Author: Tanie

This weekend was SO GOOD!

Friday Night!

Hot dogs, corn on the cob & my own personally invented and delicious potato salad:
5-7 small potatoes, washed/cubed/boiled/cooled + 1 clove minced garlic & 3 diced slices of bacon sautéed in 1 tsp olive oil and cooled + 2 tbsp sour cream + salt & pepper to taste
Normally I’m a potato salad hater but this was AWESOME.

After we ate we played a game of Apples to Apples, then I read Sym a chapter of our current bedtime book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s fun reading these books to her, she’s so involved and excited about everything that happens, and has all these theories about what’s going to happen; it’s hard for me not to spoil it for her!

Saturday!
Saturday was BASICALLY the best day of my life.

Reason 1: summerrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Reason 2: Opening day for the West End Farmer’s Market! I checked it out with Sym and we got organic eggs, blackberry honey, assorted cherry tomatoes and French Breakfast radishes which were grown on a non-profit farm that’s right inside the city! Very cool.

Reason 3: the return of Popsicle Party!

Reason 4: THE BEACH THE BEACH OMG THE BEACH

18°C and super windy? IT’S BIKINI TIME. Sym and I spent two and a half hours on Sunset Beach and had endless fun.

Reason 5: our Vancouver Canucks

Taylor and I watched game two of the Stanley Cup final at La Belle Patate with Leanna, Katrina and Carleigh (who doesn’t have a blog HOW WEIRD). Things were a bit nerve-wracking for a while but it all worked out in the end.

Sunday!
Sunday I woke up with a small hangover, so I did what any person would do: I killed it with brunch. Taylor and I went to Glowbal in Yaletown, one of our favorite brunch places, and they did not disappoint!

mini doughnuts & mimosas

strawberry mint smoothie (I was CRAVING one of these the whole way there!)

my food: a Kobe beef and burrata cheese frittata with potatoes and fresh greens

Taylor’s food: wild berry panettone french toast with white chocolate mousse (should have been organic rosemary honeycomb but we’re not complaining) and a milk chocolate shot

SEE YA, HANGOVER! After brunch we had boring errands to run. Taylor bought a new PS3 to replace his old dead one and I bought a shower curtain rod like WOW what fun. I also somehow tricked myself into thinking it’d be a good idea to try on bathing suits. I know, I’m CLEARLY out of my mind. Anyway I got frustrated and came home and ordered this one:

I have a problem with loving rainbows. Hopefully it’ll arrive before the summer is over; there’s a rolling mail strike going on here!

After we got home from shopping we took the dogs out for a big epic walk, from Sunset Beach to English Bay to the Stanley Park dog park.

Kichou was very well dressed in his little Canucks jersey! We got a lot of compliments on it.

Someone once said to me that Georgie always looks so clean and nice, but here’s some proof that isn’t always the case, she’s a very ocean-going dog.

Now I’m off to go read Sym another exciting chapter from Harry Potter. I hope you all had wonderful weekends too!

Summer is here and so are popsicles!

In case you weren’t around last year, all summer I make a different kind of popsicle on Friday night and then Sym and I test them out on Saturday. Last year I was lazy and resorted to just using store-bought juice way too many times, but this year I’m determined to be more creative and hands on.

These were definitely hands on! Pitting all these cherries was tedious and messy, but worth it in the end!

After removing the pits and stems from all the cherries, I blended them in the blender until they were finely chopped. I ended up with just under two cups of blended cherry, half of which I put aside and the other half of which I used to make cherry syrup.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup blended up cherries
1 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
Combine in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until all the sugar is completely dissolved and then simmer for approximately 15 minutes. Allow to cool completely and then strain through a fine sieve to remove any lumps.

I mixed the cherry syrup and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice into the reserved blended cherries and then poured it into my popsicle molds!

And the result?

Delicious!

Sym painted this family of Russian nesting dolls months ago, but I didn’t get around to spraying them with clear coat until this weekend.

I love the different facial expressions she gave them, they’re so cute! I told her to keep the colour scheme simple so she only used white, grey, yellow, green and pink, plus the flesh tone on the faces and a little bit of red detailing. She did the outlines with a fine Sharpie.

She’s also been continuing her Harry Potter Felt Flatties series.

Hagrid, looks like Professor Sprout but is actually Professor McGonagall, and my personal favorite, Voldemort. I love the evil look on his face.

I’ve also been hard at work finishing the glitter garland for my giveaway winner! This will be going in the mail (or more likely, get Fedexed because of a looming mail strike) this week.

Nicole by OPI in Shell Me the Truth + MAC x Hello Kitty in Something About Pink + Sharpie

Edit: I want to give credit to the girl who explained how to do these but she doesn’t have a blog that I know of, but thank you Jetpacks!

Did you know I’ve never made a layer cake before? It’s true. Cupcakes, jar cakes, cake doughnuts and once many years ago, a sheet cake shaped like a bat with hot pink icing (unfortunately no pictures of this exist), but never a layer cake.

I decided it was time to remedy this and I also decided it was time that I, as a rainbow enthusiast, try my hand at that internet classic: RAINBOW CAKE. I know, what better way to make my first layer cake a success than by making it six layers?

Since I didn’t know whether my attempt would be a disaster or not I decided to use a boxed cake mix so that if I had to toss the whole thing in the trash I wouldn’t have wasted a ton of ingredients and time. I used Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Classic White, but feel free to use your own favorite white cake (what kind of cake is “white” anyway? Or “yellow” for that matter. When I was growing up cake came in two varieties: chocolate and vanilla). Preheat your oven & mix the batter according to the box instructions or your own recipe.

Once you cake batter is mixed up you need to separate it into six smaller bowls for tinting. To colour the batter I used Wilton Icing Color– it’s super concentrated and gives really bright colours, although I’ve also heard of people having good luck using regular food coloring in neon shades. The icing colour is a pastey gel, so to get it into the batter without staining the crap out of my hands I “poured” it; the colour would sort of ooze out really slowly and I’d scrape the emerging pea-sized blob into the batter with a toothpick. To mix the colours in I used forks.
Anyway I used four colours: Red-Red, Golden Yellow, Royal Blue and Petal Pink, and mixed them thusly:
for the red layer, two Red-Red
for the orange layer, one Red-Red + one Golden Yellow
for the yellow layer, two Golden Yellow
for the green layer, one Golden Yellow + one Royal Blue
for the blue layer, two Royal Blue
for the purple layer, one Royal Blue + one Petal Pink
The purple layer didn’t turn out as I wanted; it was much too dark. I should have used two blobs of pink and just a dab of blue.

Bake the layers in 8″ cake pans. I have three so I made the layers in two batches. To make sure the layers wouldn’t stick (since they were very thin and would have torn very easily) I sprayed the pans with non-stick spray AND floured them. I poured the batter in and spread it with a silicone spatula to cover the bottom of the pan- it was only about a half and inch thick but that’s fine. I baked them on the middle rack at 325°F for fifteen minutes, rotating after ten, and they came out perfectly. After they cooled for ten minutes I turned them out onto a floured surface and let them cool upside-down while I washed the pans and made the second batch of layers.

Even though I used cake mix, I wanted to make my own frosting; I don’t really like the canned stuff. I used this recipe from Martha Stewart, substituting lemon juice for the vanilla. I think I used seven cups of icing sugar, and had exactly enough frosting to cover my six-layer cake.

Once all the layers cooled I assembled the whole thing, from red to purple. Since I’d never made a layer cake before I’d obviously also never frosted one so I didn’t do a bang up job, and my layers also weren’t totally flat and I didn’t want to top them (cut the curved part off) because they were already so thin, so it was fairly dome-shaped. All in all, however, I think it turned out pretty well for my first attempt!

I can’t make anything without putting bunting on it, SUE ME. Of course, with rainbow cake it’s what’s inside that counts:

PERFECTO. As a bonus this cake was also really delicious- the cake itself isn’t sweet, which is a nice offset to the INTENSE OUT OF CONTROL SWEETNESS of the frosting. All in all I think this was a big success!

Claire didn’t throw up last night! It’s a miracle you guys. On Thursday and Friday night I shut her out of the bedroom so I could sleep without her barfing all over the sheets, but last night I didn’t and she only woke me up with her usual making biscuits on my head and NOT the ominous herk-herk-herk pre-barf noise.

I don’t even know. It was really hard to get her out of there too. Also, Taylor’s playoff beard is basically OUT OF CONTROL.

Symphony’s dessert on Friday night: cinnamon sticks, sugar frosting, chocolate ice cream, s’mores sprinkles. I KNOW. She had a nutritional dinner of pizza though, so it’s okay.

Me & my friend Harley. He belongs to my upstairs neighbor and he and Georgie are in love.

My main weekend accomplishment (although I also have some pretty sweet nails to show you guys tomorrow). More on this later…

Remember my diabetic cat? Of course you do. Well, now she’s my diabetic cat with unexplained uncontrollable night vomiting. It’s time for another round of expensive tests, meds and special food! SEE YA, ALL MY MONEY.

Argh. Well, at least my nail polish hasn’t chipped.

She has some mysterious infection or allergic reaction that’s causing her to puke all night (this has been going on since last Friday), PLUS her diabetes is as bad as ever. My poor old cat is sicker than ever and I feel helpless and defeated and like all the time and money and MONEY I’ve spent trying to get her healthy has been a huge heaping waste. The vet called and left a message about the test results and I couldn’t call him back for over half an hour because I couldn’t stop crying, partly because I felt bad for Claire, partly because I felt guilty for letting her get so sick (although in my defense she isn’t acting sick at all, I mean other than the barf), and partly because I felt (still feel) guilty knowing that if this gets much more expensive I won’t be able to afford to do it anymore. Luckily the current plan of action just involves switching her food and adjusting her insulin dosage, with no more account-draining blood test for a month.

Yesterday was a holiday, so today is my Monday!

Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Blue Me Away! + Winwax blue-green glitter
Last week I snapped half my nails off to little nubs and had to cut them all super short, boo. Anyway this manicure is pretty meh, I didn’t feel like fighting with the glitter because I knew it would take forever to dry/get wrecked in a minute so I kind of just gave up. I swear my next set of nails will be more interesting!

So remember when I was sick on Saturday and Sunday? And it was raining and miserable out anyway? Well, Monday it was sunny (well, half sunny) and I was feeling better! Of course, my house was a disaster so I spent the morning cleaning, and came up with this great plan to clean out and rearrange three closets. I may have mentioned before how my cleaning often turns into mess-making and then shopping, but luckily this time I chose to go shopping first.

Ostensibly I was looking for shoe shelves, but instead I bought some ramekins and a new doormat. I used to have a cool one with a raven on it but my neighbor’s dog pooped on it, and then my dog stepped in the poop and smooshed it in, and it’s not like I can just throw a doormat in the wash. Anyway.

Isn’t it so pretty?? They had a few different ones but I liked the pomegranates on this one. I think they’re pomegranates. I guess they could be some kind of red figs. Also, it was twelve dollars. TWELVE. I can’t argue with that.

Sym was with me and she used her girl powers to sniff out some Tokidoki Unicornos.

Hers are on the left; mine are on the right.

I bought her some new sunglasses, which she wore with her super-fresh pink/grey/black ensemble.

Fashion.

I bought myself some flowers, $10 for 30. And they match my desk perfectly.

They are like the daffodils of tulips. Did you know tulips are my favorite flower? IT’S TRUE. Well, it’s true today.

For dessert we had chocolate ice cream with s’mores sprinkles. Yes, you heard me right. S’MORES SPRINKLES. What will they invent next???

I never did get around to cleaning out the closets, but oh well. There’s always next weekend!

It’s that time! First of all I just want to thank everyone who entered my glitter garland giveaway, I love you girls so much, you keep me young.

I know lots of people like to use some number randomizing website to pick giveaway winners, but I went the old-fashioned route.

Little bits of paper! I saw this as an opportunity to burn through some of the giant stack of hotel stationery cluttering up my desk drawers.

What is more random than kids, anyway?

“What does that say? George… Anne?” (note: this image has been doctored but ONLY to remove a toilet from the background LOL)

YES, GEORGEANNE! CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!