the water.

Knead the dough and flatten with a rolling pin just like how you'd make sugar cookies. Cut out the shapes using your cookie cutters. You can use whatever shapes and sizes you want. There is no hard and fast rule as to what you can use. I used Christmas cookie cutters.

When you'll find the dough starts to dry and become a tad difficult to knead, add some water until you get the desired consistency - wet enough that it doesn't crack when you knead.


For the ribbon hole, you can use drinking straw to poke the hole. This way, you'll have a perfect tiny circle.


To embellish, you can stamp or even draw on them. You can also use glitters if you want. You can do however way you want to prettify them. I used my Christmas-themed rubber stamps. Because I am going to hang these ornaments on the Christmas tree by our old leather couch in the living room, I decided to use burgundy to go matchy-matchy with our leather couch. I didn't have burgundy ink so I used food colour in lieu of a regular ink. You can also use acrylic paint.

To dry these ornaments, you can either "bake" (set it to the lowest possible temperature) until they're dry. Or you can just air-dry them. Again, there are no set rules as to how you'll dry them as long as they're dry and have hardened enough when you hang these little beauties.


And one more thing - you can add some cinnamon powder in your dough mixture. I did that in all the batches I've done. It smells like ginger bread cookies in the room when they're hung. And it also adds a "vintage" look because of the brown specks.

So there you have it. Enjoy!

Over a slice of brownie

I had fun hanging out with some of our closest friends last night. And as always, over a big meal and sumptuous desserts, we talked about our favourite topics - the kids, our husbands. In between these topics, some new jokes were told, old ones were retold. Added to that, health concerns were discussed, the whole she-bang ;). All in all, life is good. It's not perfect, but good overall. Nobody needs it to be perfect anyways. So....

I made some brownies and shared it with my friends last night. I made it more decadent by adding some roasted pecans and topped it with cheesecake swirls. For the cheesecake swirls, just beat together 250 grams of Philly cream cheese, 1/3 cup sugar and 1 egg. Spread it on top of your brownie batter and make some swirls by using a spatula or a barbecue stick. I used chopsticks and they worked like a charm. Bake like you would bake a regular brownie. If you want a brownie recipe, you can try this.

It's good to serve these brownies warm with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream. With a glass of cold milk is how I like it especially on a quiet weekend afternoon.