[recipe] Brownie Cheesecake Bites

Welp, I made four dozen of these, and they kind of disappeared in one night.  I'm glad I managed to remember to take a picture before we ate the last two!  I made them for Q's birthday and even the non-diety people enjoyed them.  It was such a blast to have Isilzha over and NanoNuki in town again.

BROWNIE BASE

1/2 cup Butter (one stick)

2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate

1 cup almond meal
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
pinch salt
3/4 cup Splenda
2 tbsp vanilla
2 large eggs
1/4 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Melt butter and chocolate in 30 second microwave bursts, or over a water bath.  Mix in all the powders and vanilla, then the eggs once the butter has cooled down enough to not cook them.  Spoon in to mini cupcake tins and flatten down to fill base.  Bake for 5 minutes at 325F.

CHEESECAKE FILLING

1 lb full fat cream cheese (two standard 8 oz boxes)

1/2 cup Splenda

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 tbsp vanilla

2 large eggs

1/4 cup cinnamon (optional)

Beat all together until fluffy and spoon into the prebaked brownie cups.  Bake for 15 minutes at 300F.  Stick in fridge to set, or as long as you can tolerate not burning yourself.

The original recipe from All Day I Dream About Food is written for a 9" buttered springform pan, but cupcakes are always more entertaining ^_^  My other big change was to add the cinnamon.  Of course, this is completely optional, but it made them divine.  And since there is never enough cinnamon for Dan, he made a fantastic sauce to bathe them in.

CINNAMON SAUCE

1/2 cup melted butter

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1 cup Splenda

1 cup cinnamon

Next time I really want to try and make this caramel sauce from Blondie's Paleo and Keto Journey.  I am such a sucker for caramel!

Orange eyes, take two

After that last failed attempt at getting color on my eyes, I hit the internuts and ordered a bunch of crap from china. And I love it!  The seller was named hittime_hk, but charged under the name Buyincoins, which runs a bunch of chinese ebay sellers.  I got a 168 color eye pallet, 12 nail brushes (which did a fabulous job at lining my eyes), and a 12 piece glitter mineral eyeshadow pot set.

So first I tried out the pots for the play, and they were really nice.  I put a cobalt blue on my lids and purple above the crease, with some ivory highlight.  It was really nice and bright and showed up well for the play.

Today I went all out for work and pulled out the pallet and the brushes.   I used column 7, row 9 wet to line the top of my eyes, 5:1 for the bottom, 6:8 the inner corners, 7:1 dry lids, and 6:9 dry above crease.  The colors pop really nice!

I took the first pictures with my camera and the last with my phone.  You can kind of get the gist.  The best thing, other than them being visible, is that they don't irritate my eyes, so I barely notice I have anything on.

A++, would buy again.

I'm a man and you're a woman, at least last time I checked.

I, Drea, am a shop-a-holic.  I love shopping!  Well, kind of.  I hate the mall, and especially trying things on, so I'll take a quick stroll through, buy a bunch of stuff that looks cool, then return anything that doesn't fit.  I also have tremendous disposal guilt, which causes me to keep things until they ABSOLUTELY HAVE NO LIFE LEFT IN THEM WHATSOEVER.  Like seriously, I don't throw anything even remotely functional away.  I -might- give it away, but only after two years of sitting in a "charity" box without me thinking of it in addition to extreme amounts of guilt from Dan.

This has lead me to accumulate great amounts of tees, shoes and makeup over the past twenty years.  They still fit!  They still work!  Why get rid of them?  I am going out of my way to change this, though.  I donated a lot of old clothing to the play I'm in!  Mostly because one of the characters is a raging nerd that only wants to "sleep and read and bake".

<.<

>.>

<.<

-_-;;

I've also put a moratorium on purchasing shirts and severely decreased my shoe purchases (except for when I find really gaudy heels for $10 (Hey!  They are $10!!!)).  Unfortunately, yarn and nail polish have kind of filled in the gaps.  They're small, cheap and functional, and multiply like rabbits.  And then my friends (see how I'm not naming names?) go out of their way to enable me, and all hell breaks loose.

So, A-Certain-Cephalogal-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named sent me a link to eye shadow tutorials yesterday that are pretty frekin fantastic!  I found this look and spent all night dreaming about it:

Beautiful, no?  So this morning I tried to replicate it:

Yeah...  I mean, it looks nice in person, but my skin has a horrible habit of completely annihilating any color I put on it.  I really loaded it on, and it was bright on my fingers!

I used this old eye shadow pallet from Clairs, Iridescent Red liquid eye liner from Makeup Forever, and Indigo Blue Mega Liner Liquid Eyeliner from Wet 'N' Wild.  Counting down from the left 1-5 and 6-10, I used 6, 7 and 4 in the center front of the eye lid, and 3 and 5 around in the crease.  I lined the top lid with red before and after the shadow, and dotted between the lower lashes with the blue.  Finished up with some black mascara and a bit of 1 illuminating the inner corner and 2 covering bags.

Like I said, it is nice, but I have no clue how to achieve the FUCKING BRIGHT tones of the sample on my skin :/

Happy Birthday Dory!

Yesterday was isilzha's birthday, and I made her a rainbow cake! This time, I actually made it in cake form, using Betty Crocker Super Moist Party Rainbow Chip mix, seltzer and food coloring, and the Omnomicon recipe I love so much. It came out very fluffy and moist (teehee, moist!) but seriously lacked structural integrity. Next time, I will include a bit of egg white.

So this was real easy. I poured the powder in to a 5c measuring cup, and slowly incorporated the 12 oz of seltzer with a fork. Once mixed, I poured one cup at a time into a smaller measuring cup and mixed in the food coloring. This was then split among both, very well buttered cake pans. After scraping as much as possible out of the cup, but without obsessing, I poured another cup of batter and mixed in the yellow. Minor color mixing doesn't really matter. I did the same with the remaining colors, adding a tad bit more seltzer to the last batch (I seem to not have mixed it as well as I thought the first time) and tapping the pans on the counter once pouring was done. I baked at "350" for 22 minutes, let cool (well, the second pan, after the first one completely crumbled out of the pan), flipped and frosted.

I'm very proud of how the colors came out, though, and how both layers lined up very nice when the cake was cut! Remember, all of the calories drift to the center, so beware the tip of the slice. Not using the oil and eggs also dropped the calories for 1/12 of the cake from 230 to 160. Pay no attention to the lemon icing that was the only thing keeping the lower layer together...

Happy No Longer Holiday Season!

I am so happy that I managed to finish everything for my family! I still have several gifts for friends on the needles, but meh, I'm spreading the Holiday Cheer ^_^



Just in december, I managed to make the thrummed slippers for my mom, regular house slippers for my sister, fingerless mitts for her husband and two kids, and Snoopy Pilot Scarfs for Rudy and Chris (k1, p1 in 50/50 silk/wool; quite yummy!). Individual patterns to come shortly.



For me, Jessie got me some wonderful alpaca to spin, and Erin got me some Manos, which I'm dying to make into gauntlets and a hat! Erin, and her fiance Drew, are now the proud owners of my Leaf and Steelers socks (and a howling monkey that loves Pittsburgh), and Jessie's husband Matt now owns a Funny Metal Hat. Her belly dancing gear has gotten much better tips and is currently being produced in my basement...




I made a Chunky Button-Up Cowl for my boss, and I am ALMOST FUCKING DONE with my orange headwarmer thing. I can't believe how busy I've been for the past couple of months! In store for me now, I should be making a Quadrat in a KAL with nanonukie and a bitterroot shawl just because. I bought some skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk, and hope it will be enough!

Oh, and I also knit a horrible cabled scarf for my roommate's father's new wife.

[pattern] Doesn't play well with others

In honor of a friend getting her tubes tied, I decided to give her a pair of ovaries in a jar, with googley eyes. Because everybody knows that all body parts that make it into a jar need googley eyes!


Knitpicks Pallete in Blush
Fingering weight
231 yds/50 gr per ball
23.7154 yds/5.1332 gr used

2.5 mm crochet hook
5 cotton balls

3 1/2 hours
Ovaries are 1" around, with 3" tubes.

OVARY (make 2)
Work in spiral.
1. Sc 7 in magic ring.
2. (2 sc in next st) x 7. 14 sts.
3. Sc around.
4. (Sc into next st, 2 sc into next st) x 7. 21 sts.
5. (Sc into each of next 2 sts, 2 sc into next st) x 7. 28 sts.
6-11. Sc around.
Start decreasing rounds. Stuff before hole gets too small.
12. (Sc into each of next 2 sts, sc2tog) x 7. 21 sts.
13. (Sc into next st, sc2tog) x 7. 14 sts.
14. Sc around.
15. (Sc2tog) x 10. 4 sts.
It is now time to work on the tube.
Continue to work 4 sts in spiral until tube is about 3" long, or long enough to tie in a knot. Finish with 4 hcs. Tie knot, break off and hide yarn.

[FO] Quant!

This was a quick Knit-a-long that I had with my crafting group, the Centre County Crafting Bitches. It took me about a week to make while waiting for the bus. Probably a total of ten hours, including all the time spent on taking it out of the bag to do a row, and then stuffing it all back in.



I used . Knitpicks' Pallete in Tidepool Heather, and according to my wonderful lab scale, only 17.2703 g of it, so it cost me a whopping 69¢ to make!

The pattern was a free download from Knitty.



This was the first knit object that I have finished in probably a decade and a half, or so. The first actual memories that I have of knitting were with my grandmother in 1991, though I might have learned before, I can't remember :/ But for some reason, I would always try to make a scarf and get so damned bored with it, that I still have half of one that is a good seven years old. I've made several things in crochet since then, but all the knits just sink to the bottom of the list.

Until the knit-a-long. I am now addicted, and have spent something like $250 in the last month on sock yarns and circular needles -_-;; Which, by the way, I need to remember to return, but I'll hopefully remember to make a review post about them soon. So yeah, I used to be a hooker, and now I share needles...

I didn't encounter any problems with the pattern, but I'm known to jump head first into projects. It's so much easier to do things when you don't know that you don't know how, and when you don't know it's supposed to be "difficult"! I did hear, though, that there was a problem with picking up stitches for someone in the group.

Both ends of the quant are different, and it's rumored that there is a pattern mod out there to make them the same.