Category: Crafts

Galentine’s Day

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For those of you who are unaware, Galentine’s Day is traditionally celebrated on February 13th. Leslie Knope (from Parks and Recreation) holds a brunch to have fun with her female friends. It is a day where ladies get together to celebrate friendship.

Generally speaking, I like to give gifts to pals… mostly made of sugar. Here’s an example of the copious amounts of sugar I shoved toward my peeps in mid-February days of yore:

Sadly, this year is socially distanced. Austin has been at Stage 5 for a while, but we recently moved to Stage 4. Once we are in Stage 3 I plan on mailing some pink and red sugary treats to my friends (where gender is not important- friendship is).

Until then, I wrote this post with a few ideas for your Galentine’s Day. Or any day, really. These are mostly breakfast foods, as Leslie Knope loves breakfast foods, especially waffles!

Waffles

I made a video about this waffle, which is the KEY Galentine’s Day brunch item:

My family used to chop up Easter candies and add them to pancakes. I did something similar here. I chopped up a candy bar (shown in the next section) and added it to the waffle batter. Delicious.

If you do not have a waffle iron, you could make Galentine pancakes instead! Here’s a pile of mini pancakes with sprinkles and a chocolate-covered strawberry. Still festive and no extra appliance required:

Pancakes seem too “every day?” How about some cinnamon rolls topped with pink cream cheese icing and sprinkles?!

Last Minute Ideas (No Oven Needed)

Are you reading this on February 13th? Happy Galentine’s Day if you are! I have provided two ideas. One uses store bought cookies and the other requires only a microwave in this video (okay, fine… a microwave IS an oven, but it is the oven for people who don’t like to bake).

Chocolate Bars

Candy bar molds are cheap and I am obsessed. Yes, you can use any mold (I am sure some people have spheres from the great cocoa bomb experiment of December 2020). However, making an ACTUAL candy bar made of smaller squares makes me feel like Willy Wonka. You can learn more of these in the video, but if you have no interest in motion pictures, know some of these have M&Ms and some have leftover cake crumbles from last week’s post (I froze them for this purpose).

“Store Bought is Fine.”

As Ina Garten has said many times, you can TOTALLY buy delish food from stores and use that instead. We received a gargantuan bucket of Cheryl’s Cookies from my husband’s work. So I put some in the cute handmade heart I made. BOOM. Magic. Also, I kept these wrapped because they’d be fresh whenever my Galentine eats them AND Cheryl doesn’t think I’m trying to start a turf war.

What if my Valentine/Galentine has a favorite recipe that doesn’t make sense as pink/red/heart shaped?

Great question, self! I completely understand this query and think that people should get what they WANT as gifts, especially if it is a recipe you’ve made them before and they like them. For example, one of my Galentines Jeca likes my Molasses Cookies, which are not pink. They could potentially be heart shaped, but they are crackle-top cookies and a broken heart seems a bit to emo for a gift. So, I made the damned Molasses Cookies. End of Story.

Enjoy your February, friend!

However you choose to celebrate Galentine’s Day, remember you deserve a delicious treat. So make yourself a waffle. Or pancake. Or PB&J. We all deserve one- 2020 was weird and 2021 is kinda cray fillet as well.

And, since we are close friends, please don’t tell Leslie Knope that I like my waffles the NORMAL way… with three gallons of syrup and 2 gargantuan pats of butter:

XO,

Quit Playing Games with my Heart (of Chocolates)

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Well, we all know the DELIGHT of Valentine’s Day chocolates. Really, any sweet. However, I am partial to the foil heart of chocolates. It is old school and classic. Sadly, nowadays these hearts are mostly packaging. I’m glad I am not married to Russell Stover, because check out this crap:

Also, you probably cannot tell, but the top center chocolate was cracked. Like REALLY, Russell?!
You couldn’t ensure each of the like 9 chocolates in this gargantuan heart were unscathed???

If I am being fully honest, I prefer my baked goods to most candies. So I decided to spend the past two weeks filling this Russell Stover heart with BETTER options. It does not take two weeks to make ANY of the recipes below. I just spaced out the making of them so I did not go into a sugar coma while testing these. I’m selfless, y’all.

First up? Merengue Cookies (arguably the healthiest one since they are mostly Egg Whites…. basically a Rocky Balboa type of gift).

Merengue Cookies

Now, I LOVE a merengue cookie. I love pavlovas. I am obsessed with ALL the magic whipped egg whites have to offer. They are majestic. How in the world did FOUR egg whites make all of these treasures?! Answer: They were whipped with sugar and cream of tartar, then piped by yours truly. Obviously.

Also, can we talk about how FULL this heart shaped box looks now? The one with nine socially distant chocolates is depressing. Get with it, Russell. We have emotional eating to do. 🙂

Since this recipe was so bountiful (you truly have no idea what treasures await when those four room-temp egg whites are waiting in the mixer to do their thing), I had some extra fun styling some photos. In fact- this was the first recipe where I was able to use that sweet canister from West Elm (on the left). It reminds me of the estimation jar from elementary school, but in a fashionable Greg Brady kind of way.

Craft Break

I did these cookies and put them in the heart-shaped box. Welp… real talk? I did not like Russel stealing my Thunder. I put the open box on top of the branding to hide it, but that would be boring for several shots. SO… I rebranded it… I love a craft, okay?

This will be the box featured for the rest of the baked goods:

(Can you hear me saying “ta-dahhh” while making jazz hands at the computer? I totally did)

Cake Truffles

I LOVE Milk Bar’s birthday cake truffles. They. Are. Amazing. I decided it would be fun to make cake truffles using a mug cake. So, I microwaved three mug cakes individually and cooled them in a shallow bowl (see below- they are in the teal bowl on the top right). I mixed this with the icing packets and rolled them into tiny cake balls.

Christina Tosi, aka my goddess and savior, suggests rolling them in a thin layer of white chocolate and her confetti cake crumbs. I omitted the white chocolate step by rolling the truffles in the crumbs while they were still warm out of the oven. They stuck and I put them in the freezer. I included a close up of the crumbs below because OMG look at them!

The leftover birthday cake crumbs were frozen so they could be part of a Galentine’s Day post for next week.

Stay tuned. 🙂

Chocolate Covered Strawberries

I decided to actually use the insert of the Russell Stover chocolate heart for these darlings. I know the typical chocolate-covered strawberries have stems and are full. These are strawberry halves with no tops/stems, which I think fit nicely in the box insert. I also do not like how you have to awkwardly put the stem somewhere when eating a full strawberry. The stem is great for dipping and for holding the finished product. But at what cost??? Since there’s no weird stem leftovers on mine, these little dudes can be the star of an espresso-filled Fika Friday or chill on top of an adorbs pudding snack.

Oh no- I forgot!

Did you forget a Valentine’s Day treat for your babe/dude/soulmate and still want to spread some sugary cheer? Welp, call on your local Girl Scout to order a box of cookies. Then put said cookies in a heart-shaped box. No heart-shaped box? Slap a sticker on that bad boy.

Did we just become best friends?

yup.

Sidebar: you can support Girl Scouts living in the NYC shelter system here. Realize it five minutes from your soulmate’s house? Buy the cookies, explain this AMAZING cause, and then cuddle. 🙂

Retraction

It is not normal to retract something before publishing it. However, I enjoyed giving Russell Stover candies crap because of the exponentially disappointing candy to heart-box ratio. When I googled ol’ Russ to make sure I spelled his name right I found out he was a chemist that discovered how to ensconce ice cream with a chocolate shell.

Due to this, mea culpa Russ. Love you.

-Ber

xo,

Crafternoon- Valentine’s Day (well, month) Edition

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Hey, friends!

I wanted to share a quick craft I did to get our home lookin fly for February. We have a basic wreath on the front door that is made of twisted brown vines. I change the look of it by simply adding poms. The past two versions, fall and winter, both had poms individually tied to the wreath. This was not ideal because there was occasional separation and it did not look uniform. Also, it was a pain to take off the wreath when changing designs because each pom was tied on individually.

I decided that future designs would be affixed to cardboard (from one of the many-a-boxes we get- thanks, Covid). The first one? A beautiful heart. And I actually used the ENTIRE skein of yarn you see below. For those of you who don’t want to squint, that is over FOUR HUNDRED YARDS of yarn turned into adorbs poms.

First, I began by cutting a heart out of cardboard, then folded it in half to cut lines. If I am being fully transparent, I was not sure what I was doing. Initially I thought I would alternate every other line, but the poms ended up working well on each line, so I just kept making poms and tying them onto the heart. I was mirroring the poms along the way because the yarn is gradient and I wanted to make sure there was a sort of flow to the color changes.

Once I trimmed the heart, it was time to attach it to the wreath. This was done with zip-ties, which are basically noncommittal duct tape. I showed how I placed them on the top right. The bottom right pic is my finished product with my supervisor Champion.

It was finally ready to be hung on our front door! I realize the juxtaposition of the message on the sign with the heart, but we have had some really uncomfortable “not interested” conversations with strangers on our porch. 🙂

I do have one more Valentine’s Day craft up my sleeve. It involves a heart shaped box of Chocolates (seen below) which was transformed with washi tape, sharpie paint pens, and a sticker. 🙂 Wait until you see what I bake/make for inside this adorbs vessel!!!!

Happy excuse to eat sugar and wear pink month (I know that there are two days left in January, but I have been eating pink heart shaped treats for weeks, sooooo….),

Unbe-WEAVE-able!

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This is not about baking. I made a thing. Well, I made TWO things. They are gargantuan weavings that I hung over our bed. Initially this was supposed to be made of green poms. When I took that off the loom and attempted to put it on the wall, it looked like a postage stamp:

So sad. Luckily, it looks AMAZING over the guest bed, which is a bit smaller (tis a queen). This new placement made me feel MUCH better about spending a gargantuan amount of time making green poms (they were used after all!).

However, I did not want the same thing over the bed in our room now. There needed to be a different vibe in each room. Poms in TWO rooms?!? Unthinkable.

So, I came up with a plan to hang TWO weavings next to each other. This plan was using two groups of yarn (pictured above) and several drawings that look like they should be connected with red string on a cork board in some conspiracy theorist’s secret lair.

The pink one was finished first, which was probably done in mid-October.

I was SO PUMPED with how it turned out!!! Then my perfectionist brain was afraid to start the other one. I played several games: I’ll finish this when ___ is graded, I’ll finish this after final grades are in, I’ll finish this before the holidays, and I’ll finish this before the next semester begins.

Well, folks… the semester begins tomorrow SO WE HUNG THESE BAD BOYS UP TODAY!

I underestimated how challenging making two mirrored(ish) weavings would be. The pink one was hanging in another room behind closed doors so our cat Champ could not bat it. I had to use the illustrations above and a picture of the pink one (the one from above). Close to the end of the project, I had Jon take a picture of me holding both so I could check.

I was SO pumped to hang these yesterday, but we did not have long enough nails. So they slept in the guest room and waited patiently:

Speaking of waiting patiently, here’s the finished product!!!!!!

Yay!