The first (and second) day of our Advent Calendar

Our Advent Calendar is a series of activities & outings, rather than gifts or chocolate..

The first day - Make our Advent Calendar!

(yeah, ok, that was just because I was too disorganised to have it done in time..)

Each peg has a tiny card with the activity for the day written inside it, and gets opened up & re-pegged each day.

Day 2 - Decorate our Xmas tree!!

(Yes, we have a fake tree... it was $8.47 at Kmart eight years ago.)

We have quite a few homemade decorations on our tree, but making more features quite heavily over the rest of the month (shhh!! secret.)

I'd love to see other people's activity based advent calenders too!!

When is too much...??

THIS is too much!!

 For paul's birthday, I made a two layer rich vegan chocolate cake, with this concept in mind, and as such I (rightly) thought that buttercream icing would be a bit much for the filling & icing, so just did a plain cocoa + icing sugar icing... and that is where this started to go a bit wrong.. as we allll know, that sort of icing goes hard VERY fast. Too fast to be able to glue Kit-Kats on easily... 

And speaking of Kit-Kats... I bought 3 family sized Kit-Kat blocks to hopefully have plenty to spare. Nuh uh. Turns out family sized Kit-Kat blocks reeeeeaallly don't break nicely. In fact, they don't so much break as shatter. Or rip they base off the bar next to them. So there was a fair amount of chocolate shaving & gluing going on.

And guess who forgot that their ribbon stash has been missing since moving house?

That all being said, it was rather delicious!! Though it was SO sweet and SO chocolatey that paul had no chance of finishing all his portion.. Even the kids had a bit left over!!! Even I had a couple of crumbs left!!!

mmm chocolate.

On a much easier note, but still a little chocolatey - 

Chocolate chip Anzac biscuits from this recipe. But with chocolate chips thrown in too, cos that is how we roll.

(hey did you know that you are not ALLOWED to call them Anzac cookies?! There are strict rules about these things. I'm expecting a stern letter about those chocolate chips.)

Rawrrr...

Eli's 3rd birthday cake!

We got him some wooden african animals for his birthday, so a matching cake was in order..

I must learn to keep things simple in future, cos they always come out better if i don't go overboard with lolly decoration!!

Pancake Day!!

need i say more?!

ok, i will anyway.. shrove tuesday, another classic example of how us agnostics/atheists have the best of ALL worlds, because we can indulge in the culinary delights of any festival that we choose! Afterlife? well, have to cross that bridge later.... ;-)

anyhoo... we had 5 minute vegan pancakes, with choc chips & maple syrup, for lunch today... yum!! the recipe is in the recipes/tutorials tab at the top of my blog - it's a perfect recipe for when you have almost no ingredients too!

not known for my punctuality...

Christmas!!!

yeah, i know, it's march... minor detail.

anyway, in a yarn sampler box i got ages ago there was 12 grams of 2ply alpaca. what are you supposed to do with 12g of anything?! what are you supposed to do with 2ply?!

turns out the answer is bookmarks.

crocheted butterfly bookmarks even.

cos we all know that reading is the ultimate in cool, especially reading books long enough to require bookmarking, and crochet has always been known for it's total chic, so the two together is pretty much a flawless combo.

so i ended up making 5 of these wee knick-knacks as gifts for various people! (i think they're pretty cute actually- but hey, i like long books & crochet)

still had some yarn left over too.. who would have thought that 12g of 2ply could go so far?!

(gold star to anyone who can name the book in that photo without googling!)

on a less successful front, the (compulsory) advent fair biscuit debacle.

stained glass window biscuits = fail.

they overflowed & stuck to the baking paper... and tasted pretty blah too.

i bet martha's snow cap cookies never turned out like this either-

note for future- bake sales are NOT my forte. At. All.

and on an equally successful front- how to make an actually quite cool bag look meh in one simple photographic step-

i made it for my 12 year old step-daughter for xmas - it's a Pleated Purse from this tutorial - and she loved it!! managing to please a 12 year old girl is quite a challenge sometimes, so yay ;-)

and cos i'm a total sucker, when i saw gingerbread house kits in the supermarket i HAD to have one for lexi-

needless to say she had a fantastic time decorating it with her daddy on xmas eve :-)

and with me she made simple paper decorations for our tree!

fun times :-)

i wonder if i can get the jump on easter....

it's the thought that counts.. right?

Proud mummy moment, kind of...

the kids insisted on making me a birthday cake! and not just any cake, a proper themed cake from the original Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book...

an "Old Woman who lived in a shoe" cake. y'know, the one who had so many children she didn't know what to do? yeah. hmph.

anyway, a certain father who was roped into help, on account of children being too young to bake unassisted, was quite convinced that it would be fine to leave cake baking & decorating til around 4.30pm. I can imagine what seasoned cake decorators are thinking right about now...

So they toddled off to the supermarket in search of ingredients & decorations, perhaps losing sight of their vision (goal and possibly eyesight) along the way..

it was a hot day for making buttercream icing that is supposed to function as adhesive AND cladding... and there wasn't much (any) time to let the cake cool before icing it anyway...

and the lolly selection didn't prove particularly useful when it came to authenticity...

ummm yeah-

any sensible woman with too many children is bound to have a couple of sharks guarding the perimeter right?! and a nice brown moat...??!

ah bless.. :-)

luckily i live by the mantra "if it tastes good (and doesn't involve killing anything), then who cares!!" and it did, so yay! and it's the first birthday cake they've made for me, so it's extra special... and uhhh.. memorable too ;-)

on a slightly more unadulterated note- another cakey effort recently was lexi's birthday cake for kindy... the teachers appreciate it if the cakes aren't too over-the-top and, especially, full of artificial colourings & plastered with sugar!

so i made my favourite vegan lemon & coconut cake-

i decorated it by placing some star-shaped stickers around it, sprinkling with icing sugar, then removing the stars :-) i thought it looked quite effective, and with the minimum of fuss!

whenever i make this recipe i also make a tiny star cake as a RAOK, so this one i made to match for lexi's kindy teachers as a thank you-

cute huh?

It's been a long time, been a long time....

been a long, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy time!!!

mostly because of this thing-
Her name is Maia, and she was born at home at 4.01am on Friday 8th of October!

She was born in our bath, weighing a teeny tiny 2.69kg (5lb 14oz), after a quickish & easyish labour, with no difficulties or complications then or since!!

Her timing was pretty much perfect, at 38 weeks + 3 days gestation, because we had spent the beginning of the week checking out geothermal wonders 4 hours away from home in a campervan with a broken alternator (so no battery charge, we drove the last hour to home at night with NO lights!!!!), and then after dropping the van back up north only got home at 10.30pm thursday, with me having had intermittent contractions (20-40min apart) all the way home!
But she also managed to sneak in on the last day of the school holidays, so we got an extra 3 days of daddy being at home than if she had arrived once the term had started!
So an excellent time to make her arrival, if cutting it a bit fine ;-)

but anyway, i've got plenty of things to share that i managed to get done in the lead up, that got delayed with several weeks of school production chaos, and a couple of things that i've even done since!! :-D

another birthday

we have a few of them, luckily spread nicely throughout the year, apart from certain awkward people not long after xmas... (one of which would.. uhh.. be ME)

and partially because of that we like to keep them fairly simple affairs, with little touches making them special...

like a decorated chair for the birthday person, our special birthday banner, the shared birthday candle, and the presents wrapped in our gorgeous playsilks!
this year (again) was a birthday away from home, so i needed to go for something simple for the birthday cake, like icecreams!
'cept because i like CAKE, they're cupcakes decorated like icecreams, to match the ones in the book that was one of the presents-
heh heh...
and the birthday was a success!!

Stars, in their multitudes...

(of course the awesome skatey-beachbabe-katie breaks out movie quotes, and i reach for Broadway. i never claimed to be cool! ;-) )

anyhoo... around these parts it is a time of year known as Matariki (maataareekee), also known as the Maori new year, also known as the time when the Pleiades become visible in the night sky, and in part due to that we've had an abundance of stars cropping up around the place!
Par exemple- our playgroup is undergoing HUGE renovations, and in the long term plan is a beautiful stained glass windows for the tiny babes to stare up at, but in the meantime i decided to make us a biggish window star (each point is half a sheet of kite paper, so the whole thing is approx 25-30cm tall). We then decided that making these was a nice craft for the parents to be engaged in, so we've started a mass campaign of star making, in part so each child can take one home at the end of the term for the mid-winter break (cos who doesn't like a bit of colour injected into grey days?!), and also potentially to sell at our advent fair.... i must get a photo of the big basketful next week!

anyway, there is a good tutorial for these waldorf window stars over at Gardenmama, and i get my kite paper from Forest Folk, which is the little shop run by our playgroup's school :-) (they're a perfect little gift for a new baby or wee kiddo's birthday when you don't know what they've already got!!)

annndd....

after seeing a tutorial somewhere (might have been this one at Childhood Magic) i decided to have a go at making a little star lantern!(this one was too small to fit a candle inside it, but they're still cute as holders for taller candles too)

and then taught a few of the mums at playgroup to make them, using the kids watercolour paintings, which then became little baskets to hold a biscuit for each of the kids at our matariki celebration morning!this is a few of them *just* catching the morning sunlight up on the windowsill....there were all sorts of delicious star-themed treats for the kids to eat- and lexi did a story for eli & one of the little girls (who was singing "twinkle, twinkle" as accompaniment!)and the kids sung star songs and listened to a special story :-)

annnndd...

completely unrelatedly, i saw these on The Magic Onions a while ago, so had to try it out!it's nice to add a little sparkle into these wintery days!!

the Real Reason why doll play is good

because they have birthdays too.

Vegan Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

prep time: 10 minutes | cooking time: 20 minutes | makes 12 cupcakes

Ingredients
3/4 cup sugar
5 Tbsp vegan margarine, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1 banana, mushed well
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup soy milk

Directions
Preheat oven to 180°C

Combine first three ingredients in a large bowl, mix well.
Add banana, stirring well to combine.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cup and level with a knife. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt, stirring well with a whisk.

Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with 1/2 cup soymilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mix after each addition.

Spoon the batter into 12 muffin cups lined with paper liners.

Bake for 20 minutes or until cupcakes spring back easily when touched lightly in the center. Allow to cool, and frost if desired.


Recipe from the awesome Post Punk Kitchen, the people behind our much loved Veganomicon, and such other fabulously titled books as Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar!

my little big boy

my little guy was about to get a whole year older (it happens overnight you know) and so i decided he needed to join in on our first proper family birthday tradition - the felted crowns.

so i started with some wool-
(yes it's pink & purple, it was left over from lexi's so-long-ago Tigger Cardi (look how little she is!), and the only feltable stuff left in my stash!)

some food colouring & vinegar,

and some of this stuff-
and.... ta da!


the butterfly theme was because we inherited a couple of monarch caterpillars a month or so ago from our playgroup, and we've had a constant stream of them to look after ever since! Eli absolutely loves them, and has been finding the process fascinating, so i thought it would be a fitting theme for his crown :-)
i think he likes it!

i was incredibly proud of lexi too, who was inspired by my efforts to make eli a present herself as well! she decided to make him a toy horse, which turned into a unicorn, so i cut the basic shape out of felt (i like minimum 70% wool felt), showed her how to do a whip stitch, and off she went! I did the eyes for her, and threaded her needle, but the rest was all her work, even choosing the colours (it's red on one side, purple on the other ;-) ).

(there was a minor controversy on eli's birthday when she decided she actually wanted it to have a short mane, so hid behind the lounge curtains to give it a haircut without asking first, but really since it was her project she had to be forgiven!)

and of course there was birthday cake... not one of my sleeker efforts to be sure *blush*
but it tasted good & the kids loved it, so i'm happy!

Lexi's 4th birthday!

within a month doesn't count as late blogging!

due to unforeseen circumstances we had to cancel lexi's party, but we still had a little get together with lexi's aunty, uncle & baby cousin, which lexi was more than happy about!

i made a few things for it, firstly a Little Rocket (designed by a very clever friend called megan!)
(auto photo rotating grumble grumble)
made out of scraps of yarn from lexi's earflap hat & felted slippers (not bad value for an $8 200g hank from the titirangi markets!)
and a special new birthday dress (two years running now!)
i'm rather happy with the detail, the buttons are the same as her Spring Butterfly
modelled with the crown & cape that were handmade for her birthday by her nursery teachers(!!!)
and a very silly alien cake-
i think she enjoyed her birthday!

february isn't too late...

for xmas stuff, surely?

just a couple of things that had slipped through the blogging net... first, an Elefante-
pics taken on xmas eve, hence the shocking lighting!

seriously fiddly, but pretty cute, and all from stash!

and a funny little activity i did with the kids, making xmas felt wreaths!
i simply cut some holly, or xmas trees depending on who you ask, out of green felt and marked two holes on each leaf... then the kids threaded some thin elastic through the holes in each leaf once, in from the front then from the back, then through again, forming a loop, this time going from the back first, then in through the front, threading red buttons or felt circles occasionally as they went. if that makes any sense.

some peoples looked slightly more haphazard when worn...
but it was a fun & easy way to keep them happy for a while, and have been a welcome xmassy addition to the dress-up stash!