Berry Berry Bread

Happy Memorial Day to all!  I hope that you all had a restful and long week-end!  This week-end we decided to sequester ourselves in the apartment and try to potty-train my daughter.  It was a particularly blustery and overcast day on Saturday.  Perfect weather for hiding out in the apartment.  Since we were confined to the indoors, I decided to take the opportunity to make breakfast.  We happened to have strawberries and blackberries in our refrigerator, which I thought would make a delicious breakfast bread.  I used the recipe found in my previous post here  except I substituted strawberries and blackberries for the fruit/ nuts addition.

My daughter who just turned two, is growing by leaps and bounds every day now.  Her affinity for helping in the kitchen has not declined in the least so she was excited to help me make the bread.  Needless to say, everything she was doing came to a dead halt when she saw I was beginning to make something.  She stopped eating what she was eating, got off her chair, and pulled up her stool up to the island where I was working so she could see what I was doing.  So of course I let her help me mix the ingredients and add the berries, and together we watched the bread rise in the oven.  She even insisted on bringing my cookbook to the bathroom when she sat on the potty so she could “read” it!  She is a constant source of entertainment!

This bread is a wonderful spring bread.  I loved the flavor of the berries mixed together.  I think I took it out of the bread pan too soon (out of eagerness) as gravity quickly began to pull it down and it ended up in quite a squat form.  Despite it being one of the uglier breads I made, it was still delicious.  The berries were piping hot and very fresh, so the bread had a wonderfully bright sweetness to them.  My daughter and husband quite liked it and I have to admit that these impromptu breakfast breads are quite tasty and fun!

A Kitchen Extravaganza – Part 3

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful mother’s day!  Congratulations to all the mommies out there for doing such a wonderful job with your kiddies!  The best mother’s day gift I had was coming out of the bathroom and having my daughter walk up the stairs, see me, and say “Happy Mother’s Day!  I love you!”  What a little dear!

My goodness!  This kitchen really took some time to make!  You can follow the progression from my previous posts here and here.  Living in a small apartment with limited space really makes it difficult to craft a larger project and not have it become a hazardous area for your toddler!  I must say I’m very pleased with the result.  Even before I started adding coats of paint to this to make the kitchen look nicer, my daughter was thrilled at having a kitchen.  It just goes to show you the power of a child’s imagination.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of leaving some sharpies out one morning and my daughter ended up drawing all over the freshly painted stovetop.  Alas, the red paint I got can’t seem to quite cover up the sharpie marker…. man those things are permanent!

This entire project cost me about $30 for some knobs, a p-trap for the faucet, and paint.  Everything else I had on hand.  I wanted to make an oven because my daughter got an adorable cupcake and cookie set that came with oven mitts.  No kitchen is complete without a sink.  I used an small stainless steel mixing bowl I had on hand.  Since I was making this, I measured to make sure everything she owned would fit in this: sushi kit, stir-fry kit, cupcake kit, and cookie kit.  I’m very pleased with the results and my daughter has already had endless hours of fun “cooking” for us.  I just hope it stands up to the abuse.

Here are some more pics of the finished product.  I hope you enjoy!

Top view of kitchen

Diagonal view of the stovetop

View of sink: the faucet swings back and forth

Oven with storage drawer below

Front view of overall kitchen

Specs on the kitchen:

Measurements: 24″W x 12″D x 32″H

Sink: small stainless steel mixing bowl w/ a lip

Oven door: window is plastic from a cheap $3 Ikea frame I had on hand

Drawer: leftover box from the Melissa & Doug cupcake set

Stove knobs and faucet knobs: larger ones are pot handles I got from the hardware store

Small knobs: extra pulls that I didn’t need from my Ikea bedstands

Sink Faucet: p-trap from hardware store – I screwed the p-trap into the ring and glued the ring to the countertop so the faucet actually swings around like a real faucet.

Bar for hooks: plastic LED fixture cover I had as a sample from work

A Kitchen Extravaganza – Part 2

Well, I finally mustered up enough motivation to take a look in our basement for materials to build a play kitchen for my daughter.  We live in an apartment building with a communal trash/recycling room and there are always lots of cardboard boxes on hand.  I thought to myself “what a great use of free resources!”  I pilfered heavily from the basement and for the next two days our apartment’s living room looked like the trash room.  I think I may have stressed out my husband and my mom (who was staying with us at the time).  My daughter thought it was the next amusement park though.  She had a blast playing with scraps as I cut, measured and glued stuff together.  It reminded me a lot of my architecture school days building models hour after hour.  It was actually quite fun.

Based on my previous post, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted this kitchen to incorporate.  It needed an oven, stovetop and a sink.  Once I figured this out, I had to think about how I proportionally wanted it to look.  Being an architect, I drew a plan, front elevation and side elevation, thinking of the easiest way to accomplish this without any unnecessary hardware or additional bought items. (Sorry for the shoddy photos, my sketches got a little messy from use…)

Of course my first pass wasn’t perfect.  My first iteration had the oven door as the full left side panel.  This resulted in the door opening, being too deep for my daughter to reach into, and her stepping on the door to put anything into the oven.  She ended up not liking it so much and didn’t ever want to use it.  Also, she somehow accumulated all of these utensils and other items and had nowhere to put anything so it turned into a hazard zone where you had to be careful not to step on a fork or other item.  I decided to cut the door down and add a drawer in the bottom.  This was exponentially better as she immediately took to putting things in the drawer and taking them out.  Also, the door to the oven shortened so she no longer was in danger of stepping on it and breaking it.  This little add made the kitchen that much more useable and “real”.

Above is a sneak peek of part of the kitchen in it’s finished state.  Stay tuned for more to come!

A Foray into Fair Isle

One of my inspirations in learning how to knit stemmed from my admiration of the fair isle pattern. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with this pattern I knitting. I didn’t know it’s name until I stumbled across a great free pattern for a knit child’s hat with a fair isle pattern. This was one of the many projects I was secretly coveting and wishing I had the skills to accomplish.  Once I got the proper tools and found that knitting in the round isn’t such a terrible mystery, I felt confident enough to try this pattern out.

I didn’t have time to run to my usual yarn shop as I’ve been particularly busy at work, so I was fortunate enough to squeeze a quick run to Michael’s one week-end when we visited the grandparents.  I was a little nervous about the sizing of this hat, not using the yarn that was called for in the pattern.  I’ve found in my crocheting forays that sometimes the gauges of yards, depending on the manufacturers, don’t necessarily align.  Reading the labels on the yarn don’t necessarily yield what you expect, if you would use another manufacturer’s yarn that has the same information.  Well, I decided to give it a go and see what happened.

I ended up using Paton’s Lace Yarn, which was the closest thing I could find to what the pattern called for.  I found the yarn to be light, and easy to work with and the result is a beautifully delicate looking hat.  I slightly modified the beginning edge of the hat to emphasize the ribbing a little more and I couldn’t find enough colors in the Paton’s lace yarn line to provide this effect so I ended up using the pattern in a monochromatic fashion.  I am very pleased with the end result.  I think that it ended up beautifully delicate and that the yarn is light and airy but will still keep a head nice and warm.  The pattern itself was exteremely easy to follow and I found that having a pattern as distinct as this made keeping count of my stitches extremely easy.  I loved watching the pattern unfold as I knit away!

However, as I had originally feared, despite making the “child” size, it ended up being just the perfect fit for my daughter’s 2-year old noggin, and certainly not able to fit my daughter for the next winter season.  Sadly, I guess this just gives me an excuse to make another in a larger size, yes?

A Kitchen Extravaganza – Part 1

Kid-O Cutting Fruit

Ever since my daughter was small, my husband and I would try and include her in the preparation of our meals. We would hold her as we stir-fried simple foods for dinner, have her stand on a stool by the sink and help us to clean vegetables, have her stand on a stool and watch us chop vegetables, wash rice, or have her help hold the mixer as we made batter for cookies and cakes. She absolutely loves helping in the kitchen, and while sometimes it is more of a chore to have her underfoot, we love that she is interested and engaged and wanting to help.

Perhaps due to this, my daughter has been enamored with kitchens. She LOVES the play kitchen at her daycare and can spend hours prepping food, having the other children “try” her concoctions, and cleaning up. I started to get an inkling of how much she enjoyed them at home when she would play with her stir-fry kit from Melissa & Doug and add her crayons into the bowl to make a “soup”. I find it so interesting to see her make her imaginary food and then have us all try it. It’s incredibly cute and I want to promote her imaginary play as much as possible.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to a friends birthday party and they had the most compact and adorable play kitchen that I’ve seen to date. I loved it immediately because it was simple and compact, but didn’t impede a child’s personality. My daughter was stuck on this thing like a no other. We couldn’t even get her to leave to come out and sing happy birthday to her friend! Instead, she sang as she “cooked” up a concoction. It was ridiculous yet so cute. What really sealed the deal is that shortly after, my daughter had a birthday party and got this great cutting fruit set (shown above) that she kept playing with but had nowhere to put it. I resolved to myself to look for play kitchens for her. The only problem, which is so familiar to anyone living in NYC, is that everything boils down to space. We just didn’t have room for anything very large. While I could have purchased her friend’s kitchen, I just couldn’t bring myself to spring that much money on a play kitchen that I don’t know will get that much use. Also, I just kept looking online and thinking “I could make one of these, why should I buy one?”

So, from my various pinterest and online forays, here are my three favorite play kitchens for compact spaces.  Plenty of inspiration to get me started!

Brio Play Kitchen – $120.06

Alex Toys Play Kitchen – $88.00

Corcorico Cardboard Play Kitchen – $27.00

To Infinity… And Beyond!

My eldest nephew recently turned four. While I wasn’t able to be there to celebrate with him, I wanted to make something very special for him. He has been a great lover of the Toy Story movies and especially Buzz Lightyear. He has everything Buzz: blanket, pajamas, action figures, you name it!

In one of my previous posts I had illustrated my daughter with some of her friends in the vein of A.A. Milne and I thought that it would be nice if I could do something memorable and meaningful like that for my nephew. I thought that an illustration that built on his affinity for Buzz as more of a friendship as opposed to Buzz being a toy would be a really interesting study. I thought of the Calvin and Hobbes comics and the idea solidified in my mind on what I wanted to do.

This gift actually took me a while to complete. I had mocked up the image right when I had the thought, but it took time find time to gather all the materials (paper, frame) since I had a very particular idea in my mind. I used regular art sketch pad paper from my large spiral sketch pad and an Ikea Ribba frame. I love these frames because the are affordable and are a great design. They are simple, frame items beautifully, and I like that the depth of the frame seems to elevate the design of even the simplest piece of art that it is framing.  What do you think?

A 2-year old Affair

This past week-end we celebrated my daughter’s second birthday. This was an especially festive occasion as both sets of grandparents would be present, as well as two of the three uncles and aunts, and the newest addition to our family!  My husband and I unwittingly made a bold decision to go bigger this year. We ended up having about 30 people in total (children, parents and grandparents) and the party was a blast!

My daughter was so excited for her party.  Even though she is only two, she understood that she was having a birthday party and was singing happy birthday to herself and all of her friends (many of whom have birthdays in very close proximity to hers).  We practiced blowing out candles, baking fake cupcakes with her toy cupcake set, and looking at her party dress that was saved for this special occasion.  When today finally came, she was so excited she could barely nap and squealed at the opportunity to change to her party clothes.  It is amazing to see how much she has grown and what she can comprehend, all at the tender age of two.

I had gotten it into my head a while back that this birthday party would be a dinosaur theme. My daughter seemed to really love dinosaurs and while her attentions have waxed and waned, I couldn’t help but stick to this theme. Part of the reason was that on my trip home back in June, I had dug up these really great dinosaur cookie cutters that my mom had used at one of my brother’s birthday parties when we were kids, and I always thought they were the coolest things in the world. I couldn’t pass up a chance to use them myself!

I used a very basic sugar cookie recipe for the base cookie and a royal icing recipe for the coloring.  My mom had bought these cutters from Wilton’s years ago, but had held onto them.  My mom was a great help in lending her hands to aid in the icing of these guys.  I think that they turned out great and we individually packaged each one and put them in a goody bag full of fun things for the kiddies.

Of course, I didn’t stop there.  We also had cupcakes.  I ended up using Magnolia Bakery’s devil’s food cake recipe for the cupcakes and a very simply cream cheese frosting for the decorations.  I added a little bit of sparkle by dipping the top tips of the cupcakes into silver dragees (which, by the way, were a huge hit with the kiddies – sparkly and sweet?  What’s not to love!?!)

All in all, it was a great party.  It’s amazing to reflect upon the last two years and marvel at how life changes in the blink of an eye.  I have to thank my husband for his foresight in ordering platters of food as well as for the grandparents for bringing other yummy snacks while I concentrated on the sweets and baking.  It was a wonderful concerted effort.  Happy birthday to my little honey!