Weekend of fun!

It's been a long and wonderful weekend at chez Chang! I checked my email Saturday morning to discover I've been accepted to grad school!! Now to survive 10 more terms of school 2 nights a week while working...I've made it 6 terms while working and pregnant with/caring for a newborn baby, so this should be cake right?

Speaking of cake...wait till you see what I just finished making (and promptly devouring...). But let's go in chronological order since I have so much to share from this weekend:

Saturday night's dinner:

 

From the left: fresh corn simmered with butter and shallots, salmon on a cedar plank and black rice

Black rice is chewy and full of antioxidants (more than blueberries!), if you haven't tried it you should buy some the next chance you get.The salmon came preplanked at Costco, so I cheated a bit on that one, but it was still delicious.

Today we went to Juanita Beach Park. It's a newly renovated park on Lake Washington. The City of Kirkland reopened it this year after reclaiming the beach and adding wildlife friendly features, like wetland areas and drainage paths that protect the beach and the lake. The girls are practically fish, and little George spent the afternoon trying to barrel roll off the blanket before I could catch him.

 This last shot is at maximum zoom on my phone, a bit grainy but you get the idea: Daddy sacrifices his shorts to the lake to play with the girls :)

After we got home, I whipped up some butterscotch to top off this glorious cake:

 Yes, that is Pirate's Booty, a sippy cup, and Korean sea salt in the background. What?

I lost track of how many crepes are in there, I think I count 13?

 This is the Banana Bread Crepe Cake with Butterscotch from Smitten Kitchen. A lot of the recipes I make these days start out as one from Smitten Kitchen, or are inspired by Smitten Kitchen...I spend hours browsing through the history on that site and am still amazed. Maybe someday, when I'm not taking pictures with my phone, I can have a site that inspiring :)

A recent experiment not to repeat, the Pobbler. I love pie, I love cobbler. A good friend suggested combining the two, so I did! And it was not delicious...

 That's a bourbon peach pobbler right there.
A delicious deep dish pie crust baked in a the ring of a springform pan. It is thick, flaky and perfect.

The filling is a take on this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. I substituted white peaches for yellow, and brown sugar for the white she used. And I may have added extra bourbon, I'm pretty sure I just poured a bit. The filling was rich without being over sweet, the peach flavor and the bourbon came through, accented by the brown sugar. Also perfect.

The cobbler topping is my favorite go to from "The Joy of Vegan Baking." Vegan or not, you should get this book. It is easily the best baking cookbook I have ever owned. You can see it open to the cobbler recipe in the photo. This cobbler dough is delicious.

Put three delicious things together....and I was totally underwhelmed. We threw out the leftovers a week later after they'd been forgotten an molded inside the cake stand, which never happens at my house! I'll make this again, but only the pie or the cobbler. No more pobbler for me!

 Now off to watch Olympic swimming finals and work on my next crochet project :)

Project Home, part 1

Aaron and I have lived in 7 places in the last 9 years, moving our growing family with us. I've  always felt that each place was really just a placeholder, but never a home. Each time we moved was a little mini-adventure (and a lot of heavy lifting for Aaron...) and it was nice to have the freedom to move when and where we wanted. Now that we've completed our family, the wonder of new places has worn off, and I find myself wanting to make a sense of home for the kids.

This weekend, I set to work on a few little art projects: framing the paintings my mother gave us for our wedding (nearly 9 years ago now) and painting some art for the kids' room. Both on a very small budget.

For the painting, I purchased two 12" frames from Michaels:

and used 2 pieces of scrapbook paper in "Cinder" as matting:

These paintings are going up in our room, above our dressers.


For the kids' room, I bought 4 12" canvases and scrounged paint I bought for another project in their room that I will share as soon as I finish it :)

I found a font I liked, and enlarged each of their initials on my computer screen, then traced them in marker. I cut out the tracing, and taped it to the back of each canvas. Then I held the canvas up to a reading light and painted the letters in.

For the fourth canvas, I got foot- and hand-prints from each of them...Aaron had to help with George and I had to paint over his a bit to get the right idea...but that still counts, right?

I wrote their exact age next to their prints and hung them about the dresser on their wall:

Here is a close up of their prints:

I'll add more projects as I finish them, hopefully this year :)

I also have a pretty big backlog of baking experiments to share, so brace yourselves for way too many cakes!

I survived!

I made it out the other end of perhaps the craziest thing I have done in my life: grad school prep, working full time and carrying my son at the same time. One set of finals at 39 weeks pregnant and another set with a 9 week old baby. This week, I'm done!
I made a happy, healthy baby. I got higher grades than I needed (just barely, but I'm counting it as a victory!). I got promoted at work.
All this means I have the summer to finish all the projects I have on hold, and bake all the confections I've been drooling over. And I have time to go through the photos I've taken this year and finally turn them into posts :) I hope you all enjoy crafting and cake, because there's about to be a whole lot of both.
And possibly nerdy commentary on the world....but mostly cake.