Friday, November 23, 2012

Happy Thanksgiving! Crafts and Recipe Critique

This year I had people over for Thanksgiving since we are away from family.  Since I was entertaining, I wanted to add just a little more fall/autumn decor to spice it up a bit.
How I made the sign: *If you had a cricut or something like it, this would be a lot faster to make.
-I bought some textured scrapbooking paper that had these raised polkadots ( in mustard, a camouflage brown, and a nice autumn red).
- I traced a cd onto the paper to make the circles, then hand cut them.
-I also hand cut the lettering like my other sign (from computer generated lettering) and printed it on an off white cardstock.  The off white went a lot better with the colors I chose.
-Then, I found leaf templates online, printed on cardstock, then traced them onto the fall colored paper, then cut those out.
-Then I glued everything together (using elmer's glue)
-I bought a burlap ribbon from Ben Franklin and decided to use that to hang the letters on.  I hot glued the circles onto the burlap ribbon.  That worked great.

 Below: My daughter and I made these adorable and yummy acorns!  Pinterest inspired.  I saw a pic of these on pinterest, but no instructions.  I assumed they used frosting or melted chocolate to stick the Hershey kisses to the MINI nilla wafers (don't use the bigger ones, it won't look good), but I thought Nutella would be delicious, so that's what we did.  We used Nutella as the glue and used a toothpick to make the "stem" of the acorn.  These were a hit.  Thanks Pinterest and whoever came up with these!

 Below: I used the burlap ribbon I used for my "Give Thanks" sign to decorate vases I had around the house.  I filled the 1st vase pictured below with tangerines because I couldn't find little pumpkins but it still added that pop of color I was going for.  If I could find small lemons, I could have used those also. I filled the 2nd vase below with pomegranate seeds as an appetizer.  The 3rd vase is just for decoration purposes and I filled that with macadamia nuts that I had laying around the house that I didn't get around to roasting.  They looked fall-ish, so I filled a vase with them! 



Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes

I also tried this pumpkin pie cupcake recipe (this is not my picture, mine didn't look this nice) that I made for dessert at my Thanksgiving dinner.  I found the recipe on Pinterest.  I made the mistake of filling cupcake liners 1/3 way full instead of 1/3 cup like the recipe said.  Which made my cupcakes pretty shallow, but it still tasted great.
*Critique: 4 Stars
 Here is the link :
http://bakingbites.com/2009/10/impossible-pumpkin-pie-cupcakes/