Three Things Thursday :: Bose SoundLink Mini, Netflix and Jackaby

I didn't think I had three things to talk about for this post and truthfully it's been hard coming up with three.  I've made a commitment to get my finances under control this year and I made a budget for myself, which has really helped me see how much money I don't have and how it's unacceptable for me to let my mom buy the groceries this week because I can't afford it.  I have plenty of things to entertain me and I have enough clothes to cover me.  I budgeted in buying some clothes only once a quarter (so March, June, September and December) and for two months I haven't bought anything online that wasn't for:  a) someone's birthday, b) seeds for the garden or c) already on a revolving charge.  And honestly I've felt really good.  I feel more content and less anger or guilt over spending money I don't have.  So coming up with three things for this post was hard, but I managed.  The first was an early birthday present from Mom, the Bose Soundlink Mini.

I had been eyeing a bluetooth speaker and truthfully I wanted one of these cute little speakers, but they are only available in England.  Le sigh.  The curse of reading magazines from the UK is that you can't buy what they advertise.  So I did some research and was going to buy a cheaper bluetooth speaker off of Amazon but then I went to Costco.  Curse you Costco and your amazing ability to hear a speaker before you buy it!  I stood there in front of the Soundlink listening to song after song and then Mom came back and found me and I stood her in front of the speaker and we were both smitten. I tried to logic myself away from it.  But then Mom said she had no idea what to get me for my birthday coming in March and I said that speaker would be enough.  Besides it was $40 cheaper at Costco than Amazon, so really I was saving her money.  ;)

So what better place to try it out than while relaxing in the tub?  And what better way to use it than to stream The Great British Baking Show on Netflix?

I have been paying for Netflix and not using it for a long time now.  I'd just let it hit my credit card every month and then use it once a year.  But recently I was told that season one of GBBS was on Netflix and I've been using it more than ever!  I found TV shows that I love and haven't gotten to see all the seasons and movies that I ACTUALLY want to see.  I'm really happy and surprised with Netflix's offerings and maybe I'll try getting my moneys worth out of my subscription.  Back to the idea of "be happy with what you have."

So my last thing is the book I'm currently working on, Jackaby.  I picked it up at Inklings, our local bookstore, on one of their 20% off Saturdays.  At the end of the synopsis on the inside cover it said "Doctor Who meets Sherlock" and I was sold.  It's a great quick read and reads really easily.  If you like a mystery novel with a bit of the mystical thrown in, this book is for you.

Recipe Tuesday :: Cupcake Mania for a Baby Shower

A friend at work recently was throwing a baby shower for Melissa, another of our co-workers, and asked me for my best cupcake recipes.  She didn't imply that is was for the shower, so I sent her over a couple of good ones and then I thought...wait, I bet I know what this is for.  So then I sent her a note that said, "If you want I can make cupcakes for the shower..." and her yes was quicker than a NewYork minute.

When I make cupcakes for someone's birthday I always ask them what their favorite flavor is.  It gives me a chance to make a new recipe and sometimes I find some real gems that way.  Melissa asked for Funfetti with cherry frosting, which was a boxed cake and canned frosting that I would bring in on the occasional Friday at work for Funfetti Friday, because cake makes everything better.  She also said that she liked lemon flavored cupcakes, so I knew that my Lemon Curd Cupcakes would be on the menu.  I know that there are two kinds of people, those who like flavors like cherry and lemon in cake and those that don't.  I figured I'd throw in some chocolate cupcakes with Nutella frosting for the purists.

I couldn't make two fantastic cupcakes and then bring a boxed cupcakes along with them no matter how good they were.  So I jumped on Pinterest and found some cake-box-hacks that make a boxed cake mix taste like homemade.  I also saw some pins on how to make your own, but since I was going to make all three of these in one night I figured I needed a break on something.  That didn't mean I was going to go canned for the frosting however and decided to make a cherry cream cheese frosting.

That's right I pulled a 5 hour cupcake baking marathon that proved to me there's no way I'm leaving my day job to do this full time.  I worked a full day and then came home and baked and frosted from 4:30 until 9:30.  I only have one mixing bowl for my Kitchen Aid mixer so I had to make a cake, wash the bowl, make another cake, wash the bowl, make the last cake, wash the bowl, make the first frosting, wash the bowl, make the second frosting, wash the bowl, make the last frosting and throw the bowl in the sink because I was not washing it one more time.  I did get to use my awesome new scoop for dishing out batter which was nice.  It was just an eye on the prize kind of adventure with the prize being my warm bed at the end of it all.  I did learn some things though.  I think that homemade cupcakes are better than even that cake-box-hack.  I felt that the frosting shown and the cake was meh.  So unless there are some serious additions that go into the recipe (as the Lemon Curd Cupcakes do) it just not really worth it and it doesn't save that much time.

I also learned that lower fat cream cheese is not ideal for making frosting with unless the butter/cream cheese ratio is upped.  On the lemon cream cheese frosting I used two bricks of cream cheese to one stick of butter.  No matter how much powdered sugar I added or beating I did would make that frosting stand up.  It was like soft serve ice cream.  Boo.  So when I went to make up my cherry cream cheese frosting I only used one brick cream cheese to one stick of butter.  It made a big difference.  So now if you've read down this far, I shall reward you with that wonderful recipe!


Carrie's Cherry Cream Cheese Frosting

1 brick of cream cheese
1 stick of butter
2 tsp cherry extract
4-5 drops red food coloring (or as much to get the color you want)
3-5 cups powdered sugar

Bring cream cheese and butter to room temperature.  Blend until creamy in a mixer.  Add cherry extract and mix well.  Add powdered sugar 1 cup at a time until you reach your desired thickness.  Near the end of add all the sugar, add the food coloring.  If it's too dark it will lighten up as you add more sugar.  Frost your cupcakes and enjoy!

I even bought a cupcake stand to display them all since I thought just setting out 60+ cupcakes was kind of a let down and they needed more of a send off than that.  But I forgot to bring my camera to the shower and so you'll have to put up with an iPhone shot instead.

But seriously.  Get out there and make some cherry frosting!

A Bit of Knit :: Winter Trails Hat

I was having trouble coming up with a name for this new series.  Should it be WIP Wednesday?  WIP means Work In Progress, which made a nice alliteration with Wednesday but I thought it was a little much with the other "day" blogs I do.  I worked through a lot of possibilities before I came up with "A Bit of Knit".  I made a list of things I'd like to accomplish this year and blogging a bit more regularly was one of them.  I'd done well last year until we hit October and mostly that was because I became too busy and then uninspired to blog.  So I've set up a schedule for myself, which somehow makes me feel obligated to blog.  I've also found that I haven't blogged much about my fiber addiction and that felt like a missing hole in this journal of my life.  So here we go!  I hope you enjoy it.


What I'm working on right now...The Winter Trails Hat in Madelinetosh Tosh Vintage, colorway Sea Salt.

I've made a few hats in my knitting career, some for me, some for family and friends, and mostly they've been the normal tube kind with maybe a cable or two.  My current favorite is this slouchy number that works with the cutest mini-skeins called Unicorn Tails from Madelinetosh.  I've made one for myself, one for Nicole's daughter Emily and am working on another for me.  But I've found something out about myself.  (On a side note -- I feel that suddenly realizing a preference or truth about yourself is the best part of being an adult.  The kind of realizations that don't rely on what other people think or what society says you should want, but what you truly want.  It's freeing somehow.  Okay, deep thought over.)  What I've found out is that I don't look good in those tube-y hats.  They look like....my head is too small for my body and I'm wearing a used, ummm c_ _ d _ m on my head. Seriously.  So I've changed my hat outlook.  I'm looking towards tams now.

A tam is also like a beret in the fact that it gets big right away but they are less stiff than a beret.  I'm looking for volume in a hat and a tam certainly has that.  Winter Trails isn't as slouchy as some tams, but I'm hoping it will look good.

I've also had to add stitches to this project because every hat I work on has too small of a diameter for my big noggin.  Whenever I manage to work out the math to add inches to my project I feel like I have a superpower.  So for this project the size said it fit 19-23 inch heads.  My head is 24 inches.  But it's a pretty cable heavy hat, so I needed to make sure that the increase was a whole repeat of the pattern.  The pattern was 26 stitches and the initial number of stitches to cast on was 100 stitches.  But there was two increase rounds to get to the 130 stitches needed for the body of the hat after knitting a knit 2, purl 2 ribbing.  So the numbers looked like this:

Cast on 100, increase to 125, increase to 130 for 5 repeats of a 26 stitch pattern.

So to add one more repeat of the pattern my final number needed to be 130+26=156.  So going backwards they added 5 stitches in the second increase, one for every pattern repeat.  I'd need 6, so my second number needed to be 150.  So now I had this:

Cast on ___, increase to 150, increase to 156 for 6 repeats of a 26 stitch pattern.

How many to cast on?  In that first row they worked 4 stitches per 1 stitch increase, so 150/5=30.  150-30=120.  My cast on number was 120.  Before I went ahead with that I needed to make sure it was divisible by 4 because of the knit 2, purl 2 ribbing.  120/4=30.  Perfect.  Math is my superpower!!!!!

And now to the knitting...

Recipe Tuesday :: Taco Stuffed Peppers

A Tasty video come to life!  I am standing up and admitting that I am a Tasty video addict.  Every time one shows up on my Facebook newsfeed I will stop and watch the whole thing.  Now most of the time I think, "Yeah, that's got to have a bajillion calories in it" and move on.  But this week I saw Taco Stuffed Peppers.  I watched it in awe.  Then I watched it again.  Wait, one more time.  Then I got a piece of paper and watched, wrote, paused, wrote, rewound and wrote until I had the recipe down.  This. Was. Happening.

I've always thought the idea of stuffed peppers sounded good, but every time I made them I didn't like the taste.  Most of those used Italian spices and sausage and other things, but when I saw the Mexican flavors in this I knew it would be amazing.

In the video they used 1 whole pound of beef!  There's no way that all the insides they made fit into only 3 peppers.  I pared that down and omitted the corn just because I'm not a fan of whole corn in my Mexican food.  I also like more tomatoes and less spice, so I added some chopped tomato to it also.  Here is my Taco Stuffed Peppers for two...


Taco Stuffed Peppers for Two

2 bell peppers
6 oz lean ground beef
taco seasoning to taste
1/4 cup onion
1/2 can black beans
1 cup cooked brown rice (I used one Minute Rice Ready to Serve cup)
1/3 cup salsa
1 roma tomato, chopped
1/2 cup 2% Mexican blend cheese
Toppings:  fresh cilantro, sour cream and guacamole

Core peppers and place standing in a glass dish.  Bake 20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a skillet brown ground beef and add taco seasoning.  I usually add a touch of water and cook down until the sauce is thick.  Add the onion, black beans, rice, salsa and tomato and cook until warmed through.  Add the cheese right at the end and mix in until melted.  Throw in some cilantro here if you'd like or use it just as a topping.

Take the baked peppers and fill them with the skillet fixings.  Top with more cheese and bake 15 more minutes at 350.

Top with cilantro, sour cream and guacamole.  Serve with tortilla chips on the side.

Magic in a microwaveable cup I tell you...

The skillet fixings are so good that you could probably just make that and put it in a tortilla or top nachos with it.  We had a little left over and they are waiting for a quick dinner for me sometime this week.  Mom also thought that after coring the peppers we could cut them in half and do baked half-shell peppers so that you can just pile up the skillet fixings on top.  Whatever way you want to make them, just do it!  They! Are! Awwwwwwesome!!!

Where I've Been

At the beginning of autumn I found myself offered an opportunity.  There was a contest offered by the local city council to help start your business.  It included classes about writing a business plan, marketing your business and technology available for small businesses.  I had dreamed about starting a cupcake business for a while.  My big dream was to have a cupcake food truck that would go around three days a week and sell cupcakes.  I signed up for the contest and was really excited.  For the month of October I was busy drawing up the financials, looking up how to get a food truck and refurbish it, what sort of legal hoops I needed to jump through and how to write a business plan.  And it took All. Of. My. Time.  Eventually it went from a food truck to just a stand at the farmer's market in the summer.  But that meant I would give up every weekend I had off to sell cupcakes and then bake those cupcakes (read hundreds) in my "free" time after work and at the end of a year I'd make around $10,000.  I may or may not have had a minor breakdown.  And then in all of that Mom said something that freed me.  "Who says you have to do it?"  I was caught up in not letting anyone down.  I feel so guilty if I say I'm going to do something and then don't follow through that I felt locked in to creating this business.  There were other people in the contest that had businesses that were their livelihoods or were giving up their day jobs to start a business and here I was still clinging to my day job and thinking of starting this business for what?  For fun?  I realized that I am not prepared to start baking as a business.  I am not an expert at baking and I have never baked more than one set of cupcakes at a time to take in to work.  The work it took to do the financials was torture and that's what most of my time would be about.  I have so many other things that I love to do or want to learn to do besides my day job and all of the time I have to do them would be lost to making cupcakes.  I love baking, but not being forced to make them, lets me do it for fun not for profit.

Around this same time I was writing a lecture for the students in the Medical Laboratory Science program about clinical microbiology.  It's what I am (a Medical Laboratory Scientist) and what I do every day (clinical microbiology) and what I've done for 10 years.  It was easy to sit down and write about microorganisms and pathogens and all the intricacies in identifying them.  And I realized in that I am close to an expert.  I have experience and certifications and I really love doing it most days. I've felt restless and unhappy in my job recently but I also realized that I am free after I leave the laboratory.  For the most part it doesn't follow me home.  I have time to do those other things, like knitting, blogging, photography, gardening, that I would have to give up for making cupcakes.  So the job that I thought would free me from my unhappy job would actually shackle me to it.  I would have less free time, work more and ultimately be even unhappier.  And in that I found more job satisfaction and was more thankful for my day job than I had been in a long time.  If I ever did want to try my hand at making cupcakes in the future I at least have more information.  Because I wouldn't want to do it poorly.  I would want to succeed and right now anything I did would not succeed.  I don't have the energy or the will to see it through.  So I've found contentedness again in where I am.  And I'm thankful for that.

Recipe Tuesday :: Autumn Apple Cheesecake

So I was pretty sure that I had already done a post about making this cheesecake before.  I mean, I make it every Autumn and it's a favorite at work, requested even.  But I searched all the way back to 2012 and didn't see a single post about it!  How could that be!?  I mean look at all this deliciousness...

I know, right!?  Well, here is the post you've all been waiting for.  If those pumpkin bars didn't get you two weeks ago, then maybe apple is the fall flavor you're craving.  My recipe came from a Philadelphia Cream Cheese cookbook I picked up at Costco on a whim one year.  I've tweaked it, of course (when don't I tweak a recipe?), and so I'll give you the link to one that looks just like the original and also type up my tweaky one below.  I also looked on Amazon to see if you could still get it and there were "new" ones for $1.50.  Seriously, only $1.50 for the most amazing cream cheese cookbook ever.

But really.  You need to make this cheesecake.  For the sake of fall!

Autumn Apple Cheesecake
(tweaked by me)

Crust - 
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
3 Tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter. melted

Filling - 
2 packages (8 oz each) cream cheese, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs

Topping - 
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
pinch of ground allspice
pinch of ground cloves
4 cups THINLY sliced peeled apples
1/4 cup finely chopped pecans

Crust Instructions:
Mix together graham cracker crumbs, pecans, sugar, cinnamon and melted butter.  Press into bottom of 9 inch springform pan.  Bake at 325F for 10 minutes.  Let cool.

Filling Instructions:
Mix cream cheese, sugar and vanilla with a hand mixer on medium speed until blended.  Add eggs one at a time, mix on low speed until just blended.  Pour over crust.

Topping Instructions:
Mix together sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves in a small bowl.  Pour over apples and toss well to coat.  Spoon apples over cream cheese mixture and sprinkle with pecans.

Bake at 325F for 1 hour and 10 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes, until center is almost set.  Run a knife around the outside of the cake to loosen and allow to cool before removing rim.  (I usually wait until after I take it out of the fridge to do this.)  Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight.

My biggest tip for making this perfect is to get one of the most amazing gadgets ever, the Apple Mate by Norpro.  It peels, cores and slices the apples into the perfect pieces for cooking on this cheesecake or in a pie.  We've used ours when we have bumper crops of apple from our fruit trees and want to freeze them in ready-to-go bags of apple pie fillings.  Small apples seem to work best and they can't be too soft, but it really works.

And now a fabulous food photo to end on that'll make your tummy grumble... ;)

Recipe Tuesday :: Church Pumpkin Bars

I recently saw an advertisement for Starbucks that said "Fall starts with three letters, PSL."  Many of us understand that the taste of pumpkin equals fall.  (PSL stands for Pumpkin Spice Latte, if you hadn't figured that out.)  With the trees starting to change and the evenings getting chilly enough to turn on the pellet stove, a pumpkin recipe was in the cards.  Enter my family's favorite fall treat, Church Pumpkin Bars.

The recipe was given to us by our church to make for a CCD Family Night back when I was a kid and though it's gone through a bit of modification (the original asked for 1 cup of oil!) it's been a favorite ever since.  This year I topped it with my favorite Cream Cheese Frosting from all the cupcake making and I'm sure that will become a tradition as well.


Church Pumpkin Bars

4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups pumpkin (fresh cooked or 15oz canned pumpkin)
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt

1.)  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2.)  In a stand mixer add eggs, sugar and oil and mix until well blended.
3.)  Add pumpkin and blend well, then add in vanilla and mix.
4.)  In a separate bowl place the dry ingredients (flour through salt) and whisk until well blended.
      While mixer is going add the dry ingredients to the wet.
5.)  Grease and flour an 11 X 17 cake pan.  (You can spray it with non-stick spray instead.)
6.)  Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
7.)  Let the cake cool before frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

8oz (1 brick) cream cheese
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1 to 2 Tbsp heavy cream (or milk)
1 tsp vanilla
2 to 5 cups confectioners sugar
(pinch of salt if frosting is too sweet)

1.)  Bring cream cheese and butter to room temperature.
2.)  In a stand mixer add cream cheese and butter and blend until smooth.
3.)  Add 2 cups sugar and 1 Tbsp cream and blend until smooth (about 1 minute).
4.)  Add vanilla and 1 Tbsp cream (if needed) and blend for 1 full minute on high.
5.)  Add sugar one cup at a time and blend for 1 minute after each addition until frosting reaches the
      consistency you want.  My frosting is always sort of a soft-serve ice cream consistency.  Add in
      the pinch of salt at the end if you think it's too sweet.
6.)  Pour the frosting over the cake and smooth out, the frosting will harden just a bit on the top as it
      sits though it stays deliciously soft underneath.  You can also add chopped walnuts to the top if
      you'd like.

Doesn't that look like a plate of autumn decadence?