Halloween Pumpkin Sugar Cookies

This has been a tradition at my house longer than I can remember. We always made these deliciously moist sugar cookies, frosted them with orange frosting, and decorated them with chocolate chips and candy-corns to look like jack-o-lantern faces. We'd help my mom frost and decorate them and she'd take them to neighbors and friends. And we were always allowed to decorate one or two for ourselves to eat. Mine, of course, had every inch of cookie covered in candy-corns because if they were on my cookie, I could eat them :) This is super fun to do with kids, or just with friends! It's such a delicious recipe and it's fun to make because you get to feel all artistic!

Rolled Sugar Cookies
Recipe from: My mom's kitchen

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cubes butter
2/3 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar (white)
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. milk
2 tsp. vanilla
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

Directions:
Cream together butter and shortening for 30 seconds; add sugar and beat till fluffy. Add egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Add dry ingredients, beating until well combined. Cover and chill at least 3 hours. Working with 1/2 the dough (or less) at a time, on a lightly floured surface, roll to 1/8" thickness. *Cut into desired shapes. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for 8 minutes.

*To get a round cookie, we always used a cup. That way you don't have to buy round cookie cutters. :)

The butter cream frosting recipe can be found here. This is the best homemade frosting recipe ever and goes great with these cookies!!

Enjoy! -Al

Failure Friday: 7 Crock Pot Tips for making the Best Meal

To learn what failure Friday is click  here

One thing I consistently fail at is cooking. I'm really not that great at it and am always learning things I need to change to improve the meals I make. Usually when I make something new I call my mom and ask her about all the little things she does that I don't think about doing. So hopefully these crock pot tips can help me and you!

I love how people are always coming out with new crock pot recipes and freezer meals to save the food maker some time. SO great and definitely my kind of recipe. Since this is the new thing I thought I'd do a post about some crock pot tips so that your (and my) food will turn out the absolute best it can!

Halloween Candy Corn Centerpiece

Do you remember this? I did a tutorial on how to mix paint and mod podge to add color to glass here. This is the project that came out of that tutorial. The only other thing I did to this was add candy corns and a black table cloth! This is what I planned for and why I painted it with orange and yellow. I think it turned out awesome for Halloween, don't you? (Plus it was a great excuse to buy candy corns!) :)

Check out my tutorial and tell me what you think!

Halloween "BOO" Sign

 

Not too late to Decorate! And this baby is so inexpensive and easy you won't be able to resist making it to hang on your door. Plus it's freakin adorable, right? 

Failure Friday: Homemade Mild Salsa

So I wouldn't call this a complete failure. It's only the second time I've made salsa. It tasted pretty good and we ended up eating most of it! It's a great starter recipe but, it was a little bitter and I feel like it could be a lot better. So I'm going to tell you what we did and maybe you can help us out! :)

This whole ambition of making salsa started with Chandler and I going up to my Aunt and Uncle's for dinner. They had a bunch of extra tomatoes in their garden and asked us to take them off their hands - they had so many that they even made ketchup with them! Apparently it takes a lot to make a little when you do ketchup. So we picked a good bunch of them and headed home.

Then next day was our date night. We went out to dinner and were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our night. It's hard thinking of new things to do on dates without spending too much money. I'm sure you know the feeling. . . We talked about going to a movie but there weren't any good ones at the dollar theater. Then we remembered our tomatoes! Hey - Cooking together is fun - let's make Salsa!

We called up the master cook, Chandler's dad, and got to it. My father-in-law helped us figure out what to buy since we didn't want to have to go home to find a recipe and come back into town. What we did:

Ham Fried Rice

This is a recipe my husband has been working on perfecting for about 2 years now. It's so easy so we love having it all the time - probably at least once a week. It's great also because it can be really cheap and you can add pretty much anything you want to it! : ) If you want to check out the recipe head on over to Beauty Through Imperfection. I'm a new contributor over there and will be putting up recipes once a month on Paula's blog.

Feather Nails

There's only one thing I love more than painting my nails, and that's having someone paint my nails for me! Especially when its a super cute design. Look at these adorable feather nails my sister-in-law, Shelby, did for me! :)