friday top ten: web style.

top ten intriguing/yummy/crafty/beautiful things from the web this week.

via swiss-miss.

Inspired by my own birthday this week... find out how common your bday is. 

via delighted momma. 

Like to try my hand at polymer clay necklaces.

Wine belt for a bike! Genius!

Cute kitchen scale to add a vintage touch. 

Chocolate coffee hazelnut layer cake. Going to try this for Mr. S's birthday next week.

I see a different you. 

Beautiful dress! Love the bracelets too. And the rest of the blog is pretty fantastic as well. 

via

Just figured out today that the flower muguet in French is Lily of the Valley. I snatched a few this week on an evening walk and they're making the apartment smell lovely. 

What! Tom's Sunglasses?!

via.

Want to buy some succulents for the apartment. Such lovely, understated plants. 

What's in store for your weekend? I'm going to wrangle up a barbeque, watermelon, cold beer, smore fixings, and some pretty awesome people and celebrate birthdays and warm weather. Have a good one!

xo

in the kitchen: caramel apple layer cake with apple cider frosting.

You are in for a treat! I had a special occasion to celebrate last week and I was invited to make dessert. So logically, my first stop was Pinterest, to find a bit of inspiration. I stumbled upon this recipe pretty quickly, for caramel apple layer cake from the blog a hint of honey. After drooling on my keyboard and reading through the fairly minimally-intimidating directions, I pinned it up and started gathering ingredients. 

The cake was made completely from scratch, and there were two parts that I was semi worried about. The first was making caramel sauce, which was an ingredient in the cake. First step: buy a candy thermometer. Check!

I found the recipe for the caramel sauce on another blog, my baking addiction.

Caramel sauce: 

1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon corn syrup
1/4 liquid cup water
1/2 liquid cup heavy cream, heated until warm
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
½ teaspoon fine grain sea salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Stir together the sugar, corn syrup and water in a large-ish pot. Hook on the candy thermometer and bring the mixture to a (slight) boil. 

Watch the sugar like a hawk!

During this time, you should also be heating the cream in a smaller saucepan. Careful not to heat it too fast. Mine got slightly scorched, but no big deal.

I found it was pretty uneventful until all the sudden it was eventful. Here it started turning a darker color. 

This is right after I added in the milk and stirred it viciously to keep it from overflowing. I really wanted a picture of me adding the cream to the boiling sugar, but in retrospect, I'm glad I wasn't holding a camera during these steps! 

Now stir in the butter. And the sea salt. Easy as that! Try not to eat up all the caramel before you add it to the cake mixture later. 

Now on to the cake! Growing up my mom always made two layer cakes, I think they're more fun. A little surprise layer of frosting in the middle is always a good idea. This recipe made for two 9 inch cakes.

Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (I used only all-purpose flour. So a total of 3 3/4 cups)
1¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1½ tsp. baking soda
1½ tsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp. salt
1½ cups light brown sugar
¾ cup canola oil
¾ cup unsweetened applesauce
¾ cup caramel sauce (homemade or jarred)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 eggs
1½ cups buttermilk

Combine the dry ingredients in a small bowl.

Pause to take a picture of what a mess the countertop is.

In a larger bowl, combine oil and brown sugar. Beat together.

Voila your homemade caramel sauce! The recipe I used made about a cup of sauce. I measured out 3/4 cup for the cake batter, and ate the rest saved the rest for later.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Now add the dry ingredients in small batches, alternating with the milk. 

Lightly spray the cake pans or wipe them with butter. Pour in the batter and pop them in the oven!

Deliciousness waiting to happen!

Run out to the balcony and take a picture of the sunset you were missing while slaving away in the kitchen. :)

While the cake is cooking, move on the frosting! This was the other part I was slightly intimidated by, since I had never made frosting before. And because the recipe called for 7 3/4 to 8 cups of powdered sugar. Whaaaa?! I only ended up using 5 cups, and I think 7-8 may have caused heart failure. While I'll admit the frosting was a bit thin/slippery at the beginning, I put the cake in the fridge after frosting it to let it harden a bit, which really helped.

Ingredients for Apple Cider Frosting:

7 1/2-8 cups confectioners’ sugar (or 5 in my case)

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened
1/2 cup apple cider or apple juice (I used juice)
3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
pinch of salt

Less than one bag was used for this recipe.

Cream together the butter, juice/cider, cinnamon and salt, adding sugar as you go to get to your desired consistency.

Cakes almost done! I cooked them at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Let the cakes cool for about 15 minutes, then remove them from the pans and place them on cooling racks. Or those cool, cheap plates you bought from IKEA. Let them cool COMPLETELY before frosting.

Disclosure: I am not a professional froster, nor do I claim to be. These pictures may make you cringe at their lack of neatness, but oh well. Only so much can be done with a metal spoon and silicone spatula.

Frost the bottom cake a bit.

 I didn't put as much frosting as I could have, since I was afraid of running out. Could have been a bit thicker in the middle, and I had plenty of frosting left over. 

I guess this was as far as I got picture-wise, until right before we ate the cake...

YUM!

Alright, a little messy. But in my defense, this guy survived a killer snowstorm, two 15 minute walks to and from metro stations, hidden under that metal bowl you saw pictured earlier (mental note: MUST BUY CAKE CONTAINER).

I would most definitely make this cake again. It satisfied the sweet dessert craving even though it wasn't the standard chocolate recipe. Fairly straightforward recipe, with no hidden traps or surprises!

Voila!

What's cooking in your kitchen recently??

xo

All pictures are my own, recipes from a hint of honey and my baking addiction.

souris.

Remember this guy...?

via lionbrand.com

And remember when I had a visit from a rodent in my apartment? Well thank sweet baby jesus I haven't had any other mice scurrying across my floor lately (although I do have a plastic bag stuffed down the hole in the wood floor, and sometimes I'm convinced I hear it rustling).

BUT

I there is a much cuter rodent keeping me company these days:

Turns out when I posted the mouse picture on my blog, it was actually a link to a crochet pattern. I had no idea. 

So imagine my surprise, when I opened up a huge shoe box Christmas morning (I was convinced I was unwrapping a pair of boots) and dug through the tissue paper to find this guy nestled in there. I died laughing. 

I have a hard time looking at his ears and not cracking up. He's pretty much a stud. 

xo 

chestnuts roasting on an....

Electric fireplace?

Well they're a little blurry, but these photos are featuring the best part of my night!  Friends and family know how much I complain about how HOT our building always is.  It seems that whenever the heat is on in the building, it's on at full blast.  Try as I may, I can't control the heat coming out of 4 out of the 6 radiators in my apartment.  And I've TRIED twisting the knobs.  In both directions.  Doesn't work.  

Usually a fireplace (no matter how small or... fake) would be the last thing I'd want in this apartment.  But the heat has been off for the past two chilly days and so the inaugural fireplace session was tonight.  I'm in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with my hood on!  But I am NOT complaining.  I finally feel like the temperatures in my apartment are somewhat aligned with the calendar months.  

I supppppppose I could take this opportunity to say thank you to Mr. S. for buying that fireplace on sale at BRICK for $50 marked down from $450.  Because quite honestly, when he brought home an electric fireplace.  In July.  When we were saving up for apartment necessities like a kitchen table.  It's tough to recall exactly what explicatives words I used, but I'm 99% sure the words thank you were not among them.  So take this as a belated merci, mon cheri. 

xo

alli 

muscle memory.

West Desert Airpark, June 2010.

I'm a pilot.  I don't talk about it too often, even though It's something I'm very passionate about.  Are you ever hesitant to talk about the things you're proud of?  I've been around aviation all my life.  My dad is a pilot.  Oshkosh is the aviation Mecca that is (almost) always at the end of my summers.  In our family we tell stories about my sister and I walking around in the cabin in a Cessna 170, flying above Indiana when we were hardly old enough to remember.  I recall flying in the backseat on the way to Chardon, Ohio, mesmerized (and a bit skeptical) that I could talk with my mom and dad from the backseat without everyone on the radio and in the control towers hearing me.  

The first time I ever went to France was in June/July 2003.  After a late afternoon drive by an airstrip surrounded by tall grass and radiant sunflowers that only seem to exist in Southern France, I came home and told my dad I wanted to take flying lessons.  September through May I drove up to Heber on weekend mornings, frost lining trees along I-40, snow blowing slowly across the road on windier mornings.  Come Spring, I would anxiously anticipate the first view of Heber Valley to see if it was socked in with fog on the early mornings.  The last months before my checkride I convinced my school advisor and my theatre teacher to let me leave early on Monday afternoons.  Playing hooky to go fly up in the sky a while.  

Five days after my 18th birthday I earned my private pilot's license.  A Sunday morning if I remember correctly, after waiting hours for the checkride instructor to show up.  Show up he did, and we went over every possible question for the oral part of my exam.  And then we flew, going over every ground reference maneuver, stall, emergency procedure, and landing situation.  Only going back to practice my right side steep turns until I perfected them without losing 100 feet of altitude.  

Since then I've flown in two other countries.  I earned my tailwheel endorsement in a little Jodel outside of Paris, France, accompanied by Claude the retired French Air Force pilot and a little British terrier named Yessie.  Well, Yessie followed me on the ground.  Airport dog but scared to death of the planes, go figure.  And then a new friend let me fly in the left seat of the Piper Arrow as he accompanied us back to Sens and we hitched a ride back into la centre ville.  My friend and I were talking about that amazing afternoon for awhile.

And just two weeks ago, I piloted a plane for the first time in over a year at an airport outside of Montreal.  A Diamond Katana, the plane I trained in.  After the flight as I flipped through my logbook, I saw that the last time I flew a Katana was in July 2006.  Five and a half years ago.  So much was different back then.  So much is different now.  Yet as I walked around the plane on the chilly Sunday morning, I was struck by how similar the whole thing was.  Two words popped into my head. 

Muscle memory.  

My fingers traced the smooth tapering surface of the wing.  Eight years later (wiser?) on another continent, but for a moment I believed myself 17 once again, addicted to the first feelings of flight in the left seat.


Right tire.  Pressure. Strut. Right wing. Pitot tube. Position light. Strobes.

17 and smiling since the moment my hands directed us into the sky.  45 knots and a gentle pitch up, excited to see what the sky was hiding beyond the mountains.

Fuselage.  Fuel drains.  Vertical stabilizer.  Horizontal stabilizer.  Cables.  Left tire.  Left aileron.  Aileron cable.  A click to the left and the right.  


Though I carried a list with me, my hands took over and my brain was quiet.  Remembering the moves to a choreographed dance.  It made me smile in a way I hadn't for awhile.  Preflight finished my quebecois copilot and I closed the canopy and taxied to the runway.  Before long we were soaring above St Hubert airport, and we would land at Saint Matthieu de Beloeil and Saint Hyacinthe before the morning was over.

Any out of practice pilot gets anxious on their first landing back from a break.  I always adjust myself in my seat, pull my seatbelt tight, and fidget my feet on the pedals.  Landing is the most complicated part of flight, but also in a way the most rewarding.  An eloquent dance between friends.  A chain of intuitive maneuvers.  Yet a challenge.

Eyes on the center line.  Hand on the throttle.  Pressure on the stick.  Throttle in.  Speed check.  Nose down.  Throttle out.  Last set of flaps.


A gentle ebb and flow.  Front step, back step, creeping slowly to the ground.  I knew it had been years since I had been in that plane, but I couldn't believe how normal it felt.  How instinctive it was.

Nose up trim.  Flare.  The persistent stall warning horn.  Hold it a bit farther.  The screech of the tires.  Back pressure to keep the nose up.  Flaps up.  Steering us to the taxiway at the end of the runway.  


I looked at my flight instructor with a smile on my face.  Not too bad for the first time in a year!  It was excellent, he said.  I believe that was the perfect way to describe it.

xo.

butternut squash & boots.

I dare say this might be turning into a food blog.  Tonight I was feeling inspired.  I cut up the butternut squash that's been sitting on my counter for..... a week at least now, and roasted it with some olive oil and salt n pepper.  Delish!  Sugary heaven in your mouth.  What you see in the picture is only a fourth of the squash, and since my dinner guest didn't like it much.... there's some leftovers.  What does one do with leftover squash?  I almost want to make mashed squash with caramelized brown sugar.  Is that... allowed?  Will continue the brainstorming.

Also, milking the inspiration for all it was worth (and taking full advantage of weeknight with no classes) I tried a recipe for buttermilk biscuits, that were more like 1/2 cup cream 1/4 cup 1% milk biscuits.  Which turned out much better than that one time I made scones.  Finished the dinner with lemon-y perch and a side of quinoa.  

In things not related to food, I've (mostly) decided that I'm going to give the half marathon a try this weekend, and power through the challenging foot issues I've been having.  I ran for a bit today and although it's sore/tired at times during the day, during the run everything seemed fine.  So I'm going to continue resting a bit and gear up for race day this weekend!  

Also,

I'm thinking about these boots.

And this cable-knit sweater.

And this cute as can be video, of a grandma and grandpa accidentally recording 5 minutes of them trying to take a picture using their computer.

How is your week going so far?

xo