Homemade Cheese

So, we did it! Mom and I took the plunge and made mozzarella cheese!! It was super easy using the instructions here. The citric acid was easy to find, you can find it at most wine stores. The hard one to find was the rennet, but, it can be ordered on the Internet for cheap. The entire time we were doing it we were sure it must be wrong, nothing seemed to be exactly as the picture.

Here is our version of how it went down...

The final product... Drumroll please....

It turned out exactly as it should!

And throw it on some pizza and you get?

...a masterpiece... This is what my mom made for dinner... I will use mine tonight!!!

Adding it up, it's pretty cheap... You barely use anything other than the milk, so it was probably less than $5 for all the cheese!!

Little Dude's Room

I have been wanting to blog about my little dude's bedroom for quite a while. He is now 2 and a half, so no longer a nursery, but a big boy room. This was a big project and was a lot of work. We had just bought our house and there was still a lot to do. In this room, we had to pull the carpets and baseboards, the room was basically gutted. We were on a very tight budget for this job, after recently purchasing a home and expecting our first child as a young family.

Hubby started by replacing the carpet and baseboards. He went discs end of the roll place and got some carpet a bit cheaper, which hubby installed himself. He also managed to replace the baseboards himself. Then we needed to paint. This was one of the largest project in the room. I had this idea to do big squares and was inspired by colors on all the baby stuff I had gotten!

After we had colors picked out we wanted to do bedding and curtains. With the help of my mom we came up with some great ideas. We went to Ikea and bought a long beige curtain. We also purchased baby duvet, so we just needed to make a cover. When I was looking around at different bedding sets, they were all super cute, but, they were so expensive and included lots of things,such as bumper pads, that I wasn't going to use. Anyways, we also went to the fabric store and bought some fabrics. We brought along our paint chips and choose fabrics with the same sorts of colors. We weren't that concerned about what the patterns were, because the colors would tie it all together.

My mom took the long curtain from Ikea and cut it to a good length for the window, then with the rest She made the front of the duvet. For both, she cut bits of the colorful fabrics and sewed them in strips. We had also purchased a softer fabric, which we used for the back of the duvet. We used some big bright buttons to fasten it closed on the bottom. With the scraps she made some little pillows for the glider chair.

As for the furniture, The crib was a gift from the Inlaws, and we put an old bookshelf in the room, that my dad had made for my mom, years ago. Lastly, we looked everywhere for a dresser/change table. Everything was so expensive. I waited until babies r us had a big sale. When we went they were clearing out a lot of stuff. The one I got was more than 50% off the original price and then the guy loading it in our van took a chip out of the bottom, so we got it even cheaper. It was a great deal!

When we were traveling in the mountains shortly after little dude was born, we found these stuffed animal deer heads. If you can imagine, they were kind of cute. After much debating, we bought one (which we call ray). This however, turned into a bit of a joke, and now we also have a bear hear and a polar bear rug... Overall, I still love his room and like that it is a bit different than other babies room; there is not a "theme" per say, but, just colors that we liked.

 

Safari Birthday

My good friend asked me to help her make her son's first birthday cake. I decided it was the least I could do to celebrate the fact that they had survived their first year together as a family. I was excited to help, but nervous when she said that there would be almost 60 guests at this party! This meant it would have to be much larger than any of the cakes I had made so far.

She choose the theme "safari." After much googling, I came up with a few ideas. The original idea looked somewhat like this. 2 tiers, covered in fondant. On the inside I made a marble cake, chocolate and white cake. It ended up being pretty neat, because when it was cut it looked like zebra stripes. ( just google "zebra cake batter design" and you will see what I am taking about and how to do it). We also decided to do a little smash cake in the shape of a safari hat.

I baked the cakes, leveled and added crumb coat, with the help of my husband, the day before we decorated. Then, I let them set overnight in the fridge to make the icing nice and hard. The key is to cut the "domes" that form while baking all the way off to leave a level top on each cake. Then, put a thick layer of buttercream of the top. Take the second layer, and place it cut side down on the buttercream. It can be pressed a bit to make it completely level on top. Now you have the somewhat smoother bottom on top, which is much easier to ice than the crumbly side that was cut. A generous layer of buttercream is added on the whole cake. This is important because it helps the fondant stick.

I had pre made the fondant with the help of my mom. She has a kitchen aid mixer, so it makes the process much simpler. I made marshmallow fondant, as I mentioned in other posts, however, this time I precoloured them all in the mixer to avoid having to do it by hand again. This simply required a bit of planning to know approximately what I wanted. I did leave one chunk white, so that I had some for extra colors if I decided to make any changes to the design, which inevitably happens.

In the morning, I covered each layer with fondant to make transportation much easier. I finished the safari hat, which was just a small rounded cake, which I had baked in a small well greased metal bowl. I covered it in buttercream and beige fondant, added a few strips and voila, it was done. That was a pretty simple task. I took all the cakes to my Fellow mommy's house and with the help of a 1 year old, 2 year old, a 16 year old sister and a dog, we finished decorating the cakes. I pretty much let my friend have control over the decorations, just helped her with the technical issues, such as how to glue fondant together (with water) and how to clean off cornstarch (with vodka).

The final product ended up being really cute and was definitely a hit at the party.

I learned at least 2 lessons from this project; one, always make sure you know the scope of a project before agreeing to it... And two, I 100% understand why they charge so much for these cakes. If I were charging, I calculated that I spent about $50 on supplies and approximately 10hours planning, baking, making and decorating this cake. This one year old hit the jackpot this year with a $250 present :).

 

Summer fun

I would say that summer is officially over now. Not only is it getting cold (it's only 11c today), but, I am also back in class (my last year of university). I haven't blogged much, for 2 reasons; the first, summer was crazy, the hotel, that we call our house, was busting at the seams all summer. And 2, because I wasn't at school, I wasn't using my Laptop and blogging on the iPad is a bit of a challenge. But, now I am attempting to use a new app to see if I can more easily and efficiently blog.

So, back to the summer; other than lots of guests and mini-trips, we spent a lot of time outside in our garden. We have a lovely rainy summer, so we ended up with quite the harvest. Apples, tomatoes, peppers... It was great. However, it all seems to ripen at the wrong time.

This summer my little harvest began just as some friends from Germany showed up. That means one lucky guest got to spend days helping me can. (thanks t... Hope you still enjoyed your working vacation :) )

We spent days making apple sauce, apple pie filling, salsa, dill pickles and bread and butter pickles. I enjoyed it and now have a cupboard full of jars for the winter. And don't worry, I sent T home with some as well.

I even made my own labels for all the jars. I bought Avery labels and made a simple design using their templates. I learned that if you are looking for cute backgrounds, the best search option I found was "fabrics." this way they had a bit of texture and were generally cute and simple.

Anyways, here is a little picture summary of the canning project. I will update the blog soon with some other exciting projects I have completed recently!