GIRLS WITH THE GRANDPARENTS

While we were off doing lots of fun things last week, the girls were home doing lots of fun things with John's parents, aka, Grandpa and Grandma.  They love on our girls so well, and I trust them entirely to take care of them, which was such a blessing.

Here's their week in pics.

Lots of playing, park going, horse riding, picnicking, rolling on the floor and hugging.  So much fun!

Not having family that lives in town is a bummer, but when ours come, they really are fabulous.  Thanks, Lenny and Sharon for loving our girls well!

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.