Molly wanted a Hamburger Cake for her birthday. We trolled around the Internet and looked at lots of photos and ideas. This is what we came up with. It might look like something difficult but let me be the first to tell you-I am not much of a baker and if I can put this together anyone can! I don’t have any photos of the cake in progress.

I bought 2 cake mixes-1 yellow and one chocolate. I made the chocolate in a 8×8 brownie pan-square patty like Wendy’s burgers!

I made 2— 8 inch rounds out of the yellow cake but filled one with more of the batter (bottom bun smaller-top bun larger.)

After they cooled I trimmed the patty to make it nice and flat as well as trimming the bottom bun. Then I took the extra chocolate cake and added it to the top of the top yellow cake bun to make it more dome like. Make sense?

I bought 3 cans of frosting 1 chocolate and 2 white

We took some frosting out  and divided it into 3 bowls for condiments and added food coloring –red for ketchup, green for lettuce and yellow for mustard. You don’t need much. After you reach the desired color put each into a plastic bag and squeeze down to one bottom corner. set aside.

Take more white frosting into a bowl and add color to look like American cheese—use this to frost graham crackers to look like cheese slices on the burger.

Take the other can of white frosting and make it bun colored-we added a bit of the chocolate frosting for some color plus some food coloring.

Now to put it together

bottom bun cake first with burger patty (chocolate cake) next. Frost the chocolate cake with the chocolate frosting-making the edges look burgery!

 To that we put the graham crackers already frosted on the edges of the burger cake-hanging over a bit. We didn’t go all the way into the middle of the burger with these I wanted it to stay stable and thought this might make it tippy and too sweet. We did use more of the cheese frosting between the graham crackers and on the edges to look like melting cheese.

Then top with top bun. Use the bun frosting to glue the dome shape together. Try to smooth the frosting out as much as possible. Now get your condiment frosting’s and cut a tiny bit off the corner (a little larger for lettuce) and pipe lettuce around the bottom edge and squeeze squiggly ketchup and mustard on the cheese frosting.

We added a few slivered almonds on the top for seseme seeds.

This really wasn’t too hard. And it was surprisingly good. I thought it was going to be way too sweet-but it wasn’t. It was a little hard to cut but no one seemed to mind!

Flubber is a homemade version of silly putty. It’s cold, slimy, a solid that flows and incredibly fun to poke, stretch and play around with. Especially for those tactile loving kids!! And it’s a nice break from playdough.

You will need 1 1/2 cups warm water

2 cups white glue

1 1/3 cups warm water

3 tsp Borax

food coloring

mixing bowl and spoon

This could get messy –so be prepared

In a large tubby combine food coloring, glue and 1 1/2 cups warm water

In a smaller container, combine 1 1/3 cups warm water and Borax. Mix ingredients in each container thoroughly.

Pour contents of smaller container into larger container. Gently lift and turn the mixture with a metal spoon until only about a tablespoon of liquid is left.

Flubber will be sticky for a moment or two. Let the excess liquid drip off-then it is ready. Stretch it, bounce it, roll it!

Flubber is an example of a non-Newtonian substance-appears to be a liquid and a solid at the same time. Here is some science behind it.

Store tightly covered for up to 3 weeks.

Peppermint and/or Pine scented Playdough

In a pot mix together

1 cup flour

1/2 cup of salt

2 t cream of tarter

add

1 cup water with many drops of red or green food coloring

2 T oil

several drops peppermint essential oil to the red batch and pine essential oil to the green batch

cook on medium heat until a ball forms and pulls away from the sides of the pot.

Put this into a plastic tubby with a few holiday cookie cutters attatched and this makes a great gift for a little person.

Most would call this an advent calendar. And most would start on Dec 1. But I am a little late this year and if Ginger wouldn’t have found her thrift store Christmas sweater in the laundry basket, which was intended for one of the days surprises…..I most certainly would have made this the 20 days until Christmas garland or even  the 10 days. You get the idea—there is still time to make this!!!

I found the idea for this at Maya*Made. Her’s is much more neat, I am guessing she didn’t have little elves helping her! Also I am borrowing her idea for time tickets! Love it! I am planning to give several of these “dates” to my kids as Christmas presents also.

You will need a paper tube for each day. If you are using paper towel tubes you can cut them in half.

Cut 4 slits around the bottom of each tube and fold them up and tape them shut to form a bottom on each tube.

Next have your helper cut a decorative edge around the top.

Then number them and use a hole punch to punch 2 holes on either side of the tubes (so the number is in the middle).

I made a mistake and only punched one hole and they didn’t hang as nicely.

I used a hot glue gun to decorate these with pieces of silver rope garland, beads, jingle bells, and flat glass star pieces.

My next mistake was that at this point I stuffed them with shredded paper-I suggest waiting until after you string them if you plan to use any “fluff” in them!

Then I strung a long piece of yarn through the holes (be sure to put them in numerical order) and secured them to our mantel.

I tried to keep the cost down and bought a few things from the thrift store-a Christmas sweater and T-shirt, PJ pants, a game to share. I also bought some candy and gum.  And of course, the time tickets!

Now, I decided to wait until each night after the kids are in bed to stuff these tubes or else they may all get opened in one day!!! If the surprise doesn’t fit I will either wrap it or leave clues to where it may be found. It was reassuring to me to see so many days left until the actual holiday. I haven’t even started my shopping!!!

This is sort of how this project felt…crazy.

First off  you will need some flat leaves for this project. Next, you will need a tablecloth to decorate. A quick trip to my local thrift shop got me a gold tablecloth-perfect!  You will also need fabric paint. So,  a hopeful run down the one craft aisle at my grocery to find fabric paint and save me a trip to the craft store,  revealed fluorescent colors. Boo!! But then out of the corner of my eye, on the clearance rack, I spied the perfect Fall colors of permanent acrylic paint. Score again! I love when things are easy and work out that way! It doesn’t usually happen, so I was indeed happy with my lucky finds!

So I cleared the way in my kitchen to spread the table cloth on the floor. My kitchen is small and my floor isn’t spic and span-eww- and the tablecloth took up all the available floor space. That meant we were constantly walking all over the tablecloth–eww again-it also meant the material kept getting wrinkled up. I begin to get annoyed.

OK-next I spread out some newspaper and paper plates with the paint, leaves and brushes.

You will also need more newspaper and a rolling pin for this project.

Paint the underside of the leaf—the veins will give you a better print.

Then carefully put the leaf, paint side down, on the tablecloth and cover it with wax paper or a sheet of newspaper. Carefully so that the paint that is all over your fingers doesn’t get all over the tablecloth.  Then again-carefully, so that the leaf doesn’t slide around, roll over the top of the newspaper with your rolling pin a couple of times.

Remove the newspaper and then carefully peel your leaf back up-so that you don’t just drop it back down creating paint splots on the tablecloth. And watch were you throw your cover piece of paper-it has wet paint on it. Are you feeling my blood pressure rising??

Can you see that I was a little too invested in the product of this project!!! Part of it was this was a little messy for my kitchen floor and tables. Water colors or tempra are one thing but permanent acrylics are another. As Ginger walked over the wet paint back onto the wood floors and I am yelling, “Don’t step in the paint, wipe your hands off, don’t get that paint on my rolling pin, you’re wrinkling the tablecloth” etc… etc….  But surprisingly-they endured my fussiness  and the leaf prints came out great. We plan on using this on  our Thanksgiving table.

So the moral of this story is…if your looking to make this a really perfect looking tablecloth…do it your self. If your looking for a fun project for your kids…protect all surfaces and  shut your mouth. Allowing the kids to make it without being over supervised (and probably taking most of the fun out of it)!! It will look great either way! Another lesson learned!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

This was a fun and fairly simple recipe to make and because it uses rapid rise yeast, they don’t take hours to prepare. And the results were delicious!!!

I suppose these aren’t “real” bagels because we didn’ t boil them-but the recipe (on tattered piece of paper from unknown origin) calls these bagels. So……….

Pumpkin Bagels

4 1/4 to 4 3/8 cups all purpose flour, divided

1 package quick rise all natural active dry yeast

1 cup warm water (120-130 degrees)

1 cup canned pumpkin

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

Combine 2 cups of the flour and the yeast. Add the warm water, pumpkin, sugar and salt.

Beat with a mixer on low speed for 30 seconds, scraping the bowl constantly. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes.

Using a spoon stir in as of the remaining flour as you can.

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface.

Knead in enough remaining flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic-about 5 minutes.

Cover and let rest 10 minutes. Grease a cookie sheet and set aside ( or use parchment paper)

Divide the dough into 10 portions.

Real life math!

Shape each portion into a smooth ball.

Poke a hole into the center of each ball and pull to make a 2 inch hole.

Place on prepared cookie sheet. Cover and let rise 20 minutes. Pre heat oven to 375

Bake for 25 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

While you are waiting for your bagels to cook you can make your maple butter and honey butter.

For the maple butter just combine maple syrup to taste with softened butter in your mixer using whisk attachment. Whip it up  and store in the fridge so that it doesn’t separate-if it does just stir it up again. (maybe 3/4 stick of butter to 1/4 to 1/2 cup maple syrup) again more or less to taste.

For the honey butter we mixed about 3/4 stick of butter with 1/4 to 1/2 cup honey, a few drops of vanilla, and a shake of cinnamon in the mixer. More or less to taste.

When your bagels are finished baking-smear lots of these sweet, creamy butters on your warm bagels and enjoy!!!

The recipe made 10 bagels…enough for us to have homemade pumpkin bagels and maple and honey butter again this morning!!

This is a super easy, super cheap, super messy way to temporarily color your hair!

We used about 3 to 5 squirts of hair conditioner to 3 packets of the same flavor Kool aid. DO NOT use it with sugar, just the flavor packet. Kool Aid stains everything …so be careful!

You may need to add a bit of water. You don’t want it to drip off of your hair but it needs to be spreadable. Remember to use old or disposable cups as this will stain whatever you use. We used paint brushes to put it on our hair.

Seperate hair into sections and paint some of the Kool Aid color on to hair. Avoiding scalp and skin.

Next we wrapped the colored hair in foil to keep it from staining anything else.

It is key to leave it in your hair as long as you can…the longer the better. So we slept in ours. It does get a little itchy!

Then we rinsed it out really well and gently washed our hair.

Voila…strawberry, black cherry, cherry and blue raspberry hair color!!!

It has been almost a week since we colored our hair and since the girls went swimming a few times theirs has faded some but mine is still pretty bright. We all have really light hair so the color took well. If your hair is more brown it won’t be as dark as ours. It was only supposed to last about a week…hmmm. I may have pink hair for a little longer than expected!