PLAYING OUTSIDE

How's that for a creative blog post title?  Sometimes inspiration just strikes you.  Or it doesn't, and you are left with "Playing Outside."  If you have got something more witty, please send it my way.

Arkansas is a pretty awesome place to live.  I mean that sincerely.  I really love it here.  It helps that I have spent all but 5 years of my life living in this state, so it is home.  One thing I heart about this home state of mine is the fact that even in the heart of winter, you will get some days warm enough to play outside.  And now that the girls are old enough to actually enjoy it, we do just that.  Hence the title.

I could have also called this post "Wordless Wednesday" and just posted pictures, but I can never seem to do a post where I don't yack about whatever is in my brain.  However, the rest of this post will be mostly pictures of my beautiful children playing outside with no captions.

But I will say that I love my girls.  I love seeing them enjoy being outside.  I love dressing them alike and derive much more joy from it than I probably should.  I love that when we play outside there is no mess inside.  I really like taking pictures outside in natural light.  I love that they whine slightly less outdoors than indoors.  All in all, playing outside is the bomb.

So, here are the pictures that I have now droned on about.  Hope they are worth the build up.  At least I know they are for me, since they are my babies.  (What?  I don't have babies?  Only a toddler and a little girl?  How did that happen?  Where does the time go?)

(Francie tried to come enjoy the sun, and since she is an indoor cat, Lily had to take her back inside.  Poor kitty.  Also, I apparently lied about the lack of captions.)

(The chevron heart shirt/dress things were made by my friend Nicole, and I am in love with them.)

That wraps up this edition of almost Wordless Wednesday.  Thanks, February, for giving us more than we deserve in the winter time.

SUGAR COOKIES: MY RECIPES & TIPS

As almost anyone who reads my blog or follows me on Instagram will know, I love making and decorating sugar cookies.  I really do.  I have realized that most of the time, I have more important stuff that I should be doing, so I am not turning sugar cookies into any kind of career.  (Nor will this become a cookie blog.)  I already have a career in food.  Sort of.  By proxy.  Anyway. . .



I have started to get a lot of questions about what I do for sugar cookies.  There are a million different ways to do sugar cookies - like most things in the world.  I have found the one that works for me.

I use this basic recipe from All Recipes for the cookie.  It is good.  The only thing I do differently is add a teaspoon of almond extract, along with the vanilla.  I figured out about a year ago that I can only use real butter in these cookies to get them to turn out consistently.  Then I found out that lab rats won't eat margarine, because it is practically not a food substance.  Since then, I have only used the real deal butter when I make sugar cookies.  And almost everything else.

Basic tips for making and rolling out the cookies -
- Roll them out on parchment paper - then you do not have to move them at all, and they stay in their shape better.
- Get to the right consistency of dough.  It should not be sticky.  Add more flour if you need to.  This makes a huge difference in how much you like your life while making cookies.
- Practice really does help a lot.  The more you make cookies, the easier it becomes to get the results you want.

Moving on to icing.  What you probably don't realize, because you probably have not done extensive research on sugar cookie frosting techniques as I have (which makes me sound crazy), is that people have strong opinions about what frosting is used on sugar cookies.  Royal Icing is used most commonly, and it yields the perfect looking sugar cookies that you most likely find on Pinterest.

However, many people, including me, are not in love with how hard it dries and the taste of it.  I prefer Glaze on my sugar cookies.  The taste is better, it stays much softer, and but it still dries hard enough to be stackable.  However, you cannot get the fine details with glaze - it tends to be more goopy.

So - I finally decided that to make sugar cookies that look the way I want and taste the way I want, I need to use both kinds of frosting.  It is slightly more work, but it gets the results that I want, so it is worth it for me.  Also, both kinds of frosting keep in the fridge for long periods of time, since everything in them is shelf stable.  Usually I make large batches of both, and then I just color them and re-whip as needed.

For Royal Icing I use this recipe from Sugar Kissed.  It is supposed to be a softer royal icing and uses glycerin to keep it that way.  I have used this exclusively for some cookies, and I was pretty pleased with how they tasted.  I still like glaze better, but this recipe does taste good all over the cookies.

For the glaze, I use this recipe from All Recipes.  As a general rule, I "flood" all of my cookies with glaze.  So, I outline with Royal Icing and then fill them up with the glaze.  Then, I do the details with Royal Icing, because it is much more precise and holds it shape.

Basic tips for frosting -
- Consistency is key!  If I were the kind of person that used a lot of punctuation, I would have done a line of exclamation points on that.  Piping frosting needs to be stiff, but not so stiff that it will crack as it is coming out.  Flooding icing needs to be thin enough to spread easily and run all together, but not so thin that it runs off your cookie.  You determine how much control you have by the consistency of the frosting.
- I use gel colors.  Especially with the glaze, it is important to add white food coloring to it right off the bat.  Even though it is white.  This will make the white glaze more opaque and will allow it to take other colors better.

Well, that is about as basic as I can keep it without running on and on.  Other people do this much better than I do.  As I have mentioned before, Sweet Sugarbelle is one of my favorite cookie bloggers.  Her site is excellent and easy to navigate and includes detailed tutorials and in-depth explanations of stuff like icing consistency.  If you are really interested in cookies, I would check her out.

Please feel free to ask questions - I clearly enjoy this little hobby and like talking about it.  Also - I think it is easier than it looks to achieve results that you would be pleased with.  It just takes a little knowledge and practice.

Also, you can order beautiful sugar cookies on Etsy or at your local bakery if making them seems like too much work.  Always a good option.

KEYS TRIP

Since Seminar is a built in time to get away sans kiddos, we usually try to take at least one extra night and maximize having grandparents keeping the girls.  Since we disembarked the ship on Thursday morning, which also happened to be Valentine's Day, we decided to make this trip our present to each other.

Best. Decision. Ever.

It has been one of John's dreams to rent a convertible in a beautiful place, and since this was a short time and a beautiful place, we finally pulled the trigger on it.  So Thursday around noon found us just like this.




We headed here.

It felt like normal, cold February had never existed.  After a nap, which is virtually non-existent in our real life, we headed to go sea-kayaking.  Since we live in a firmly land-locked state, this was a great choice of activities.  (And, I got a Lifeproof case for my phone so that I could take pictures while sea-kayaking.  I love it.)

Next, we went for a bicycle ride around the property and a bit around town.  It was gorgeous.

We did go out for dinner on Valentine's Day, which is sort of against our rule to never do that.  We ended up at a very random place on the beach with live music.  We were seated outdoors, until it started raining.  Then we were seated in the bar with Very Loud Men who were also smoking.  It was super romantic.  At least we looked cute.  We did have fun, and it was perfectly fine doing something low-key since we had been having white-table-cloth meals all week.



And we were driving the cool car, who I am sure played a supporting role in Transformers.



After sleeping in way late on Friday morning, we spent more time driving the Keys.



We got a pizza lunch and picnicked by the Seven Mile Bridge.  We brought our champagne that we never got to from the night before and made mimosas, cause we got class.  Plus, we love the environment, which should be obvious from our use of styrofoam.



Our picnic partners included this pelican.




And these fisherman, who kept lamenting the fact that every time they threw a fish back into the water, the pelican would manage to swipe it from the air.

We gave them the rest of our champagne as we headed for the airport.  It started raining just as we pulled away from lunch.  Perfect timing.



Peace out, Keys - you were good to us!  Thanks to John for being the best travel buddy of all time and my favorite person ever.  Thanks to God for giving us far more than we ever deserve.

CRUISE LIFE: SEMINAR AT SEA

Let me start by saying that we were not aboard the Carnival Triumph, thank God.  We heard about it as soon as we were in port and able to check the news on our phones again.  It was a bizarre day to come back from a cruise just as another one was making such terrible news.  We were sailing on Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas - the world's largest cruise ship.  CFA chartered the entire thing, and we had our annual seminar aboard the boat - Seminar at Sea.

Let's just say that this Seminar may have ruined me for all others.  Seminar is always good fun (click here for 2012 and here for 2011), but this one was far more vacational than normal, and that suited us real well.

I'm going to divide this up into categories of stuff that start with the letter "F" to keep it moving.

FRIENDS
We got to hang out with people that we normally don't get to see.  Plus - no kids are allowed, so we get to finish conversations.  Amazing.  It was so good to see our peeps - it only makes me wish it could be more often.

(Kristen and I were in the white pants club this day.  Another day, it was the blue pants club.)

(The guys were too antsy to lay in chairs in the sun between sessions.)


FANCY DINNERS
Formal night is standard cruise fare, and this one delivered the goods.




(Don't worry - that's a mocktail.)

Another night, we dressed up for dinner at the speciality restaurant 150 Central Park.



FOOD
It seemed like I was always hungry.  We ate more hobbit style than normal, sometimes eating two dinners.  The CFA message was spread through the cruise, and it would show up in funny places - like on my lemon meringue tart.



Here's our flight of salts that we got at the fancy dinner.  One tasted like boiled eggs.  So strange and strangely tasty.



Eating free room service on our balcony never got old.



FUN
We stopped in the Bahamas and chilled at the beach.


(John lost and recovered his sunglasses not once, but twice, in these waves.)

There was a CFA Talent Show on the last night.  One of our friends brought down the house with his amazing juggling act that culminated with him juggling knives while balancing on a rocking board.  The whole event was quite entertaining.

FUNNY

- Dancing Operators.  Always funny.

- Towel animals.  Love these guys.

- There were three channels devoted to CFA on the boat, also known as propaganda.  I watched the entire loop of two of them.  I especially loved the CFA comedy channel that included old training videos.  This is "Talking Trash" from the early 90s.

- No alcohol anywhere on the boat.  All bars were stocked with bottled water, Powerade and Red Bull. The crew talked a lot about what a break our cruise was for them.

- John and I got stuck between decks on a bar that went between the 5th and 8th decks.  Our friends could look down and see us as they were heading into the dinner we were supposed to be meeting them at.  After 10-15 minutes, we got moving again.  More than one person mentioned that this is the sort of thing that is always happening to us.  I'm not sure if things like this are always happening or if I just talk about everything that happens to us more than other people because I write a blog.  Either way, it was pretty funny.

- Operators dressed alike.  Happens a lot.

FANTABULOUS ROOM

We got to stay in a great room, which was such a treat.  

Since CFA chartered the whole boat, we actually knew the people who were staying in the nicest room on the boat (not us) and got to go see it.  It was 2000 square feet, with a bedroom loft, a grand piano, it's own staff and a private hot tub, just to name a few features.  So fun to see!

FEELING HAPPY

Every year that we have Truett at Seminar, it makes me happy.  I always tear up when he is on stage.  This year, we all sang Happy Birthday to his wife, Jeanette.  They had motorized scooters to get around the boat.  So thankful for Truett's vision and what CFA is because of him.

The cruise was amazing.  It was far more relaxing that I thought it would be.  In fact, trying to get our heads back into the game here at home is proving a challenge after such a treat of a week.  We are so thankful to work with a company that takes the time and money to spoil us like this - what a blessing!