Happy Birthday!!!

Big birthday preparations and fun today.  Celebrating 19 years of having Cookie in our family!  What a treat!
In honour of this occasion, Muffin and I worked hard to create the perfect birthday cake!
We used this cake recipe, but changed out the milk for So Delicious Coconut Milk beverage, and the butter for Earth Balance.  Oh, and we made it lemon flavoured!! 
We made 2 round cakes first.  Then we made 24 cupcakes using the recipe posted here.  These are vanilla flavoured, just in case we get tired of eating lemon cake.
Cookie sent tagged us in Pinterest, so we could see this cake idea...  but she wanted a SHARK!!  Cookie loves sharks...
It was hard, but in the end, Muffin was the hero!  This is what we got:

Its a great white...  lemon shark!!

He has TEETH!!

With the extra round cake, Muffin made this!  So beautiful!

Of course, we sang Happy Birthday to Cookie in our best voices after dinner, and we cut the cake.  We cut the rosette cake, keeping the shark intact a little longer.  Pretty sure I'll be having shark for breakfast tomorrow...  

***NO SHARKS WERE HARMED OR WILL BE HARMED****

Oh, and please, support shark conservation efforts on behalf of Cookie, marine biology student/shark lover.

And the winner is......

Canadacole is the winner of the name the quilt contest!!  But let me tell you how this all played out...

As I posted a link on Facebook, that's where the names started coming... first name was Fields of Love, given by a dear friend who explained how the quilt reminded her of the perfect fields when flying over England.  I was drawn into her vision and thought so too. It reminded me of my trip to England a few years ago when I toured London and the surrounding areas with my sister on a weekend!  I began to think that the quilt reminded me of the perfectly manicured gardens at Hampton Court.  I was hoping someone might name it "my english garden", but that never came.
The next names were amazing too, as each one had a story that went with it.  They were all very touching, but it wasn't until canadacole posted Summer Oasis that I knew I had my quilt name.  (For a brief moment there, I thought Harry might be appropriate given the fact that I have puppy and guest puppy at the house and in my bed most mornings...) As a tribute to the fabric name, Oasis is very appropriate, but even more so with this hot hot weather we're having!  I'm not complaining, because this is the first hot summer in five years of living on the coast!  It's a shame to be so close to the beach and not have hot weather! During this heat wave, I've been in my cool basement- my oasis- working on this lovely quilt!  What a treat!  It will certainly bring hot summer memories once I have it completed.

Now, Canadacole lives a bit too far for me to just bake something and bring it over, so I offered the set of handmade cards.  Wanna see them?  They are quite pretty.... I hope she thinks so too!

Fancy little storage box to hold them all!!

Today is the day Cookie comes home from Hawaii for her summer break!  Can't wait to see her! I'm baking a triple layer cake for her!

I want to eat it now!!  Only 2 more hours before she arrives!

Mango Coconut Sorbet, for a hot hot day!!

Company is coming today!!  I thought I'd plan dessert and then later I'll figure out what we're actually going to eat.  I want it to be delicious, maybe even a little decadent?  Well, lets start with dessert- decadent and dairy free!!

I've made coconut milk sorbets before.  There was an awesome recipe on canadianliving.com a while back. In fact, I remember making it in Galveston in 2006 while on a family vacation in January...  and I know we had it before then, because I remember that it was a tried and true recipe that I brought with me (along with my icecream maker in my suitcase!!) for family night in our condo.  So my coconut milk sorbet from before was a simple syrup made with lime juice and lime zest, added to coconut milk in the ice cream maker.  So, same technique here, except that I want it to have a lot of mango purée in there too.

One 600g bag of frozen mango into the food processor.  A little hard to purée because it was frozen.  No problem, the next step will fix that.  We still need a simple syrup:  1/2 cup pulp free orange juice, 1/2 cup sugar, in a saucepan on the stove.  Bring to a boil, completely dissolving sugar and reducing slightly.

Now we have a smooth mango purée! 

Add the coconut milk and blend...  and into the ice cream maker!  

Oh wait, maybe you should read the instructions on the icecream maker that you haven't used in a few years to remember how to use it!!  Or, you could just dump everything in and then not be able to put the paddle attachment in...  and not be able to dump it out because it is already frozen to the edges, so you end up having to paddle the whole thing by hand!!

Starting to chunk up.  Thank goodness I had this hard plastic spatula in my drawer. I think it came with a hand mixer...  lovely tool.  Scrape and stir, scrape and stir....  my arm hurts.

I poured it into a lovely ceramic bowl once it reached the hardest consistency I could paddle, and into the freezer it goes!  Dessert is going to be awesome!

Does this look creamy enough?  It was so good! 

There's only 2 days left to name the quilt!!  Get your creative caps on!!

Do not press....

I have some pictures to show you.  Maybe this will help you with the quilt name you're going to come up with, but that's not why I'm going to show you the pictures.

Remember I said I was trying out this new technique (well, new to me...)?  Well, let me show you the preliminary results of my experiment in this no- iron technique.

What do you think?

Sweetie says it looks even better now with the white strips in between.  I like it a lot. 

You will notice here the slightest unevenness in the ends.  Less than 1/4 inch in all rows.  I'll trim this up at the end.  Don't you just love my photography skills too?  Yes, that is the camera strap.  Yes, those are my feet.  If only you could get a closer look at the fireworks design I have on my toes.  Muffin is doing nails these days...

No trimming done here.  This is the end I have been starting at to sew the strips.

What you should be noticing is how nicely my lines and rows match up. Now, I could take great care to make this happen, with trimming and pinning and a bunch of other tricks that I haven't learned (hence my usual results), but I haven't taken much care at all.  Well, except for the fact that I carefully cut to exact measure each piece before I started, and I carefully sewed each piece using an exact 1/4 inch seam, and I did not press any fabrics after the initial cutting!  The results are astounding to me!  I have always wondered why the math didn't work out. I would calculate, taking into account seam allowances, and the math wouldn't work out to what reality was.  Or perhaps it was the other way around.  Math is ALWAYS right.  Reality may vary???  Well, I think the trouble with the math was that I could not account for the distortion caused by ironing.  

[Interesting thought here- could it be that the reason my clothes don't fit right has NOTHING to do with the coconut cream strawberry desserts and a whole lot to do with the fact that I iron them???  Maybe I should just wear my clothes wrinkled....  ]

So now that you've seen these pictures, are you thinking of a name?  You still have 6 days!!  There are names posted on my facebook wall post too.  Click here to find it.  I'll be choosing from both places.   I hope to have the quilt top finished before Cookie comes home from Hawaii next week!

Giveaway!!

I've been continuing to work on the new quilt and realize it needs a name!!  So I thought, maybe I'll leave it up to you for suggestions?  The pattern is called  Rectangles and Strips.  The links to the original can be found in the previous post.  The fabric is Oasis by 3 Sisters for Moda.  Post your suggestion in the comments, and the best one will get:  a collection of hand made cards OR a baked dessert (if you live locally or want to travel to my house to pick it up!!)  I'll pick my favourite on Friday July 13th (will that be your lucky day???)  That gives you a little more than a week to come up with a creative quilt name!!

the unnamed quilt, layed out on the family room floor!

I have all the pieces cut, and all the strips made.  I need to make 1 1/2 inch white strips to separate each of the rows.  This quilt is going to be HUGE!!  I'm thinking a King size!  That will come in handy because I seriously think we need to get a King size bed.  Puppy is starting to take more room than he should, as he is stretching out, and Sweetie has grown accustomed to bigger beds after his 3 week stay in a luxury resort in Barbados (it was work...  yeah, we all wish we had his job!!)  I'm finding myself curled up on my pillow, or clinging to the edge of the mattress most nights.  Lately, I've given up and gone to cuddle up to the Vanilla Cake quilt in Cookie's room (aka the SPARE room).  

I hope to get some strips cut tonight, and maybe start sewing it up!  We have a guest puppy coming to Camp Kirchner for 2 weeks though, starting tonight. That might impede production.  Maybe I'll have to go back to baking and cooking while the guest puppy is here.  I need to pick this up and put it somewhere until I can piece it together, because I am still not ironing.  I have to wait until the quilt top is complete... remember, I'm trying out this new technique!  So far, I like it!

Can't wait to read your quilt names!!