Pintrest Successes

Like most of the blogging world, I jumped on the pintrest bandwagon a few months ago and pretty much delved into an alternate universe believing I could make anything with a glue gun, vinegar, and burlap.

Despite my hours of perusing the gorgeous pictures I think I've cooked less and my house has been more of a mess than ever the past few months. Turns out staring at lots of pretty pictures doesn't actually make beautiful crafts and food magically appear in your house. Sad day...

In the past couple of weeks though, I actually got around to using a few of the recipes and tips I've had pinned forever.

Results: 5 successes! :)

The Friday night before last I was bored and had just gotten back the results that I'd passed my gestational diabetes testing, and decided I would bake something. Now, y'all have to understand that as much as I really do actually enjoy cooking, I am NOT a baker. I leave that realm of the cooking world to my momma and youngest brother. I think it has something to do being on a low-carb basically no sugar diet for the past couple of years thanks to PCOS, but I just do not bake, so deciding to bake something out of the blue is actually a big deal for me.

It was late Friday night and I wasn't in the mood to venture out to the grocery store, and decided to try and find something to make using ingredients we already had in the house. I was thinking chocolate chip bundt cake, but all the recipes I found called for pudding mix or sour cream that I didn't have. I finally found this recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip bundt cake. Umm... hello, I've mentioned my love of pumpkin before, (probably on more than one occasion), and pumpkin and chocolate in a cake? Sign me up!

The recipe was super easy and came out really well. The first piece I had on Friday night, (ok, around 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning after it came out of the oven), when it was still warm tasted like it had a little too much spice (maybe the cloves or allspice, I told y'all I don't bake enough to tell the difference), for my taste. But I swear this cake got progressively BETTER over the five days it took to finish it! It is absolutely delicious with a big glass of milk!

Recipe #2 for CrockPot French Dip Sandwiches was thrown in the crock-pot as I headed out the door for church last Sunday morning. I love recipes where you can just dump things in the crock-pot, turn it on and go about your day. My biggest complaint about it was that the delicious smell of roast beef woke me up early from my post-church Sunday afternoon nap. ;)

I did leave out the red wine in the recipe because we didn't have any in the house. My plan was originally to stop by the grocery store on the way home from church and get some to put in, but the 5 glasses of water I had at lunch and the baby bouncing on my bladder negated that plan real quick. Even sans red wine, husband and I really like the turn out. We had our sandwiches on some really delicious mini french bread rolls from the Super Target bakery, with provolone cheese and some horseradish mayo. Yum. Of course my pregnant self wanted some spice added to it and I think they would have been good with some pepperoncini peppers added to the sandwich, but wanting spicy/vinegary things added to normally delicious and well seasoned food is about par for the course around here lately, (pretty sure I was thiiis close to adding Tobasco sauce to some lentil soup the day before).

That night in attempt to further procrastinate decorating the Christmas tree I cleaned every. single. surface. of. the. entire. kitchen. No lie. Dishes, counters, appliances, cookbook stand, decorative plates and trays, canisters, every single thing was cleaned.

While cleaning the appliances I remembered something I'd seen on pintrest about heating up a bowl of vinegar water in the microwave to make it easier to clean. Y'all, seriously, do this!! It made cleaning the microwave so incredibly easy! Plus, I'm a big fan of anything that can save me from using extra chemical cleaners when I can. I love me some vinegar and baking soda!

And finally, last Friday night I needed a quick snack to make to take a Christmas party and found two pins using mini doughnuts to make snowmen and reindeer. I've been wanting to make them for months and thought party would be a good opportunity.

For the reindeer I used chocolate covered doughnuts, brown and red peanut M&Ms for the noses and just kind of pushed them into the middle of the doughnuts, (there weren't enough red in the package to make all Rudolphs), white pearly sprinkles for the

eyes, and pieces of pretzels for the antlers. Just a note, it's a little difficult to make pretzels break evenly and pretty than you might think. Take my word for it. ;)

For the snowmen I used powdered doughnuts, orange M&M's, and chocolate jimmies sprinkles that I pushed straight into the doughnuts. Getting the jimmies into the powdered doughnuts was probably the most frustrating part of the whole process because they were so small, but even still it wasn't too bad. I had originally planned to use chocolate icing, but a)that seemed like even more trouble and b)I read a review that said that the frosting didn't stick to the doughnuts too well.

So there are my pintrest successes for the past couple of weeks! I would like to say that I am usually not so productive on the weekends, but the first weekend we had two full days of glorious rain, (after months of NO rain and a crazy bad drought), and I didn't feel like leaving the house much. Maybe if it'd rain a little more this month I'd actually get the rest of my house clean and cook dinner more often. Oh, and finish putting out my Christmas decorations...

Hope you all had a great weekend! Do you have any recent Pintrest successes to share?

Jennifer