Instant Chocolate Cake

Spring is here! Hooray! We’ve had incredible weather this week and while it is raining here right now, I don’t feel the weight of the grey like I had been since I’ve gotten so much vitamin D this week. We’ve been working hard on the back yard and have de-thatched the lawn, pulled a lot of weeds, and I’m in the midst of digging up and resetting a stone pathway that had become completely covered in dirt. In gardening news, we have asparagus and kale ready to eat and our pea plants are thriving (if not producing yet). The apple tree and blueberry bushes are blooming. I have yet to dig up the garden beds, though. The other projects are taking up all of my spare time.

In chicken news, we have eggs! The girls are laying six days a week and are almost keeping up with Nancy’s insatiable love of all things egg. Both of the chickens are somewhat naughty and have been going into parts of the yard that they are not allowed, including my flower beds where they have been sunbathing (and dirt bathing, too).

Clara has taken to collecting the eggs every day herself. The other day, she got an egg, and since it was dirty, she washed it and dried it in a towel. Then the towel became a nest and she played with the egg for a good twenty minutes and became super attached to her “special egg.” I bet you can guess what happenend. Her poor little egg fell and broke and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and even Momma couldn’t put her “special egg” back together again. She was so upset.

What to do? We made a little chocolate cake out of her egg and then she was happy again. I googled a cake in a mug recipe and found the easiest cake recipe ever! Here it is if you want to try it.

Mix the following ingredients in a microwave proof mug:
1 egg
1/4 C. powdered sugar
2 Table. cocoa powder

Microwave for 50-60 seconds or until done.
Enjoy!

Growing Science

You’ll recall (if you’re one of my ten readers) that I did a little tutorial on how to make a six-page book a couple of weeks ago and promised that I would show you how we used them recently.  So, here it is!

First we set up a little science experiment about growing seeds based on this fabulous pinterest pin and this blog entry from the Artful Child.  We talked about what we thought seeds needed to grow (sunshine, dirt, water, etc.) and then we placed wet paper towels on contact paper (you could use ziplock bags in this step instead), placed pea and sunflower seeds on the towels, then closed up the contact paper, labelled them, and carefully taped them with packing tape onto the window.  We made sure that the tape went all the way around so that no water leaked out of the seed packs.

Then we talked about what a hypothesis is (thank you Dinosaur Train for teaching Clara this for me!) and came up with one about what would happen to our seeds.

Then we drew pictures of what our seeds looked like at the beginning of the experiment.

And we looked at them and drew them a few times before we took them down and planted them in our garden.

Here’s what they looked like when we decided to plant them!

We decided that while the plants did not make it “all the way to the top,” they were going to keep growing, so we would continue to check our hypothesis as they grow.

Birdseed Ornaments

I’ve been saving this project up since I saw it on Dandee in July!  I love it!  Super easy, super cute, and with a purpose.  We made birdseed ornaments to hang outside last week.  Some of them we gave away at Thanksgiving and some of them we’re giving as presents for Christmas.  They are easy, and cute.  They would also be awesome to make if you were going to do some tree decorating outside a la The Night Tree by Eve Bunting (a FABULOUS Christmas book if anyone is interested).

The afternoon that we made these was dark as night despite the 3:00 pm time, so I apologize for the dark pictures.  I actually waited until we went to Central Oregon to take the above picture because I knew that we would have better weather than anything I was going to get at home.

The recipe for these is super easy.  The kids pretty much did all of it except for a few stirs by me to get the very bottom mixed in.

We mixed together:
3/4 C. flour
1/2 C. water
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
3 TBS corn syrup
(This makes a really, quite incredible glue. I’ve been considering how to use it for other applications ever since.)

Then we added 4 C. of bird seed. I just got mine in bulk at Winco (really, it was the leftover birdseed from this project this summer).

Once that was mixed into the “glue,” we used our hands and spoons to place the birdseed into cookie cutters, filling them to the top, then pressing them down to get rid of any air holes. Then we carefully push the birdseed down and pulled the cookie cutter up. The birdseed at this point was super-duper sticky. Drew (my nephew) refused to continue because it was too “dirty.” I had to bring out a bowl of water to rinse hands off when they got caked. We also found that if we rinsed the cutters between uses the birdseed cane out a lot easier. We placed them on silpat sheets as we worked and then added cut straws to each to make a hole in them for the twine.

We let them dry overnight and they ended up being impressively hard. One batch of birdseed mix made about fifteen ornaments for us.  We tied twine on each one (because that’s what we had on hand), but raffia would also be pretty, I think. Then we hung them up for our birdie friends during our Thanksgiving feast at Grandma’s.

Tomatoes Galore!!

My garden this year has been somewhat underwhelming.  I got very few squash, cucumbers, or zucchini because of some sort of mildew.  I treated it with a garlic powder and water solution, which worked, but they didn’t produce much after that.  I had great peas, but then it got too hot for them.  My kale was amazing, and I planted a huge pot of it on the patio for the winter.  But, that’s about it.  My green beans were practically worthless.  For some reason, I only got two carrots.  And I’m eagerly waiting on my brussels sprouts to produce anything.

But, the tomatoes!  Oh, the tomatoes!  I finally found the perfect spot for them in my yard and they have been incredible despite that one chicken who thinks that I put them there just for her to eat.  I’m off now to make roasted tomato sauce!  Yummy!

Garden/Foster Farm Update

The rain has finally subsided for a few days!  I am overjoyed!  So overjoyed that I actually acquiesced to a bike ride with the hubby and kids (in the bike trailer) today.  It was beautiful.  If only it was summer in Portland all the time.

Anyway, this was a garden update!  I was talking to a friend the other day, as we played in the park on a rather partly cloudy and sixty-five degree day, that maybe this year isn’t quite as bad as last year as far as rain goes.  My roses are not molding.  But, it is rose festival time and do I have even one rose blossom?  Not a one.  So, they aren’t moldy, but they are just non-existent.  But, the irises are coming in!  Remember that we planted a TON of irises last year after the birth of Miss Nancy Iris?  Here’s the first of them about to bloom!  I’m so excited to see them.  I don’t even remember what colors we planted!

I have pretty much all of my vegetables in the garden now. There are carrots (seedlings are just starting to show up), kale (a new veggie… I’m hoping to make kale chips that the girls will love), brussels sprouts, swiss chard, lettuce, cucumbers, squashes, zucchini, pumpkins, green and yellow beans, and Clara also convinced me to plant corn, which should be exciting. I got rid of all of my sunflowers last year because they were a pain in the butt to try to keep standing come late summer, but preschool sent home some seeds to plant, so I guess we’ll have some of those as well. I also planted some peas and tomato plants around the patio, in hopes that the hotter spot will get me more tomatoes (although it can’t get much worse than last year).

Oh! And my chives are back and blooming. I just love chive blossoms.

The chickens are finally all living together outside in the hen house. It was a little rocky there for a while. I had the little chicks in a chicken annex run outside every day for a month before I actually tried to put them all together. The first time didn’t take. Curry tried to peck their eyes out. So then I let them free range together for a few days and finally just locked them all together at night fall. They survived. And it only took a month of that for the big chickens to let the little ones roost near them.
Here’s Clucky, a beautiful Americauna. I just love her coloring.

And here’s Sugar, a Buff Orpington.

And the big girls, Buffalo, an Australorp, and Curry, a Buff Orpington.