Tinkerbell Cake

My daughter recently had a birthday and she just had to have a Tinkerbell party! A few years ago, she had a Tinkerbell party and I made a Tinkerbell cake with the Wilton's pan of Tink's face. This time, I wanted to do something different and this is what I came up with.

The cake itself is a strawberry cake (the same recipe for the strawberry basket cake) with purple and green sprinkles to make it a confetti cake. The frosting is the same strawberry cream cheese frosting as the strawberry basket cake, but with extra powdered sugar added to thicken it some. I made the flowers out of fondant using a cookie cutter and a toothpick to press in the lines to separate the petals, then brushed some edible gold dust (Wilton's) onto the flowers to look like pixie dust. I bought the Tinkerbell doll at Target in the toy section, since I thought it was cuter than the cake-topper Tinkerbells. All the kids loved the cake! 

I was originally thinking of giving out fairy wings to the girls and pirate swords to the boys during the party, but decided against it since the wings would get caught on everything and I'm sure someone would get hurt by a plastic sword. Since I want all the moms to still like me, I bought eye patches for the boys and made bell bracelets (since Tinkerbell's voice sounds like a bell to humans) for the girls instead. The bracelets were super easy, I just used stretchy sting and little bells! 

Reusable Panty Liners

I have been busy the past few months, so busy that I haven't had time to post what I've been up to! Between weeding my flower beds (where do the weeds keep coming from?!?!?), house work, and taking cake decorating classes (more on that in a later post), it has been hard to find a spare moment.

Last night, however, I finally finished up a sewing project I had started several months ago for reusable panty liners. I saw the pattern for them here in Hillbilly Housewife's website a while ago and at first the idea grossed me out, but after a while the disgust turned to curiosity. What would it be like to use cloth liners? Lots of people use cloth diapers for their babies and they don't seem to be grossed out by the clean-up, or at least not enough to stop using them. So with the Hillbilly Housewife pattern in hand, along with some old flannel baby blankets and towels, I set to work on making some panty liners.

This project was really easy to do, which is nice since I am not really an experienced sewer. I followed the basic directions in the pattern and for the inserts I sandwiched a piece of dish towel between 2 pieces of flannel baby blanket. I would definitely recommend following the suggestion in the pattern to use darker flannel since it hides the stains better. I had a bunch of light pink flannel blankets from when my daughter was a baby, so I went ahead and used those instead.

They were easy to make, but were they easy to use? The answer is yes! They are so comfortable, since they are just soft flannel. They are more bulky than disposable liners, but they breathe better and don't ruin your panties with adhesive strips. And washing them really isn't that bad, either. I just rinse them out in cold water and wash them in my regular loads of laundry.

To make your periods super "green" switch out your tampons for a Diva cup or other menstrual cup, then Aunt Flo will be virtually waste-free!

Have you started your seeds yet?

If you plan on having a vegetable garden this summer, now would be the time to start your peppers and tomatoes, since they take a while to get going. That is exactly what we did tonight, started our jalapenos, bell peppers, and tomatoes. There are seed starter kits out there and sure, they look all fancy with their plastic trays and little balls of peat moss, but why pay for those when you can DIY your own starter pots?

I saved some cans, almond milk cartons, and to-go cups from restaurants (anything that would work well as a pot), then added some potting soil and the seeds and viola! A seed starter kit for the cost of a bag of potting soil! Make sure to label your containers, that way you know what is growing in each one.

This picture is full of DIY/reuse ideas. See the glass in the top left corner? That has some green onions growing in it. I found the idea on Pinterest, basically you take the white bulb ends of green onions that would otherwise be tossed, put them in a glass of water and they should grow. Then you just snip what you need as you need it. Pretty neat, right?

The table itself that the "pots" are on is a make-shift table made from an unused closet door and two sterilite bins. My daughter has LOTS of Legos and she really hated having to take apart her creations to get them back in the bins. So we decided she needed a table of some sort where she can play with her Legos and leave her creations out and out of the way. We looked at coffee tables, but it just seemed silly to pay $200 on a coffee table for Legos. This table, while not stylish, is definitely affordable (free!) and green since we are reusing what we have.

Bean and Mushroom Soup

I still have lots of marinade left over from the portobello sandwiches and the marinated chicken, so I decided to take Isa's (from the PPK) advice and add it to a stew. I love bean soups; they are easy, versatile, and cheap. Normally when I make bean soup I toss in whatever I have on hand and play with the spices, so every batch of soup is a little different. To make things a bit more complicated, I never write down what I do for ingredients, so if a batch is super good I have no way to easily recreate it. This time I decided to live life on the wild side and actually wrote down what I tossed into the ol' crock pot!

The soup was really good, the marinade added a nice savory flavor and it reminded me of a beef stew (but without the meat!). The marinade added so much flavor I didn't have to add any spices, just a little bit of pepper and salt. I sliced up the mushroom stems from the portobello sandwiches and added them to the soup and they added a nice texture. It would probably be even better with sliced mushroom caps instead of stems, but that was all I had.

Just for my own curiosity, I decided to measure the water I added when the beans were soaking and measure it again in the morning to see how much they absorbed. The 2 cups of dried beans absorbed 2 cups of water, so I'm guessing you could just increase the water in the soup by 2 cups if you don't want to soak the beans overnight.

Bean and Mushroom Soup (inspired by PPK)

2 cups dried mixed beans
3 cups vegetable broth
1 cup water
1 cup “Perfect Grilled Portobellos” marinade from Veganomicon/The PPK
1 large carrot, chopped
2 ribs celery, sliced
1 ½ cups chopped kale or escarole
1 small onion, chopped
1 tsp minced garlic
1 ¼ cups mushrooms (I used the stems of the portobellos)
Salt and pepper, to taste

Soak beans overnight it warm water. In the morning, rinse beans thoroughly and add to crock pot. Add all ingredients except salt and cook on high for 4-6 hours or low for 8-10 hours (I usually cook on high for about 4-5 hours then switch the crock pot to low until dinner time). When beans are cooked, add salt, if desired. Note: If you forget to soak your beans, add an extra 2 cups hot water to the crock pot and cook on high for 8-10 hours.

Add some gluten-free drop biscuits (or regular if you aren't gf) and dinner is served!

Marinated Chicken and Mushrooms

In my last post I told you about the portobello mushroom sandwiches I made. Well, the marinade was so good, I just couldn't throw it out! So, I poured the remaining marinade into a jar and stuck it in the fridge. I looked through the comments of the post on the PPK to see if anyone posted any suggestions for other uses of the marinade and I found a few. One commenter said that they marinade chicken in it and, since I have a freezer full of chicken, I decided to give it a try.

Now my photography skills are not that great, but please don't let the terrible picture fool you. This chicken was delicious! Here is the recipe:

Marinated Chicken and Mushrooms (inspired by PPK)

2 chicken breasts
1 – 1 ½ cups mushrooms
1 – 2 cups leftover “Perfect Grilled Portobellos” marinade from Veganomicon/The PPK

Fillet each chicken breast in half lengthwise to make 4 thinner fillets. Place fillets in an oven-safe dish, add mushrooms and enough marinade to thoroughly coat everything. Let marinate for 1 hour, flipping chicken occasionally so both sides are marinated. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 30 minutes or until chicken is cooked all the way through.

Isa from the PPK also recommended marinating tofu and tempeh in the marinade or adding it to stews. I still have a lot of marinade in the fridge, so I think I will try a stew with the rest of it!

Delicious Portobello Sandwiches

There is a restaurant in my area that makes the best grilled portobello sandwiches, but since finding out I am gluten-intolerant, their sandwich is off-limits to me. Luckily, my sweet husband bought me Veganomicon for Christmas and it has a recipe for grilled portobellos (which can be found online at the PPK!) that taste almost identical to the restaurant's. And since the marinade is made from scratch, I can modify it easily by using gluten-free soy sauce!

To copy the restaurant's sandwich, I took the Veganomicon portobello and added roasted tomato aioli from Bobby Flay, caramelized red onions, grilled red peppers, and avocado, all on top of toasted gluten-free buns. The most time-consuming part was the aioli, but that could easily be omitted to make this a quick meal.

I meant to take a picture of this beautiful sandwich, but we ate them all before I could!

Strawberry Basket Cake

Last week, I needed to make a cake and I wanted to do something different, something that wasn't too complicated but still looked impressive. I've seen cakes that were surrounded by Kit-Kat bars and filled in with M&M's and they look great, so I used that idea as my starting point. Since I was making a strawberry cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting, what better than a basket of strawberries?


Making the basket was super easy, I just bought a bunch of Pirouettes, trimmed them down a bit so they were about an inch taller than the cake, and stuck them all around the cake.

The handle was a bit tricky and I think it would have been easier if I had made it before frosting the cake (then I could have checked the size of it without getting it all covered in frosting). Basically I cut and "glued" Pirouette pieces together with melted chocolate and put it on the cake. I cut the long pieces of Pirouettes at a 45 degree angle, which helped the pieces stick together.

To finish the cake, I tied ribbon around the Pirouettes to make sure they stayed put and tossed some sliced strawberries on the top. I'm impressed with how it turned out!

Want to know what recipes I used? I found a great from-scratch strawberry cake recipe on Food.com and a yummy strawberry cream cheese frosting recipe on Lemons and Anchovies.