2nd Annual Eggnog Day

Just a reminder that the 'Official' Eggnog Day is upon us (the first Monday in December). I know that many of you (Grandpa Barlow and Daniel) have already been celebrating this holiday everyday for the last month in anticipation for the actual day; but now it is finally here! So I hope all the practicing has prepared you-- Grandpa. For those of you unfamiliar with how this works, it's pretty simple. Go to your local grocery store or equivialant (Wal-mart, to those in Ephraim) and buy as much Eggnog as you dare consume without needing medical assistance. Then go home and drink it! We like to put a movie on (Christmas Story, or Christmas Vacation); this seems to help distract us from the fact that what we are doing is against current medical advice or common sense, but the rest is all up to personal peference. So, please, anyone who is interested in joining in on this very special day, don't hesitate. As always, be safe and do not drive afterwards if you can help it-- of course you probably won't be able to get your gut behind the wheel anyway after all that yummy, fat filled, yellow nector of holiday cheer.

Gingerbread part 4 - overkill

Okay, I know that the gingerbread project has totally taken over my blog, but no more after tonight....because it is finally finished! It's drying overnight and then tomorrow it will be out of my kitchen. Yeah, we can actually use the table for eating again. Anyway, for those of you who are still interested after all my obsessive posts, here are the pictures of the final project, and I swear this is the last time you will hear about it!

Gingerbread part 3

Sunday - slight detail work but mostly a nice break.

Monday - Andrea came and we started work on the grounds. We shaped hills out of floral foam, and then covered them with frosting and green sugar to make grass. The dirt is brown sugar.

Tuesday - Today I am working on landscape details. We used cream cheese mints to mold rocks. Marshmallow and pretzel trees adorn the hills. The pumpkin coach is in the works - it is also molded out of cream cheese mint paste. The horses still have me baffled - I'll figure it out by tomorrow though, because that's when we have to place it in the front window of Poco Loco on Main Street Logan. I also finished the tall gold spire of the castle today.

Gingerbread Update

Friday - Assembly day. I put my pieces together using various techniques for support as you can see from all the soup canse an baking soda boxes. Rubber bands work nicely too! The towers were a bit tricky and are leaning slightly. I'm bugged, but not enough to break them apart and restart.

Friday night I visited Andrea for a twilight girl's night out, and here's a picture of her progress.

Saturday - Today the assembly continued. I spent the morning attaching turrets to my part. When Andrea and Betsy got here we started the major work.

While Andrea finished painting her walls with pearl dust I constructed the false floor for my portion and mounted it on the castle base.

Then we built Andrea's walls and columns around it. We had a little trouble getting the pill bottles and spice bottles out that we were using for supports on the inside!

Betsy ran to Logan and, thanks to her dad, brought back a nicely shaped board for the final display. Once the castle was moved to the board, we were able to build the bridge and pour the sucker batch lake.

Gingerbread Craze

Some of you may remember my gingerbread house from last year - the yellow Victorian manor with a dark chocolate door - YUM!!
This year the gingerbread project has grown out of control. But wait, I must go back to start this story properly. For the last two years around Christmas time I have noticed that all the stores in downtown Logan have a gingerbread house in the window. I figured out it is the "parade of Gingerbread houses" and is an actual contest here in Cache Valley. I thought to myself, "gee, that would be fun..." So last year I tackled a big gingerbread project and came up with the yellow thing. I was very proud of it, but I hadn't made it early enough to get it in the contest. My friend and fellow gingerbread enthusiast, Andrea, came up with a fantastical idea. We would find out all the info about the parade, and do a team project for this year. So, one week ago I made a string of phone calls to downtown merchants trying to find someone in the know. After being directed back and forth several times I finally connected with the head of the project and officially entered Andrea and I in the parade of gingerbread houses.

So here's where it gets sketchy. Andrea has been cooking up an idea for over a year now--Cinderella's castle. Yeah. Square walls are for sissies.

Andrea's husband is a computer graphics expert, so he designed the castle to scale for us and broke it down into template pieces. I then took the draft and created proportional scaled pieces of card stock paper to use as cut outs. Andrea and I have divided the labor as follows: She is building the outside court wall and bridge. I am building the inside structure which will sit on a false floor just one inch below the top of the outside walls.

Wednesday: I baked most of my pieces. I don't quite know how to work out the roof yet, so I'm going to build the walls and turrets first and then do the roof.

Thursday: Frosting day! everything got coated with royal icing, and then bricks were traced with a spatula blade. Once the frosting was dry I dusted Wilton pearl dust on the pink pieces. The blue pieces and dark pink areas are pearl dust mixed with a little lemon juice to make a liquid paint.

It's Official

It's official - we bought a new car. The transmission on our 2000 Saturn was going out, and I could no longer put it in reverse. I had to make sure to always pull through parking stalls, and park on the street. One time I forgot and ended up pushing our car out of the driveway on Sunday morning in a skirt!

We listed the Saturn on KSL cars and were pleasantly surprised when someone offered to buy it the next morning. He brought cash and took it away, and we suddenly realized we didn't own a car.

After much stress, Internet research, test driving, and price checking, we settled on a 2006 Mazda 5. Michael really wanted some extra features, but we decided to sacrifice the fancy stuff for a phenomenally low-priced base model. Even so, it's more than we are used to! The door locks and windows are automatic, it has a 6 disk CD changer, and it has one of those super fancy keys that beeps when you push the red button...

Michael's work buddy says it looks like a dust buster, so we've affectionately named the vehicle "Buster."

Presenting the amazing Drewbini!

We have always known that Andrew has a sense of adventure greater than his sense of reason, and now I finallly have proof on video! He came up with this game on his own. Notice the smile at the end...it says it all!