My New Hangout

So this winter has forced me to accept a new reality when it comes to what I believe to be cold. Since we have had so many days that were -20°C or below, my body has come to think of warmer temperatures (-5°C or above) as actually warm.

This winter has also led me to believe that spring/summer aren't actually coming. We just live in Westeros now, winter came, it's going to last years, and we all need to suck it up and move on. So this is me moving on.

This is my -5°C or higher "day at the beach" zone. The backyard still has 3 feet of snow in it, so this is my drive-way hangout. I've got books, hot chocolate, my sunnies, and a few layers of winter outerwear. Reading with mitts on isn't the best, but seriously, I'm taking what I can get at the moment.

Twitter and pi Day

I have been on Twitter for about a year now and a new thing happened for me on Friday: I got a bunch of retweets. I'm pretty sure it all had to do with the magic combination of posting the right thing, at the right time, with the right hashtags, and having a cool photo. The tweet was for pi day and my blog post about it. I posted it around noon on Friday (pi day) and was really excited by the response it got.

Throughout the afternoon I got 37 Retweets and 21 Favourites. This was a new record for me to say the least. My biggest amount of RTs previously was 5. So even though the pi retweets wasn't quite an Ellen Oscar selfie, getting as many as 37 was pretty cool for me.

The RTs also had an effect on my Blogger stats, as I linked to my blog in my tweet. In six hours, I got more page views on the pi day post than most of my other posts get in a few weeks. So cross posting to social media made a huge difference for me on pi day.

UPDATE: (March 22, 2014): Last night I got an email from the Twitter team with my weekly stats. I've never gotten an email like that before, so maybe it had to do with all the action around this tweet. Not only did the tweet get all the retweets I previously mentioned, but the photo itself got almost 15,000 views. Holy shit!!

 

St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes

This past weekend I wanted to make a treat for gaming night that had a little St. Patrick's Day flare. Cupcakes are always a great go to for me, and I took to Google for some ideas, as I didn't have any shamrock accents (sprinkles, cookie cutter, etc.)

I found a fun recipe on allrecipes, that had a burst of colour inside a white cupcake. I had my winner.

I started with a white cake mix, which I substituted unsweeted applesauce for the oil. I always do this when I make a cake mix and I love the flavour of the finished cupcakes/cake.

After mixing up the batter, I put 2/3 of it into baking cups (about 21 baking cups).

The remaining third of the batter I dyed green and piped it into the middle of the cupcakes.

Using a resealable bag as a makeshift pastry bag, I snipped off the end and added a baking tip, so I could accurately squeeze the green batter into the center of my cupcakes. I actually used a baking tip that was far too wide for this purpose, and the green batter rushed out faster than I was expecting. Because of this, adding the green took very little time but some of the cupcakes got green batter on more than just their middles. I decided I could fix it in post (with all the icing on top, I was sure no one would really notice).

I made my favourite icing, marshmallow buttercream. If you haven't tried it yet, do give it a shot. Really, really, good.

In the baking cup

Unwrapped

Surprise! It's green inside!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Hope you are having a great day!

Happy Pi Day!

It's Pi Day! And that is a great excuse to make a pie and carve a mathematical symbol into it!

My favourite pie right now is Raspberry Pie, and this one was made with a pre-rolled Pillsbury crust, which was waaaaayyyyy to easy to use. Might be my go to from now on, if I'm not feeling up to tackling a crust myself.

Making the pi pie was really easy. I just printed out a pi symbol, cut it out, and placed it in the center of my pie so I could carve around it.

And believe me, this pie was mathematically delicious!

So Happy pi day friends! Are you doing anything pi oriented?

Snickers Bar Squares

One of my favourite aspects of being part of a RPG group, is that I get to bake and share treats with my gaming friends. I love making sweet things for this particular group of people as they all genuinely enjoy yummy treats. My friends are also very open about how much they appreciate the goodies too - which always makes me feel great. I was raised to see food as love so I am happy to have so many wonderful people to share my baking experiments with. This is the good life! :)

Our most recent get together I made Snickers Bar Squares. This recipe is slighly adapted from the amazing yoyomax12. Definitely check out her YouTube Channel. Her videos are awesome.

This is a no bake recipe that has four layers, each of which has to set in the fridge before you can start the next layer. I was marathoning Breaking Bad when I made these, so each layer was made between an episode, or about every 45 minutes.

Line an 8x8 pan with parchment paper and set aside.

Layer One: Chocolate
Ingredients:
2/3 cup milk chocolate chips
3 tbs butterscotch chips
3 tbs peanut butter

Add ingredients to microwave safe bowl. Melt in microwave, stirring every 15 seconds, for 1 minute.

Pour into prepared pan and place in fridge to set.

 

Layer Two: Nougat
Ingredients:
3 tbs margarine
2/3 cup white granulated sugar
3 tbs cream
1 cup marshmallow fluff
3 tbs peanut butter
2/3 tsp vanilla
1 cup chopped salted peanuts

Add the margarine, sugar, and cream to medium saucepan on medium heat. Stir and cook until it begins to boil. Continue to boil for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter, vanilla, and marshmallow fluff. Stir in chopped peanuts.

Spread nougat over the chocolate layer and place in the fridge to set.

Layer Three: Caramel
Ingredients:
200g caramels (about 28)
2 tbs cream

Unwrap the caramels (*note: unwrapping them is the worst*), and place in small saucepan with cream over low heat. Stir until completely melted and smooth.

Spread over nougat layer and place in the fridge to set.

Layer Four: More Chocolate
This layer is the exact same as layer one.

Ingredients:
2/3 cup milk chocolate chips
3 tbs butterscotch chips
3 tbs peanut butter

Add ingredients to microwave safe bowl. Melt in microwave, stirring every 15 seconds, for 1 minute. Spread over caramel layer and leave in the fridge to set.

Once hardened, cut into delicious squares.

Share with friends and enjoy!

I cut these a few hours before taking them to gaming night and found the caramel got a little unruly, and oozed a little out of the squares. Next time I might add a little less cream to the caramel layer to make it a little firmer.