Sunday, October 31, 2010

It has begun..

Truth be told, I'm a holiday junkie. Yes, it's true. I love holidays. Not only do I love holidays, I love specific seasons. Seeing how there's only four seasons out of the year, I'm rather fond of 50% off 'em, which is Fall and Winter. Coincidentally enough, my favorite holidays fall within those two seasons: Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Since my home is already decked out for Fall / Thanksgiving..there really isn't much I can do in terms of Winter / Christmas since, logically, December isn't here yet. Eric has established a rule that I'm not allowed to put up any Christmas sort of decorations till AFTER Thanksgiving. I concur, even though it's rather hard for me to behave since Christmas is the best holiday of the year.. ya know..aside from my birthday and all.

While we were out doing our usual Saturday routine, we stopped off in the PX-tra to get dog food for our pack of ankle biters. When we walked in, there was a good sized display area FULL of Christmas decorations! My pace quickened cause I made the wheels on the shopping cart chirp, plus, my eyes dilated with a sensory overload of "happy things". What did Eric do? Sighed. Heavily. Once I scurried over to the display and kept surfing the ornament section, Eric abandoned all hope and went searching for food and treats for the dogs since he knew I was a lost cause.

This is what I ended up with:

The pack actually comes with 48 ornaments! Not bad for $20! It's a dual sided box, so what you see on this side, they have the exact same ornaments on the other side. I liked it cause of the quirky lil bulbs in the middle...figured they'd add more "spunk" to the tree :)

I couldn't remember if we had a tree topper or not. In all honesty, you can always have more toppers since you can always change them out :)

See??? Nothing too bad! I really refrained from buying another tree skirt, or other decorations for the house. HOWEVER... the season for Christmas Markets is fastly approaching and I will be bombarding them with a vengeance since they have awesome blown glass ornaments (we each pick one out every year), plus cool lil things for the house.

I can already hear Eric weeping...

Kitchen Theater

Just bare with me... I was really bored, despite the fact that I'm really tired from baking all day...and it's barely 11am. I've been up since 5am between cooking bread, cakes, and even cookies.

I was staring at my bag of dried cranberries and was trying to figure out what to make with 'em. I mean, sure, I can make trail mix.. not really feeling it. I originally bought them to make pistachio cranberry sugar cookies, but Eric pretty much nixed that whole notion since he hates pistachios. So, I started trolling through Allrecipes.com and found a recipe to make Pumpkin / Cranberry Bread. Might as well try it since it sounds like a pretty "Fall-y" recipe!

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 cups white sugar
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup chopped walnuts (I ended up using Pecans)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour 2 9x5 inch loaf pans (or 4 mini loaf pans).

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, pumpkin pie spice, baking powder and salt.

Combine eggs, sugar, pumpkin and oil in small mixing bowl, beat until just blended.

Stir the wet mixture into the dry with a wooden spoon until batter is just moistened.

Fold the cranberries and walnuts into the batter.

Spoon the batter into the prepared loaf pans.

Bake in preheated oven for 50 to 60 minutes. (If using mini loaf pans, begin checking bread after 25 minutes.)

FIN!

Free Time = Pointless Baking

Now that I have a lot of time on my hands, I try to waste some of the day by baking. Luckily, my son has the week off from school, so he'll gladly help me dispose of all this sinfully sweet stuff (it's be rather porky of me to eat it all). I'm sure Eric would be willing to help, but I have a feeling he's going to be PT testing again pretty soon ....so, not too many fatty goodness things for him!

A while back, I posted a recipe for "Oreo Cake"...here's the link to that post (scroll to the very bottom). Anyway, I figured I'd try making it in cupcake form today...same exact ingredients, only 20 minutes of baking time.. and tah dah! Came out amazing! With the frosting, I added extra powdered sugar so it'd make it a little thicker, rather than having it drip all over the place. All in all, it came out really well (John gave it two freckles up).

Andddddddddddd here's my artistic pictures:

Dutch (Sand)Castles

After editing well over eighty pictures from Sunday, I can finally start writing a blog, LOL.

Eric, John & I went over to The Netherlands to check out Castle Hoensbroek, which was built around 1250. Our main reason for checking the place out was because they have this awesome sand castle exhibit and several of my friends had recommended seeing it. After viewing their pics, I figured it'd be cool to check out.

In the process of buying our tickets, we added on access to the castle cause you can actually go in there and walk around, check out some of the rooms in addition to some of the things that were left from it's original tenants.

The view when you're walking from the parking lot into the castle foyer:

I was really diggin' the house crest and the window.. trying to be artistic and what not...

Once you bought your tickets and cleared the little shack that sells them, you can get a view of the actual castle:

Makes you kinda imagine what life was like back in the day. I mean, this must have been really impressive back in the 1200's when people were arriving via horse drawn carriage.

Once I was done being a paparazzi to the castle, we made our way into the second foyer where you actually go inside. You can feel how old the place is because of the old old cobblestone, the navigation sign in the middle of the foyer, even the old barrels they had set up with a laundry line of clothes:

When go you inside, you pretty much walk through a cafe to get to the castle stairwells. Lemme just tell you this.. they are NOT meant for people who are over 5"7. John and I didn't have any trouble getting through the corridors and narrow stairs, but Eric felt like he was having to shimmy his way through since he's 6"3. The stairs in this place reminded me of the old castles in England that I checked out.. VERY tiny steps, low ceiling and if I was any wider, I probably wouldn't have made it through, lol. We finally found a little room to pop into and check out...sadly, all the stuff was in Dutch, so I had no idea what any of the information said. BUT, some of the things in there were pretty interesting:

Little knight!

After the claustrophobic stairs and rooms, we made our way over to the larger parts of the castle where people used to entertain guests and such.

The coat rack outside o the ballroom.. impressive, hunh? LOL

Ball Room:

The view from the ballroom:

I fell in love with this room! The wall had green damask fabric all over it! The whole pattern was continuous throughout the whole room..even the curtains!

From there, we walked through another hallway that took us to a Tea Room that was set up as if there was an event in there. On the way, I fell inlove with this mirror.. I totally want it!

A view to the foyer:

The Tea Room:

The ceiling in the Tea Room:

There was a small room to the side of the Tea Room.. kinda looked like it was meant for writing letters and such, but the only thing in there that peaked my interest was this trunk, lol. I want it!!

We were done trollin' through the castle and wanted to make our way over to the sand castle exhibit that was just outside of the foyer. I guess they build all the sculptures around mid June all the way till the end of October. HOW do they get those to stand for so long!?! I figured will all the rain we've been having lately, it would've destroyed the sculptures! I mean, some of these things have ALOT of detail, so I could imagine the rain ruining then, ya know?

Outside of the exhibit:

My absolute FAVORITE sand sculpture! Neuschwanstein Castle! This thing was HUGE!

Here's a pic of us infront of it just to get an idea of how large it was:

Eric & John

Eric and I

There were just tons and tons of awesome sculptures at this place!

I'm guessing this was supposed to be a witch burning?

Torture chamber:

Horses grazing:

This shady character is rollin' with some people in the back of his wagon...although, the guy sitting to the side doesn't look all that nice either.

This gal is probably thinking "WHEW! Close call!"

This totally makes me think of home. Back in Monterey,California, the county seal is a Cypress tree..I mean, I know this isn't a Cypress tree or anything, but it looks like it's from the seal.

The Paleis Het Loo! I've yet to see the actual palace in person, but apparently it's in The Netherlands somewhere and has been converted into a museum. Yet another thing to add to my "To Do" list.