Pumpkin Monkey Bread, Or, Why I Have Heartburn

Trolling for other uses for my last pound or so of pumpkin pie brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, I happened upon this pumpkin pie brioche monkey bread recipe from  Something Shiny. It's a brilliant recipe, surprisingly similar to our baked donuts, and the process was easy to make kid-friendly (and vegan!).

Basically, you put some Earth Balance in a bowl and nuke it til it's melted, and you put cinnamon, sugar, and pumpkin pie spice in another bowl and whisk it together. Everything else is the same as the recipe at Something Shiny--greased bundt pan, oven set to 350 degrees, pumpkin pie brioche dough ready and waiting.

Tear off a hunk of bread dough, roll it into a ball, dunk it in the melted Earth Balance--

 --roll it around in the cinnamon-sugar--

--and pop it in the pan. Repeat:

 Bake that big ol' mess for 35 minutes, turn it out of the pan, and gasp at the awesomely butter-shiny deliciousness that now rests in front of you:

Normally, at this point I'd show you a picture of us eating and enjoying our monkey bread, but I have to tell you, sometimes something is so delicious that your family digs right in and starts eating it, and you look at them tearing off pieces of monkey bread and shoving them in their mouths, sputtering through those full mouths at how yummy each mouthfull is, and you think...

We'll just not take a picture of people eating like wolverines today. Use your imagination instead, if you must.

And yes, I think that cinnamon-sugar gives me heartburn.

Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Valentines

Having to make the number of Valentines that the girls are having to make this year is a novelty for us. At Montessori, the children were encouraged to make Valentines only for whomever they wanted--instead of 30 mass-produced Valentines, the children usually received anywhere from six to a dozen lovingly hand-crafted Valentines from their dearest schoolmates, and they could make their own Valentines to give to their own dearest schoolmates in one inspired crafting session.

That's not really practical for the homeschool Valentine's Day party that the children are attending next week, of course. Although there are some homeschooled children that the girls have playdates with, just as there are some Montessori children and some public school children and some preschool children that they play with, there will also be homeschooled children at the party who may not know anyone else yet, and so obviously everybody needs a Valentine, not just the special buddies.

A couple dozen Valentines per kid is a LOT of Valentines, however, and so I've found myself setting up little art projects every day, encouraging the girls to play with a fun supply or a method that we haven't used in a while, and in the process doing a few Valentines. The girls, for instance, LOVE to play with their dad's Prismacolor markers, and so several Valentines got knocked out in that art project. Wet-on-wet watercolor is also super fun--

 --and that's how Sydney finished her Valentines:

Will hasn't had her nose out of a book or her face out of a computer (Newest obsession? Jumpstart Second Grade World from the library) long enough to come even close to finishing her Valentines, so I still get to whip out the Do-a-Dot markers, and then perhaps the heart-shaped rubber stamps, and I think I'm going to see if they'd like to send postcard Valentines to their other friends and family, so don't worry, the Valentines aren't nearly over yet.

Pumpkin Pie Baked Donuts

I have a LOT of pumpkin puree.

Several days after Halloween, I discovered big bins of locally-grown pumpkins at our grocery store, marked down to 50 cents each. I bought six of them, stuck them down in the basement, and every now and then I haul one up, chop it into pieces, roast the seeds, cook the rest of it down in a big pot, run it through the food mill, and freeze it into two-cup portions.

I do this every year, mind you, with one huge pumpkin, and the gallon Ziplock bag that the pumpkin puree fills, frozen in its two-cup portions, generally lasts until the next year's pumpkin. And so, with the six years' of pumpkin puree that I now have in stock, I'm trying to be a bit more creative.

In other news, Willow wanted to make donuts again. With pumpkin on my mind, I turned this into a chance to use up some pumpkin puree (and add some healthy vitamins into an otherwise worthless confectionary).

Willow and I mixed up a batch of Pumpkin Pie Brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I ALWAYS have a batch of some kind or other of their bread dough in the refrigerator, but usually it's a multigrain bread dough, and so now I have two different batches of bread dough in the refrigerator--ah, the troubles that do plague us!

After the bread dough had risen and refrigerated (no-knead doughs can be a bit sticky, and so refrigerating them until right before you want to use them is useful), Syd rolled it out--

 --and it's February, so obviously we cut it into hearts:

 
 While the donuts baked, the girls indulged in their FAVORITE baking activity:

 
 
 
It's entitled Scoop out a Bunch of Flour and Make a Big Mess with It. It's a great game, and the girls can play it for longer than it takes for the bread to bake. I should tell you, though, that they do clean it up entirely by themselves afterwards--I empty the vacuum and take another pass with the spray cleaner, and that's about it.

We've done baked donuts before--our original recipe came from Knead it, Punch it, Bake it--and so we've gotten the method down to a point where I far prefer these baked donuts to store-bought deep-fried ones. I melt some Earth Balance into one bowl, whisk sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg (and pumpkin pie spice blend!) together into another bowl, and we dunk, then dip, then munch:

It's not really an expectation that any donuts actually make it to the serving platter afterwards, at least not until you're nice and full and comfy-feeling.

Princess on Paper

Here is an assortment of artwork that Sydney has created in the last couple of weeks:

 

 

Do you sense a theme?

Artist's Paper Valentines: Prismacolor Marker on Bristol Board

We're getting a bit of a jump on Valentine's Day this year, since our homeschool group's Valentine's Day party is this week. So even though I have many more and more elaborate Valentine's Day projects planned for me and the kiddos in the next coupla weeks, our actual Valentines need to be sweet and simple.

A gorgeous Valentine doesn't need to be elaborate; professional artist's markers are beautifully saturated when used on sturdy white Bristol board, and all I need to do is cut the Bristol board into hearts and hand them over to the kiddos to draw on.

It's funny how each girl's personality is easy to see in her Valentines. Sydney has princesses, and princess gardens, and princesses watering their gardens on her Valentines:

And more princesses, and one prince:

And, of course, a fancy signature on the back of each one:

Willow, on the other hand, has this kind of farmer girl nature study going on with her Valentines:

She's got a pepper, and a pumpkin, and the Loch Ness monster, and some deer drawn with a really great perspective. I may hide that deer done as a line drawing and keep it for my ownself.

The Fashion Show Project: Sydney's Dress

Let me begin by saying that yes, I am as horrified by Toddlers and Tiaras as you are, and no, I have no desire to ever walk on a runway, myself. Like wearing make-up, dresses of any sort, or basically anything other than jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and combat boots, runway modeling is just another one of those girl-type dreams that I had nothing to do with.

For my little girl, however, it's another story entirely, as fashion is queen in her four-year-old mind, and so, bravely smiling but with many secret qualms, I entered us into our town's Trashion/Refashion Show.

I like the idea of showing Sydney that real fashion is, at its essence, about creation, not consumerism. That fashion design is empowering. That dressmaking is a skill, and an art. Never mind that I don't really care about real fashion--the kid does, so that's where we're homeschooling for a while. Whether or not our ensembles are chosen for this juried show, it's now our mother-daughter project to refashion ourselves a couple of runway outfits.

I put Syd in charge of visualizing her design. Here it is:


Please pay particular attention to the tall crown, the color scheme of bright fuschias and purples, the sleeve and arm detailing, and the butterfly wings. Those will be important later.

For a refashion entry, the entire ensemble must be constructed almost entirely from fabrics originally constructed for another purpose. Syd and I went to Goodwill one fine Sunday and found the perfect selection of fabrics for her design. We chose one main fabric, the centerpiece of her design, and then two other fabrics for detailing and accessories. I was worried that Syd would want to adhere so strictly to her original drawing that we wouldn't be able to find anything that would match closely enough, but the true trouble lay in dissuading her from being so delighted in every single thing that she saw that she wanted to completely alter her design to fit every new fabric. The main fabric, however, was an easy pick--here it is, just graduated from its former life as a woman's skirt:

Here it is, reincarnated:

I chopped off the skirt on both sides and then sewed it back together to fit Sydney's high chest measurement. I kept the entire length of the skirt, and so the dress is now about knee-length on Syd. The skirt had an invisible zipper in the back, which is now the zipper to the dress--I goofed on my seam allowance a bit, and so the dress is alarmingly snug, but Syd says it's comfortable, and fortunately the fashion show, if our outfit is chosen, is in just a couple of months.

Out of the extra material that I cut off of the sides, I preserved an entire length of the lace-embellished fabric--I finished the seam on either side of it and used it as a halter strap for the dress:
The tulle shrug is sewn across the entire length of the halter strap; it used to be part of the skirt's underskirt, shown here:

I like the extra bit of tulle at the neck because it covers Syd's shoulders, and I think it looks really nice from the back:

Syd is THRILLED with her outfit so far, and I'm relieved that it turned out so well. There were a couple of shaky moments during construction, and if our outfit is chosen for the fashion show I plan on bringing my entire sewing arsenal in case of last-minute emergencies.

Next up--a crown!

Homeschool Science: It's a Pizza Party!

Ah, pizza science. There's nothing better to take away the pre-lunch blues on yet another cold, slushy, grey winter day when nobody wants to leave the house but nobody particularly wants to be at home, either, than baking up a nice, warm, delicious pizza pie.

Especially if it's the four-year-old doing the baking.

While Will spent the morning immersed in a book (her current faves: The Incredible Journey, and yet another series about yet another family that is up to its ears finding homes for yet more foster animals), Syd got out the pizza party science kit that her Grandma Janie gave her for Christmas, and off we went.

First on the docket: yeast is gassy.

Syd measured out 1/4 cup of warm tap water (she even took its temperature, to make sure it was between 95 and 105 degrees), 1/4 teaspoon of sugar, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of yeast, and stirred them together in a small clear bottle. I stretched a balloon out to cover the opening, so that it looked like this:

Then I hid the whole shebang away over in the corner over a heating vent. Just forget about it for now, okay?

Next, Syd and I mixed up a super-simple pizza dough recipe, and although I don't usually proof my yeast, I did this time, so that Syd could notice, if she wished, that we were putting the same stuff in the dough that we just put in the bottle.

She noticed. Yay.

I also generally use a no-knead bread dough for my daily baking, but I do love to watch little hands kneading bread dough:

 
 
 
 Syd set the yeast to rise and went off to play ponies, and in just a couple of hours the dough was twice its size and...remember the balloon?

The balloon looked like this:

It's this gas that also makes the bread dough rise--yeast eats starch and gives off carbon dioxide, expanding the gluten and yummifying the dough.

Once the dough was sufficiently yummified, Syd rolled it out, put it in a pan (Isn't that a good-sized pan for a personal pan pizza for a four-year-old? I'm now officially on the look-out at thrift stores and yard sales for some little patty pans for the girlies), and added her ingredients of choice--tomato sauce, cheese, and soysage crumbles:

 We baked it, tasted it--

And Chef Sydney declared her lunch to be absolutely perfect.