Hush/Sensory Bottles

Months ago, I found a pin on Pinterest for something called a Hush Bottle, and googled it to get more instructions. Intrigued, I clicked on it and what I found was so visually entertaining, I knew I just had to try it! These bottles can be used just for visual stimulation, or for time outs - give your kid the bottle, shaken, for a time out and let them come back when the glitter has settled.

The ingredients, so simple:

A plastic bottle
Ultra fine glitter
Glitter glue (pearlized is best, but if you can't find that, use a pearlizing medium)
Hot, but not boiling water

Food colouring, if desired (I used gel colours)

I could not find pearlized glitter glue,  so as I noted above,  I just added an acrylic pearlizing medium and that seemed to do the trick. 

There isn't really a set recipe for this.  I ended up just playing around until I thought it looked cool. For this reason,  DON'T fill the bottle completely until you're sure you like the way it looks. When you do, fill it and super glue the cap on!

What I did:

I put a bit of pearlizer in...

Then, I added water and shook to blend.

Then I added about half a bottle of glitter glue, a bit more very hot water, and shook till the glue was completely melted and the were no clumps.

Next,  I added glitter and food colouring - I eyeballed it, but I probably added about 1.5 tbsp of glitter, and enough food colouring to make it look nice - and shook well.

Food colouring at the neck of the bottle, glitter starting to sink to the bottom.

I played around a bit after this, and ended up adding more glitter glue: as a rule off thumb, if you want the glitter to settle faster,  use less glue;  if you want it to settle slower,  add more glue!

Fully mixed and shaken

Since Jaxson is too young for time outs,  I made these purely for fun and entertainment,  not for time out timers, so I didn't need the glitter to settle all that quickly. These settled after about 12 minutes.

Completely settled

I'm incredibly happy with the results.  Even Adrian liked them!

Goof....

I made them during Jaxson's afternoon nap, and we ended up needing to wake him up, because it was getting late, so he woke up a little out of sorts. These worked so well as a distraction! He really liked them!

My tired boy 

I will probably end up making these again when Jaxson's older and needing time outs!

Edible Goop #1

I recently subscribed to a page on Facebook called Fun At Home With Kids and I absolutely love it! There are so many great,  simple,  safe homemade activities on there, for all ages that I'm dying to try.

Last month,  they obviously had a thing for gaks and goops. There were a ton of different kinds posted every day: sparkly, different consistencies, edible,  inedible (in most cases this meant with borax), the list goes on.

I decided to try an edible version,  because Jaxson is JUST starting to get away from the whole stickeverythinginhismouth phase and I wasn't sent entirely sure he wouldn't just try to eat it because I planned to let him play with it in his high chair,  for simplicity.

So I tried this edible gak recipe.

1/4 cup Holy Basil seeds (tukmaria)

1 16oz box cornstarch

2.5 cups water

food colouring (optional)

I was a little unsure where I would find tukmaria seeds in Saskatoon,  but lucked out when I went into a halal market in our neighbourhood. 

I also didn't really want to use food colouring, so instead I used some spirulina to make the gak green! It turned out better than I expected, though it did smell like spirulina... not that that's the worst thing in the world.

I dissolved the spirulina in water first,  then added that to the corn starch and tukmaria seeds. 

Mixing with my hands was the easiest way to do it. 

And it started thickening pretty quickly! 

After it was completely mixed, I let it sit in the fridge for a couple hours. 

The result was fantastic! 

It took Jaxson a little while to get into it....

And Daddy had to help him along by folding his hands into it....

 Even then, he was still a little unsure and had to show Mommy just to make sure it was ok...

But after that, he had a blast with it!

We all really enjoyed this stuff,  and I'm excited to try another recipe like this soon! 

Jaxson's First Birthday

So I'm way late in posting this,  but Jaxson celebrated his first birthday 3 MONTHS AGO! I can say I've been busy,  but really,  I've just not made time to blog in that long.  No excuses,  and now I'm back,  with a long list of half started posts that I need to finish.

Jaxson was born on April 27th, 2013, at 1:59 pm. He was 8 lbs 4 oz and ---- in long.  It was a very long,  tough labour,  but as is always the case,  so worth it.  It's amazing to me that a year (and more) has already gone by! It flee by even faster than I realized,  and before I knew it,  I was looking up healthy-ish cake recipes.

I decided on a carrot cake I found on a blog called Crackers and Carrots.

The recipe:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup organic coconut palm sugar
2 large organic eggs
2 small-medium apples, peeled and diced
1 cup avocado oil
5 small-medium carrots, washed, stems cut off, and cut into small chunks
1/2 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. I preheated the oven to 350°F and sprayed an eight inch rectangular pan with canola oil and then lined it with wax paper.
2. In a large bowl, I combined the whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg.
3. Then I used a hand blender to beat the sugar and eggs until they were creamy.
4. I pureed the apple,  carrots,  canola oil and orange juice together and poured that into the eggs and sugar.  I then added the vanilla and combined all the wet ingredients until they were well mixed.
5. After that I slowly added the dry ingredients, mixing until they were fully incorporated.
6. Lastly, I poured the batter into the cake pan and baked it for about 30 minutes, until a cake tester came out clean.

I allowed it to cool slightly in the pan,  then transferred it to a wire rack to cool completely.

I made a simple cream cheese icing and dyed it green for fun and assembled the cake in the shape of a 1.

Jaxson's birthday was the next day and we had plans to go to the pool and then go back to gramma's house for a BBQ and cake.  Unfortunately,  Jaxson got a stomach flu for the cost time that night,  and so he spent his birthday resting and rehydrating after a rough and exhausting night.

More unfortunately,  his cake eating celebration was put off for a whole month while first I, then Adrian got the same flu,  and then we unexpectedly moved into the upstairs of the house we were living when the previous tenants moved out.  This move took forever as we dealt with the filth of an uncleaned and unemptied house.

And so a whole month went by before we knew it. Thankfully,  this cake keeps amazingly well in the freezer and we were able to delight in Jaxson tentatively playing with and tasting it.  Also nice was that gramma was still able to be present for it.

He was a bit unsure about what to do with the candles, but he couldn't stop staring at them!

 Once the candles were removed, however, and he started eating the icing, he really got into it and loved it!

The 1 shape of the cake was significant for me,  because when I turned 1, my mum made me a cake in the same shape!

Beautiful, isn't it?

April 1989, me and mum on my first birthday

An overall success,  despite the postponement. 

Healthier Brownies

I've been trying to eat more healthy lately, and I really don't believe in dieting. Diets never work, and I don't think it's good to deprive yourself of cravings - you just end up overindulging later.

So, I had a wicked craving for chocolate today and went searching the internet for good recipes. I decided I wanted to try a healthier option, as healthy as I could do with the ingredients I have at home at the moment, and I stumbled upon this blog! There are a lot of recipes I want to try on here!

To keep it simple, I chose to try her Chocolate Pumpkin Brownies:

• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2/3 cup + 1 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
• 3 tbsp oil (I used coconut oil)
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

I decided on this one, because I had a can of pumpkin that we've given to Jaxson for baby food, and he's recently graduated to eating our meals - he flat out refuses to eat what I give him sometimes, but will eat whatever i'm eating. It's good. It's forcing me to eat more healthy, and it also saves me time having to make baby food for him anymore!

Unfortunately, I didn't have any chocolate chips (or I would have just eaten those to serve my craving!), but I did have some butterscotch chips left over from a shortbread I made for Christmas, so I decided to use those... And in-so-doing made this recipe quite a bit unhealthier! I only used 1/4 cup, because these chippits are just way too sweet for me otherwise!

So, anyway, back to the brownies!

I mixed the dry and wet ingredients separately, then combined both well. I melted the coconut oil so it would blend in better.

It was really hard to mix all the ingredients together, and the dough was quite sticky and also hard to spread into the pan. I think that if I had used canola oil instead of coconut, these two steps would have been easier!

Finally mixed well.

I spread it into into a greased 8in square pan and baked it at 330F for about 23 minutes.

I put 1 cup of the leftover pumpkin in the fridge to try this recipe from the blog for breakfast the next day (and it was awesome!), and froze the rest to use later.

I have to admit, I was really impressed with these brownies. Granted, they have quite a bit of sugar in them - next time, i'm going to try supplementing the sugar for agave or maple syrup or something to make them a bit more healthy, and see how that changes things.

But I was impressed with the consistency too, because there are no eggs! It's very nice and chewy and cake-y. A great treat. I'm glad I didn't put more butterscotch chips in, but at the same time, they're really nice in this!

They taste amazing refrigerated!

Rainbow Layer Cake!

My aunt, Twyla, planned a surprise birthday for both my cousins this past weekend.  They've been in the process of building a mansion of a house just outside of Saskatoon, and it's almost complete. Her brothers were coming into town to try help out a bit, so she thought it was a great opportunity to throw a bit of a party, since most of the family would be here.

My mum, in the plans, offered my services to make a cake for Tat's, the younger of Twyla's two kids. Kaelan already had a cake ready to go, but Twyla wanted one for Tats as well.

I was originally just going to do a simple angel food cake and decorate the crap out of it, but I decided to try something a little bit more fun and a little bit more complicated! Both Tats and Kaelan are autistic, and Tats in particular absolutely loves colour - her room is painted 4 different colours, if that gives you an idea.

I've seen rainbow cakes on Pinterest and Stumbleupon for the last couple years, and have been dying for an opportunity to try it out. This was the perfect opportunity - something fun, something that Tats had probably never seen, something really special!

I would have loved to make the whole thing from scratch, but it's already so much work and so very time consuming, so I cheated and bought 2 boxes of cake mix. Eventually, I want to invest in good quality vegetable food colouring, to use for all sorts of things, like baking and homemade play dough and chalk, as Jaxson gets older. However, they are really expensive, and i'm not sure how vibrant they are, so I bought a box of gel food colouring. That's what all the recipes recommend, and they are nice and bright - I actually liked them a lot more than I was expecting!

I made the whole thing at my mum's place, because we were planning on leaving from here the next morning to head up to Twyla's new house for the festivities! And I really wanted to transport this thing as little as possible!

Tons of ingredients and steps!

Before I go into details, I just have to say that this was a huge project - it was tons of fun, but it took me all afternoon. I was really impressed with Jaxson - he was so patient and good and played by himself for most of it, before drifting into his afternoon nap!

For the icing, I decided to make a cream cheese buttercream icing for in between the layers, and then I covered the whole cake in an easy, fluffy marshmallow icing from my childhood.

This is how I kept Jaxson busy while I was making the cream cheese buttercream icing!

Best baby EVER!

I made the buttercream icing first so that I could freeze it in layers to make it easier to stack the next morning. I traced the bottom of one of the round pans I was using on parchment paper and copied that 5 times. I then spread the icing on, making it a little smaller than the size of the pan, so the icing wouldn't overflow between each layer of the cake. Then I stacked the 5 icing layers and stuck them in the freezer overnight.

The Recipe:

1 cup butter, at room temperature
A pinch of salt
3 tbsp cream cheese
1/4 cup milk
1 1/4 cups icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Cream the butter, salt and cream cheese. Slowly add the milk and icing sugar, alternating. Add the vanilla and whip till stiff.

Buttery yum-ness!

Next, I mixed the cake according to the instructions on the box and separated it into 6 bowls.

All the batter, split into 6 bowls - about 1 3/4 cups each.

From there, I dyed each one a different colour. I was originally going to do the colours of the rainbow, but as I got started, I decided to just do Tats' favourite colours.

Thick gel colouring

This step took almost an hour, because I had to mix each bowl individually, and for most of them, had to keep adding dye little by little until I got the right hue. The red was the most frustrating; I had to use so much dye to get it as vibrant as I wanted, and so it took the longest! And poor Jaxson, I took so long with this step, he started getting frustrated and wanting attention, so he decided to open as many drawers as he could! I had to stop a number of times and rush to him to confiscate items - mainly wipes, which he has discovered he can take out of the box and throw all over the living room!

After finally finding the right colours, I baked them two at a time (I only bought two 8in round pans), wiping the pans out well between batches. I was really impressed that the colours stayed true, even after baking! There was very little difference, and i'm excited to see what this cake will look like cut into!

You can really see my handprint in this one, from taking it out of the pan!

It was right as I put the first two in the oven that Jaxson decided it was nap time and walked over to me (yes, he's walking everywhere now) and 'asked' to be picked up. I nursed him for about 5 minutes, and put him in his play pen and he was out in minutes! I couldn't ask for a better son! Perfect timing, as this is the only time sensitive part and I was a little worried about overcooking the cake!

I baked them for about 16 minutes each, and that was perfect! They came out soft and spongey! I was really happy with them.

I let them cool completely and then wrapped them individually in saran wrap and stuck them in the fridge for assembly the next morning.

These steps alone took about 2.5 hours.

The following morning, things went a lot quicker than I was expecting!

I cut the tops off the cake layers, to level them and stacked them on my new cake caddy, alternating with the frozen buttercream icing!

The final layer!

Freezing the icing worked really well for this step - it was easy to just peel off the parchment paper and plop the icing down on the cake layers!

I ended up pushing 4 straws through the stacked cake, to keep it upright, and then just snipping off the extra. I'm glad I did this! Transporting it in the car was a little bumpy, and without those straws, i'm sure it would have fallen down!

I next made the marshmallow icing. This icing is a favourite of mine from growing up and having angel food cakes for birthdays! It's light and fluffy, incredibly easy to spread on a fragile cake, and it tastes amazing!

Fluffy goodness! It also has a beautiful shine to it that looks amazing on the cake!

I iced the cake at my mum's before we left, but waited to decorate it at Twyla's.

In hindsight I wish I hadn't iced it till we were ready to serve it. On our way to Twyla's, it melted a bit... :-(

Decorated, looking a little droopy, unfortunately.

It still tasted amazing, and while the outside didn't look as good as I wanted it to, the layers were really cool and got a lot of oohs and ahhs!

Fun layers!

I have to be honest, I was pretty proud of myself for pulling this off - it looked great on the plate, and Tats was really happy with it. It also tasted amazing!

Tats was stoked!

The night was a big success, relaxed and fun, the cake was a hit, and the night culminated in us cousins singing songs from Frozen and dancing!

Dancing to 'Let it Go' from Frozen