Fall's Labor Blooms

Last November my DH and I spent hours and hours planting bulbs for the town streets and planters and parks. Hours.

It was hard and dirty work. It was cold. It went on and on and there was no respite from it.

I was not a happy camper. At all.

But yesterday when we were walking our pup, I saw that all of out labor had paid off. There were blooms popping up everywhere we looked. It was so pretty.

And mostly it was so nice to see something pay off. Now everyone can enjoy the flowers.

The best part? They spread. We don't have to do it again!!!

Morning Cupcakes

Last night I was going to bake cupcakes to feed the volunteers at today's event. But I slept instead.

It was lovely.

So this morning I got up early and baked cupcakes.

They are lovely.

(What can I say? It's Saturday. They are cupcakes. It's a win win scenario.)

Flying Bulbs

2 days and over 18,000 bulbs - and they're all gone.  Every last one was picked up by a resident of one of the hamlets of our town to be lovingly planted in their gardens, alongside the roads and in front of churches, synagogues, schools and bus stops.

Well, probably lovingly at first - and then they'll just start tossing them in the ground.  18,000 is a heck of a lot of bulbs!

Honestly I really didn't think that we would be able to get enough people to take the bulbs and agree to plant them.  They did, though.  I think it has a great deal to do with my DH's gift of gab.  He talked up the planting project from one end of town to the other - and people were really enthusiastic about it.

Now comes the waiting for Spring and hoping that they all bloom their little hearts out!  It's going to be gorgeous.  You gotta love flowers.

The Great Bulb Giveaway

Today my DH and I were bulb sitting.  It was the Great Bulb Giveaway - what all of that money we raised this past summer with the garden tours goes for.  We gave away chionodoxa - glory of the snow.  Little blue flowers that pop up in Spring with the forsythia, making our front yard look like a salute to the University of Michigan Wolverines.

 We had 2 type of daffodils.  The people voted and everyone wanted yellow this year - so I picked these teeny little Baby Moon Narcissi.  So cute!

And then the taller Quail Narcissi.  Very traditional looking, I think.

I had the most fun picking out the tulips, though.  These are Menton tulips.   The catalog said they are the very last tulips to bloom, so even if winter lasts forever (and the farmers are saying that it's going to), the tulips will still bloom.  I love the old rose color on the outside and the apricot inside.

Then, just to mix it up a bit, Menton Exotics.  More apricot, but still blending nicely with the old rose ones.  They should look great together.

Finally, for the War Memorial, I found these lovely Red Impression tulips.  They look like they're a real pure red.  Fitting for the memorial and their red, white and blue theme.

All of the bulbs (and the pictures here) were from Van Engelen Wholesale Dutch Flower Bulbs.  The Garden Club always buys from them - great prices, great product.

I have to say it was too much fun to spend a few thousand dollars on flower bulbs - I love shopping!  But it was even more fun to see all of the smiles on people's faces when they came to get some free bulbs to plant in their gardens.  I was really pleasantly surprised that so many folks came and got bulbs to plant on the roads, by churches, at school bus stops and other public places.  It was exactly what we had hoped would happen.

It's nice when things work out like that.  Especially when it involves flowers.

Church Picnic

My DH and I attended one of the church's picnic benefits today.  All of the monies raised went to their food pantries - and all of the food served was donated and prepared by members of their congregation.

We had a great time talking with neighbors - it seemed like everyone was there.  The food was amazing!  I couldn't help but think it is because this is more of a farming community.  I think that everyone who cooked a dish knew how much effort went into raising the crop and bringing it to the table.  So when they prepared a meal, they did it right - really "respecting" the ingredients.

There was probably a bit of competition going on as well.  They had at least a dozen different types of cole slaw - each one fantastic.  From a plain coleslaw to one with dill and another with apple.  The chefs for the day outdid themselves.

We saved a bit of room for dessert.

Magnolia's had better watch out, because if this lady decides to go into the cupcake business they will have some serious competition.  The lemon cake was moist and light, the frosting was homemade - just the perfect balance of sugar and fat (I believe she used a butter and shortening blend) - and to top it off was a perfectly candied lemon rind.

I'm always looking for new cupcakes, so I tried the parts (cake, frosting and lemon peel) both separately and altogether.  Either way you sliced it, this was an incredibly good cupcake.

Of course, the best part of the day was raising funds for the food bank. But I'll put the cupcake in at a very close second place!

Pie Day

Friday is pie day.  And not just any pie - it's a Fancy Pie.  This weekend is the community schoolhouse picnic - and the Chamber of Commerce has a pie contest.  And my DH gives me full baking dispensation to make the most decadently decidedly delicious pie that I can dream up.

Anything goes, but I like using something that we grow here at our bucolic manor in the pie.  This year, our apple trees did not fruit.  They were too damaged in the storm last October.  My pumpkins got eaten by - well, they got eaten by something but it wasn't me or my DH.  That left me with raspberry jam.

So what goes best with raspberry?  Chocolate.  Lots and lots of chocolate.

So, fair warning, this pie takes 4 1/2 hours over the course of 2 days to make.  It's from scratch.  But it is so well worth it.

The crust is a hazelnut and raspberry shortbread.  Full of butter.  Pre-baked.  Delicious and crisp.

For the crust:  1/2 cup toasted ground hazelnuts, 1/8 cup raspberry sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3/4 cup butter, 6 Tablespoons strong iced coffee, 1 cup flour.

Mash a raspberry into 1/8 cup flour to make the raspberry sugar.  Set it aside so the sugar will absorb the juice from the raspberry.  Combine the dry ingredients, mix together.  Cut in the butter.  Add the raspberry sugar and 2 Tablespoons of the coffee.  Blend the dough gently and quickly adding more of the coffee until it makes a paste.

Wrap the paste in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 45 minutes to rest.

Roll the dough out and line the pie pan.  Dock the dough (poke a lot of holes in it with a fork so it won't bubble up when it bakes).  Put it in the freezer for 20 minutes.

Weigh down the crust (put a piece of foil in the pan and fill it with rice or beans or pie weights) and bake for 20 minutes at 350-degrees.  Remove the foil.  Bake for 7  more minutes until the crust is done. Gently press down on any bubbles in the crust and set aside to cool.

Coat the crust:  1/4 cup seedless raspberry jam, 2 ounces bittersweet chocolate.

Melt the chocolate, then paint the inside of the crust with it up to 1/4-inch from the edge of the crust.  You want it to be a surprise!  Let the chocolate cool and harden.

Melt the raspberry jam.  Paint the chocolate with the jam - again, up to 1/4-inch from the edge of the crust.  Let the jam set.

The filling is just a really rich chocolate mousse pudding.  2 1/8 cup whole milk, 6 egg yolks, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 6 Tablespoons cocoa, 4 teaspoons corn starch, 2 ounces chopped dark chocolate, 2 ounces chopped milk chocolate, 3 Tablespoons butter, 1/8 cup cold strong coffee.

Simmer the milk, remove from the heat.  Whisk together the egg, brown sugar, coffee and 1/8 cup milk.  Mix together the cocoa and cornstarch.  Add the cocoa and corn starch to the egg mixture - whisk until smooth.  Slowly slowly slowly drizzle in the hot milk, whisking continually (put a towel under the bowl so it won't spin) until the hot milk is combined with the chocolate egg mixture.

Return this lovely chocolately mixture to the heat and keep stirring it until it comes to a boil and gets nice and thick.  Thicker is better, so let it go and worry about cleaning up the spatters of chocolate after you eat the pie.

Remove it from the heat and add in the butter and chopped chocolate.  Whisk until they are melted and delicious.

Pour this into the crust, cover immediately with a piece of plastic wrap to prevent it from forming a skin and chill in the refrigerator overnight or at least 8 hours until the filling is set.  Don't mention to DH that it is in the refrigerator or you may end up with some missing filling...

But is that really enough chocolate?  Nope.

Time for the ganache.  Take the pie out of the refrigerator and remove the plastic wrap.

Ganache:  6 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate, 1 1/2 teaspoon strong room temperature coffee, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/2 cup heavy cream.

Put the chocolate in a bowl.  Simmer the cream.  Pour the cream over the chocolate and let it sit for a minute so the cream and the chocolate can become acquainted.  Start stirring the chocolate in the center of the bowl - keep at it and it will start to come up and be a beautiful chocolate.  If you don't know what I mean by "come up", keep stirring - you're not there yet.  Once it comes up, stir in the edges of the cream and then stir in the coffee and vanilla.  Let it cool for a minute or two.  You're going to pour it over the top of the pie and you don't want to shock the filling - because then you'll have a layer of water between the filling and the ganache.

Spoon the ganache over the top of the filling and smooth it out - the smoother the better.  If you can find your offset spatula for this, your results will be better than mine.

Let it sit on the counter while you prep the decorations.

Melt 1/2 cup raspberry jam and toast 1/2 cup of chopped hazelnuts.

Brush the raspberry jam around the edge of the ganache in a 1 1/2 wide circle.  This is your "glue" for the decorations.

Dip the raspberries in the jam (use a fork to get the drips of jam off) and place them around the pie.  Fill in between the raspberries with the toasted chopped hazelnuts.

Take many pictures of your pie since it's the last one you will ever make because you are so totally exhausted from making this one pie - at least until next year.

Carefully transport the pie to the judging table - explaining to your DH on the way that it's a good thing that he'll have to buy a piece of pie, he can't eat the whole thing by himself because it is way too rich and would give him a tummy ache.  Remind him that charity events are a good thing - not an evil pie robbing thing.

Touring Seeds

The seeds on these grasses are the reason I weeded so long this week.  But the grass is mowed and the tour is over.

My DH & I hosted the dinner party for the gardeners and we raised a lot of money for our little charity.

I think I should be happy, but I'm really too tired to think, let alone feel anything right now.

I am happy about 1 thing, however, I'm so happy this tour is over.

Garden Tour

Saturday is the local garden tour.  We've spent a lot of time working on our garden to get it ready for the tour - weeding, mulching, pruning, primping.  We've advertised everywhere we could think of - newspapers, television, radio, blogs, websites.  We hung up posters, passed out cards, chatted with hundreds of people.  We've gotten sponsors and volunteers.  Hopefully this little charity garden tour will get a great turn-out.

Some of the gardens are on huge multi-million dollar estates.  They have rolling hills, exotic coy ponds, famous owners, professional gardeners.

Ours is an historic daylily garden.  Today the lilies are in bloom.  I keep going out to count the buds, hoping the deer will stay away just one more day so there will be flowers when the tour comes through.

Some of the gardens have been featured in national garden magazines.  Their owners spend hundreds of hours hunting down the perfect plants, carrying them up steep hills and nestling them into that tiny space where they'll make a big impact.

A few are national garden conservancy treasures.  Historic properties with mature gardens where even the weeds are "real plants".

Just looking at pictures of the gardens doesn't really do them justice.  You don't get the sense of scale of the gigantic boulders that were moved into place on the top of a mountain to create a naturally filtered freshwater mini lake.

Or the place where tiny terraces have been carved into a hillside/cliff to create small cozy gardens around every turn.

It's really the vistas overlooking the valley with the mountains framing the view that "make" most of the gardens.  All of the flowers, shrubs, streams and bushes are simply a garnish for what mother nature has given already.

So if you're in town, stop by and see the tour!

Special Sunday

One of the great things about the hamlet where we live is that we have a volunteer fire department.  There's no huge office, no fancy firehouse.  These guys have the basics and with it, they do miracles.

On Sundays they get together with their families and friends and make a fantastic pancake breakfast.  It's a fundraiser for the town, but what's more than that, it's a chance for everybody in the town to come together, eat, laugh, and catchup with each other.

A few years ago our neighbors barn caught on fire in the middle of the night - they had an apartment in the barn and the refrigerator started the fire.  (Vacuum your coils, people).  Everyone came out to see if they could help and by the end of the night, the tenants had a new place to live, clothes, food, a few bucks to get by on - all of the basics covered along with a lot of support to help them get through a tough time.

We were all terrified that the fire would jump.  Our houses are all historic wooden homes and our hamlet is filled with trees, shrubs - a lot of flammable material.  Each spark jumping off of the roof of the barn made my pulse race a little faster.  The wind would kick up, the flames were flying off of the roof of the barn.  It looked like nothing could stop it.

But our volunteers stopped the fire.  They didn't have to get out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, they didn't have to risk themselves for us.  But they did - and they do.  These guys are special.  The support that they get form their families is special.

Not only do our volunteers save our homes, farms, and businesses from tragedies, they also bring our community together.

And that's pretty special too.

Roadside Daffodils

Last Summer our gardens were on the town's Hidden Garden tour.  The tour is a charity event that raises monies to buy daffodil bulbs for everyone to plant along the roads in all of the hamlets that make up our town.  We bought over 7,000 daffodil bulbs last summer.

That sounds like a lot of flowers, but they seemed to disappear off the porch as everyone stopped by to pick up bulbs to plant.  We took a bag to plant along the road in front of the church.

Last Fall we dug a nice trench about 9-inches deep and as long as we could make it since it was in between 2 very large trees,

We put down a layer of compost and soil to give the daffodils some extra food when they started to grow.  Then we tucked all of the bulbs in - close enough to keep each other company, but with a little breathing room.

Then we waited.  And waited some more.  We saw all of the daffodils coming up and we still waited.

Then they finally came up!  Later than most of the other daffodils - because we trenched them deep enough to withstand a hard freeze.  (We realized the earlier daffodils had been planted down about 4-inches.)

I think they were worth the wait.  They're perky and happy - dancing around in the breeze from the cars that pass by.

Absolutely worth the wait.

Now it's time to start getting the gardens ready the tour again.  I wonder how many daffodils we'll be able to add this year?

The Great Phoneography Compet(IT)ion

My DH and I went to the Great Millbrook Library Phone-ography Competition this evening to view our photos that we had submitted and see the other work on display.  It was a wonderful event and we had a terrific time.

The director of the event thanked all of the participants for the photos being shown and then introduced the judges for the phonography competition.

The 2 gentlemen were art teachers from 2 of the schools in the area.  They seemed to have fun judging the competition - and were surprised at the quality of photographs that our smartphones were able to produce.  The playing field was sort of leveled because of the restrictions on the cameras and the editing had to be done on the phone.  This made the "eye of the artist" really become the focus of the judging.

There was one point that one of the teachers made that I found sort of interesting.  He said that since people are using smartphones more as cameras - posting instagrams, flickr, pininterest and so on - they seem to be looking at things that they would have previously just ignored.  I think that's true.

One woman who had 2 photos entered is using instagrams as her "daily phone call" to her daughter.  They share what they see everyday instead of talking on the phone or IMing.  I guess it is a case of a picture being worth 1,000 words.

My DH and I had such a good time with this charity event.  At the end, all of the photographs were raffled off.  I got a beautiful picture of posies that had a ripple filter applied - very Monet like.  My DH got a chicken in a coop with Warhol-like coloring.  It made him laugh.

It was well worth the time to enter our photos.  And more worth our time to support a local library.

Just great fun!

Phonography

Today I took some simple photos with my smartphone and edited them like mad to turn them into works of art for the charity photo showing at the library.  This is a streetlight.

I never really took the time to play with the built-in filters on the phone's photo editing software before, but it really was a lot of fun!  This is the same streetlight.

And today was a good day to have some silly fun.  Here's the original picture from the phone.  I took it when I was waiting for a taxi at the train station - truck was getting it's mani/pedi at the shop for a few days.  I just looked up and saw the clouds and light, thought it was neat and snapped a picture.

I think the final images were pretty neat.

I had to play around with this one also - it was so much fun!

I liked the way this came out, but I thought it was really pixelated after applied the filter, so I decided to mess with the colors instead.

I like it.  Pink, alien daffodils.  Kind of neat!

Bead Mania

Tomorrow I am showing my bead work at a little jewelry seminar.  I thought you might like a preview!

A few years ago I started doing bead work.  At first it was just another "occupy the hands" kind of hobby.  I found it relaxing.  The beads were so pretty!  The next thing I knew I was making wine charms and selling them at a local shop.

My little Simply Charming Wine Charms were a big hit.  It didn't hurt that I was able to get them into a store right before Christmas - right on the checkout counter.  

I thought about "expanding my market" by selling through other stores in neighboring towns.  That's when I found out just how many regulations that the state put on any type of merchandise related to alcohol.  Even though the charms were just decorations for drinking glasses, they still fell under state regulations for selling.  It was a bother.

But I still liked bead work. So I did some charity pieces for the church.

A chaplet for praying to St. Rita.  All little blue crystals - very delicate.

Little pocket rosaries in Swarovski crystals and hematite. Adorable.

Christmas was coming again and the knitters in the family needed stitch markers...

Fancy stitch markers with a good weight to them so they don't get stuck in the yarn.  They were a big hit and the different sizes helped mark the different parts of the patterns.

I tried necklaces, but I don't really wear them...

Then I paired a necklace with earrings and a new obsession was born!

I do love earrings - and now I could have them for any and all occasions.  

There were hoops

And dangles

Pearls and crystal

Freshwater pearls

Czech crystals

Swarovski sparkle

Dangles for New Year's

Teardrops

Gold and glass

Funky cracked glass

Valentine's Day reds

Pastel pearls

St. Patrick's Day greens

Golden drops

Czech drops

Crystal and pearl

Hematite and pearl

Antique flavored

Gold and pearl

But sometimes when you're designing you've got to just have a little fun!

Candy corn!  So simple and sweet.  Love it!

I'm really looking forward to showing my jewelry tomorrow.  Wish me luck!