Snack Attack

As untimely as this post is, you should know that I meant to get it up a couple weeks ago. The problem was that I just kept procrastinating because I was dreading editing all the pictures and updating the baking ingredients spreadsheet. Editing the pictures alone takes forever. 

Well, it just so happens that today school was cancelled due to the cold, so yay! Free Day! Days like this are a gift from Heaven above. The best part about them is the surprise in the morning, waking up to a text message telling me that school is cancelled. That, and it's a Monday. It's better than Christmas morning, let me tell you.

Temps in my neck of the woods dropped to 20 below last night and they've been hanging out around 0 and 1 all day, so I'm not going anywhere, and since I'm not going anywhere, I may as well make myself useful. I should go to the gym, but I don't really want to walk into my cold garage and get into my cold car to warm it up. I'm such a Delicate Flower.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that Peanut Head and I used to do an insane amount of holiday baking to give away to our friends and neighbors for Christmas. Well, in 2011 we decided we were finished with the whole ordeal. It had gotten so out of hand and become such a huge time suck and stress to accomplish, that we just threw up our hands and said "No more." 

So last year we didn't do any baking. Nothing. Nada.

And it was awful. We missed giving the treats away and frankly, we missed the treats.

So this year we cranked the machine back up and went to work. I thought it would be fun to share the crazy amounts of ingredients we use to accomplish our Bake-a-Palooza and how we pull it all off.

It starts with this. Our ingredients list. We print this baby out in October and slowly start amassing the ingredients with each grocery shopping trip, checking things off as we acquire them. On this spreadsheet you can see that we go through 39 boxes of white chocolate, 8 pounds of chocolate chips, 2-1/2 pounds of mint chocolate chips, 5 packages of Vanilla Almond Bark, 2 pounds of milk chocolate stars, 3 pounds of dried cranberries, 21 cups of almonds and pecans, 6.25 pounds of Oreos (from the Devil, they are), and on and on. Don't ask me how much it all costs because I'm afraid to keep track of it and I prefer blissful ignorance.

Here are some of the things we make, although each year we add and take things away, just to keep it interesting.

This is the Cranberry Almond Bark and it is by far the easiest thing to make. This one is my responsibility because I pick the easy stuff. Peanut Head is the patient one, so he does the really time-consuming stuff.

This is what I'm talking about. Peanut Butter Bon Bons. Peanut Head spends an entire day making these things.

And they do not disappoint. Someday I'll make a recipe card for them, but until then, you can have this picture. I know, annoying, right?

These are also made by Peanut Head, and they are Buckeyes. Or you could just call them Peanut Butter dream balls, although as a middle school teacher, the b-word is one I am very careful not to say around teens and pre-teens, as they lack maturity.

Egg Nog Fudge, another one of Peanut Head's treats. I know it's not much to look at, but every year people rave over this stuff. It's awesome.

These are Mint Chocolate Truffles. They are super yummy and smooth, but one of my least favorite things to make. I think it's because it seems like it takes forever to roll all of them into their little truffle shapes. Like maybe two hours or something like that. Not all day like Peanut Head's treats.

I used to roll these in chocolate sprinkles, but this year I made a white chocolate mint drizzle that saves a lot of time, and I think it makes them prettier too.

Pretty is good. So is pretty yummy.

Another one of Peanut Head's treats. Does it seem like he makes more than I do? Perhaps. Who's really keeping track anyway?

These are Star Cookies and they are one of my favorites.

Ah. Oreo Truffles. Who doesn't love Oreo Truffles? The only not so pretty thing about these is that when they sit at room temperature for any length of time they get a little greasy-beady looking, on account of all the lard in the Oreos. That's what makes them so good. Says my Grandma. Lard makes everything better because it comes from bacon.

Here's another one of Peanut Head's treats, White Chocolate Coconut Clusters. People rave about these too, and I have to agree, they are pretty dang good.

These Gingerbread Snowflakes are my responsibility and they are probably my most time-consuming treat to make. I make the dough one day, it chills overnight, and then I roll the dough out, cut the cookies, and bake them. Then they usually sit in my garage, frozen, until I get off my gnarly carcass and decorate them already.

That's on account of the decorating is a little tedious as I'm compulsive and insist on using tweezers to put little pearlescent balls on the snowflake ends.

Eighteen of them on each cookie

I eat some too. When they're defective and not perfectly round. That's me, taking one for the team again.

It generally takes us two to three weeks to crank out about a dozen different treats. Once something is made it gets stored in an airtight Rubbermaid container and then it sits on Peanut Head's Martha Stewart workbench in our freezing cold garage.

It's like having our very own deep freeze.

The last step is to distribute everything among the containers and deliver. It always surprises me how long this step actually takes. Hours.

Generally, every year on the day after Christmas, we hit the stores up for our treat containers for the next year. That way we get them half price. Unfortunately, we didn't do that last year because we thought we were done for good.

That meant that the usual containers we buy were out of our budget since we had to pay full price. We ended up using paper plates and cheapo boxes that had to be reinforced with Scotch tape. Neither option stacks, so it also made delivering and storing a bit of a nightmare. Live and learn though.

After Christmas we scored our usual mass quantities of treat containers for next year. Now we just need to find 1,264 small paper candy cups.

Student Treats for the End of the Year

 

I like to do something fun for my students at the end of the year as a little going away treat, but with 30 students it has to be cheap too. This year I pulled together a little Pinterest inspired goodie.

I found the straws at the Dollar Store, four to a pack. I bought the Kool-Aid Singles at Walmart in boxes of twelve.

I made the tag using Photoshop Elements and the Creative Memories Cheerful Summer Additions kit. I am in love with the fun colors in that kit.

I'm going to give my students a small water bottle with this treat, so they can kick off their summer with a cool drink when they get home.

Just thinking about Kool-Aid brings back memories from when I was a kid, and I would come home from school to mix up a pitcher of the chemical infested beverage with an insane amount of sugar. It was so good though.

These M&M treats are a little thank you for my Yearbook Committee this year, a group of sweet students that were always happy to help out. Well, maybe not happy, but they were good sports when I bossed them around.

I used the Creative Memories Cheerful kit for this tag too, but with a couple of monsters from Kate Hatfield's Lil' Monsters kit. I have a thing for monsters, so I couldn't resist.

Speaking of monsters, I need a little advice. I recently scored a job in my district teaching JUST MATH I'M SO EXCITED at one of our middle schools, and I'm wondering if I can still get away with the whole monster theme I have going on.

What do you think? Too elementary or can I pull it off?

Classroom Helper/Teacher Gifts

We have just two weeks of school left, so I'm starting to panic thinking about all the things I have to get done before it's time to send the kiddos off for the summer. Over the weekend I tackled two things on my list with my classroom helper and teacher gifts. Both were actually relatively easy to put together too.

I found the small popcorn containers in the Target Dollar Spot, two for a dollar. I filled them with some candy and a little tag that I made last year, a tag that for some reason never made it onto the blog. I'm a little annoyed with myself, because I went looking for pictures of what I did last year, and I could not find them. Some blogger I am.

Anyway, last year I think I glued this tag onto the front of a card, but who knows? Maybe I just dreamt that.  I used the Kate Hadfield Movie Night digital kit for the tag.

I put two eyelets in my tag and then tied it to a chop stick so it would stand up in the popcorn container.

I also folded the tag over and stapled it to make a little pocket for a movie gift card. I love this so much, I want to give it to myself.

That would be greedy though.

These are my classroom helper gifts. One of them is actually for a Methods Student that is in my class several days a week. I found the insulated cups at Wal Mart.

I put the tags together in Photoshop Elements using the Creative Memories Cheerful Power Palette. I love the bright colors.

I also folded this tag over and tucked a gift card inside.

Then I filled the cups with M&Ms because they're bright, and who doesn't love M&Ms?

Freaks, that's who.

Doing Whatever I Want

The end of the year is fast approaching, and I keep thinking of things that I want to share with you, but I've been too lazy to get up and do something about it. I'm going to attempt to do a little of that in this post.

The first of those things is, at first glance, possibly a little boring. It's our 2011 Christmas ornaments from my Mother-in-Law, The Barefoot Contessa.

Every year, the BFC gets every single person in her extended family an ornament that is appropriate to the year they've had. Quite often the ornament makes light of a comical event in the person's year. My ornament this year is the cruise ship, and it is appropriate, although not comical, because Peanut Head and I went on a cruise for our 20th anniversary.

Stinkerbell's ornament, however, is a knee slapper.

The Stink's comical even for 2011 was the fact that she was assigned a mule at Girl Scouts Horse Camp. It's appropriate, it's ironic, and it's hysterical. The BFC gets extra points for this one.

Peanut Head's ornament had us all stumped until we asked The BFC about it. I had to slap my forehead, it was so appropriate and I had let it slip my mind.

His ornament makes light of this unfortunate event. I have to hand it to The BFC, she's good.

Zoe Bug's ornament was a horse, just because in her world it's horse, horse, horse, horse. I took a picture of it, but it was blurry so I left it out. I could retake it, but then I'd have to move. Not happening.

The BFC has a knack for finding the perfect ornament. She frequently procures her ornaments at  Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, just in case you need to know.

On another note, I'm on break from school this week and I am thoroughly enjoying myself. We don't have enough snow to play in and it's too cold to go outside just for the sake of getting fresh air, so we're hanging out inside. I'm not complaining either. I love being inside, in my sweat pants, doing whatever the heck I feel like, because I'm not constrained by any deadlines. It's pure bliss.

I'm taking advantage of the extra time by working through some Photoshop tutorials and learning how to use my new program. I've been staying up super late, and when I go to bed I dream about digi scrapping in Photoshop. It's awesome.

So I tapped into a bunch of tutorials over at JessicaSprague.com and there's so much great stuff there, that I'm going to be busy learning for a long time. Sadly, the tutorials aren't free, but the one that I've been working through has four complete lessons with five or six tasks within each lesson. I'm averaging about one lesson every other day. The lessons come with all the supplies you need to do each of the layouts too, so that's pretty nifty.

I figure I'll wait a few months before I buy another lesson because I need to give myself time to process all the new information and get comfortable using my new skillz.

I found the Jessica Sprague site in connection with Becky Higgins' Digital Project Life. One of my New Year's resolutions for 2012 is to make progress towards getting caught up on my backlog. Notice I didn't say I was going to get caught up, but instead make progress.

I don't want to psyche myself out with the stress of another unattainable goal. Not that it's unattainable, but I like to play head games with myself and set myself up for failure. This is how I outsmart myself and work around my self inflicted obstacles.

Project Life is going to help me with that, by enabling me to focus on the story and not spend so much time on the creative layouts. I'll still do layouts like the one above, but they will be scattered throughout my albums and not stressing me out with the pressure of needing a fabulous layout for every ding dang picture.

Or stressing me out because I only have one or two pictures for an event and I don't want to waste a whole page on a one-photo layout. I hate that.

The last thing I want to share with you today is the Christmas gift I gave to my students this year. I had good intentions of getting these up earlier this month, but I ran out of time. I you like the idea, you can pin it for next year. You are pinning, right?

If you aren't and you want to, e-mail me and I'll send you an invite. You must start today. Trust me.

I got this great idea that I was going to give my kids water bottles for the classroom. They drive me crazy with their up and down to get a drink every ding dang minute. I knew I couldn't afford really nice water bottles for the whole class, but I was able to score some pretty decent ones at the dollar store. I bought every last one and I was able to get exactly the number I needed. I was crawling around, digging behind plastic containers to come up with 27 cups, 27 lids, and 27 straws to make a complete set. I really lucked out. 

I cut the names out of vinyl on my Cricut and they went together surprisingly fast. Then I stuffed them with a candy cane, an Airhead, and a mint and left them on their desks for them in the morning. The best part was that my kids loved them and they were very surprised that I personalized the cups for them. That made me feel all tingly and lovey dovey inside.

I heart their sweet little hearts.

And I miss them, but I do not want my vacation to end.

Did you hear that, Father Time? Slow the bus down, will ya?

Birthday Paint Can Inserts

As with everything else in my life since I went back to work, these little guys are laaaaate. I made them for two of my BFFs who had birthdays over the last month, Smashley and Girl Genius.

My negligence is so bad, you won't even believe this. I called Girl Genius up on her birthday to tell her that I needed her Girl Scout cookie money, and I didn't even say Happy Birthday. Doy.

I called her back a couple days later when I realized what a L-O-S-E-R I was, and I told her I was a bonehead and that she shouldn't even associate with me anymore. Then I took her to lunch and grovelled some more. She's so nice, she forgave me on the spot. I only wish I had one of these ready for her then. It took me three weeks, but finally I gave it to her. 

Smashley doesn't have hers yet, but she doesn't read my blog so I don't have to worry about her seeing this. Not that it matters as it's already three weeks late.

I know she won't see it though, because she's not super tech saavy. In fact, she was so excited to replace her five year old cell phone recently, that when she went into the Verizon store and bought a new one, the manager told her that now she's only three years behind on technology. She's doesn't care though. She's just excited that now she can text without having to use the number pad and scroll through the letters.

She's still kind of slow with her thumbs, so I've had to send a lot of pointless text messages to her to give her practice.

Whassup?

Why aren't you texting me back?

Are you mad?

What did I do?

I was dying, it was so funny. She was sitting right next to me, and still trying to respond to the first message, and I was sending her text after text. Not that I'm so fast or anything. Being a teacher I feel I should always text with complete sentences and proper punctuation. After all, I'm representing my people. The teacher people who live at school and don't have lives of their own.

This is all the more challenging when you are limited to 140 characters or whatever random number it is that we are limited to. It just ticks me off and I'll say Fine! PERIOD. Then I'll send another one to finish up what I was trying to say in 140 characters or less. Heaven forbid I should make a typo at the beginning, because then I'll backspace to eternity until I can fix it, then have to retype everything.

No matter, I still beat Gimp Thumb Smashley, and I got to watch her get all flustered. 

Then she sent me a not very nice message wherein she called me a B with an itch. And it was in all caps, so that meant that she YELLED it at me.

Smashley is so sweet, so that made it even funnier. She's like a bunny rabbit, she's so sweet.

Um, except that bunnies can be mean and they kick really hard. Not that Smashley would ever do that. She's too much of a Delicate Flower, and I could take her just by sitting on her. She probably weighs 105 pounds. Which I think I weighed in eighth grade.

Geezo, how do I get off on these tangents? I was talking about birthday paint cans.

I used Kate Hadfield's Bring on the Cake kit for these cans. I seriously love her doodles.

I made a little mistake on the templates, and one of them came out about an eighth of an inch too short at the top. That's why I put the ribbon around the tops of the cans with photo tape. It covers up the free edge of the template that didn't fit under the lip of the can.

This is an example of one of those mistakes which turns out well, because I really like the ribbon on the outside. 

I'm such a problem solver.

Holiday Paint Can Inserts . . . Finally

I'm sorry that these are so late in coming. I think I've mentioned that I'm learning a new digi scrapping software--the Creative Memories sbcStudio for macs. It's a lot different than StoryBook Creator Plus, and there are quite a few bugs still being worked out, which is causing a little crankiness on my part. And wasted time. Grrrr! It'll all work out in the end though.

At least that's what I keep telling myself in order to keep from jumping off a bridge. A bridge with icy cold water and ice beneath it. Actually, it's probably just the cold keeping me from taking the plunge. I dislike cold very much.

Check out these little knobber jobbers. Don't you just love them? I found them at Porter's, and it was all I could do not to slap my forehead.

Why didn't I think of this? These paint cans can be a pain to open, especially when you are in a hurry and there's chocolate inside. As an example.

Some genius at Porter's came up with this idea, and I can't even tell you how in love with it I am. I didn't buy them right away. I thought that maybe I could find some even cuter ones, maybe even cheaper at a hardware store. I looked though, at only one place because I loathe shopping around, and I'm happy to say that I feel good about paying $8.99 for three CEEEEE-UTE little knobs in all their knobbity cuteness.

Of course installation requires a small hole be drilled. No problemo.

Cute little screw poking through the bottom.

CEEEEE-UTE little knob. Try not to faint from the cuteness of it.

I know, weird things excite me.

So much that I can't even handle it.

I only wish it were my idea.

I'm a copy cat though. I guess I can live with that.

Without torturing you further, here are the templates. Get them printed as 11 x 14 inch enlargements. I did mine at Sam's Club.

Be sure to click on the image first, before saving it to your desktop. Otherwise the image will be blurry. Enjoy!

P.S. What do you think of my new design? Tonya at Lucky Girl Design Studio hooked me up. I love it.