Cooking: Mini Buttermilk Chocolate Bundt Cakes

This may be my all-time favorite chocolate cake. It's an individual sized buttermilk chocolate bundt cake, extremely moist, with butter frosting. Should be butter glaze but I am overly generous with it. It's difficult for me to stop eating it! My whole family loves it too! I love my father's reaction when I tell him this is what's for dessert! It's a recipe I adapted from Martha Stewart's great pumpkin cake.

Click below for the recipe.

Christmas 2010: Details

We had a great Christmas with the girls! I love everything about Christmas, including wrapping presents. I've always loved wrapping gifts, in fact even had a job in highschool during the Christmas season wrapping gifts. I usually come up with some sort of theme and this year it was brown craft paper and burlap with different bows and bells and snowflake ornaments. I think a tree looks even more beautiful if the presents underneath are wrapped similarly, but I couldn't put mine out before Christmas Eve because wrapped gifts don't stay wrapped in our house very long! If you'd like to see some of the details, including our Christmas Day dessert and a few other things click below to read more.

Christmas Card 2010

Here is this year's Christmas Card. I just got it in the mail yesterday. Next year I really am going to do this little project earlier so I am not doing the assembly line thing late at night so late in December (when I could be knitting or sewing or wrapping presents)!  The thing that set me back this year was the idea of using a photo of the girls in their Christmas dresses. We (probably more fair to say "I" as my husband thinks it's all much ado...) didn't do that last year and maybe won't next year. But I liked the idea of having them a bit dressed, probably because the card is being mailed with Tess' birth announcement so that makes the whole thing feel more formal to me.

Because they are mailing out together I wanted the two pieces to relate to each other a bit. I contacted the designer who did my Christmas card last year, Jill Means, and worked with her on this. I loved our card last year and Jill has some great off-the-shelf designs too. The custom approach made it possible to match fonts ("Bickham Script Pro" is the one with all the ligatures--I love it! and "MrsEaves Roman"). I was originally going to try and match paper and ink colors but with two different printers, two different designers and me all in different locations I opted to package the announcement with photo in its own vellum envelope so that they are companion pieces but don't need to feel as integrated. Probably I am the only one that even thinks about these sort of things, but I can't help it!

Some wringing-of-hands later I think it all worked. It's in the mail anyway.

So about the card. I kept thinking about how fortunate I am to have the miracles of three beautiful daughters. They seem angels to me and are likely the result of some angels above. It has made me think much about the Christmas carol, "Angels We Have Heard on High," which I love. More than most carols it makes me wish for a better voice! I wanted our card this year to feel joyful and thankful and I thought about using most of the first verse of the carol but ended up with the two references--to the Gloria chorus and the "gladsome tidings" the shepherds sing. I also thought the birth announcement was another gladsome tiding to be sharing this time of year. Once again, this type of thought may be lost on all the recipients but it makes it more meaningful for me.

As a sidenote, it is so fun to see the photos of the three girls together as they look so individual! Tess actually looks quite a bit like Audrey did as a baby but her coloring is lighter. We may have a blue-eyed girl in this mix afterall!

Such a merry Christmas!

Birth Announcement: Tess Augusta

I told myself I would do Tess' announcement immediately after her birth, but once again, I was busy doing other things. Seems we usually get them out about three months later. I guess Scarlett's was a bit quicker than that since hers went out with our Christmas card, but not by much. Anyway, I lean towards the formal and traditional when it comes to big life events such as a marriage or a birth so I like formal announcements. Ideally mailed in their own envelopes. But this year I am sending out this announcement with our Christmas card (again). the timing is just too close to not save a stamp and envelope (a tree or two?) and some time! It's not without a little bit of misgiving.

I love the announcement. I have a real thing for letterpress that began when I took a BookArts course in college and was lucky enough to use movable type and presses to make my own books. I'm hoping I get to do that again sometime. Audrey's and Scarlett's announcements were letterpress too and with any luck I'll use it again for their wedding invitations, but probably not so much in between as it's a bit of a splurge.

I love the fonts used on this, especially the script with all the ligatures for her name. And I love the illustration of fruits and flowers. I wanted something that felt like the warm abundance of August...  And I also LOVE the ink color (PMS 1788U). I think it is just perfect! I wanted something pink-orange-red, a good coral, on an off-white paper. Just keeping with the color palette used on her blanket and sweater and such.

We decided to pair this with one of the photos we took of Tess on her blessing day. It looks appropriately old fashioned to me and I think the creamy whites and peachy skin tones work well with the announcement colors.

I used A Printable Press (which has a pretty cool business model) to do the design work and Mercurio Brothers Printing for the printing, and despite the virtual (email/PDF/etc.) nature of the whole process for something so tactile,  it went really well (please ignore my intentional smudging in the photo)! And I'm going to mail them out in time for Christmas after all. Just barely.

Knitting: Looped Scarflette Pattern

As predicted, my first Looped Scarflette has inspired some iterations. This is such a fun and quick knit! I just love the endless possibilities presented by combining two yarns! I finished the pattern in a few sizes: 18-24 months, 2-4 years, 4-6 years, and 6-8 years and it would be easy to upsize it for an older child. I listed it in my Etsy shop this weekend and just activated a coupon code to give my blog followers 25% off  for the next month! (UPDATE: Please note that the coupon expired in January of 2011)

This pink Scarflette is knit using Lion Brand Homespun yarn in Covered Bridge Red (a chunky, cat 5 yarn) and Lion Brand Jiffy yarn in Dusty Pink (another chunky, cat 5 yarn). This pink version may be my favorite because both yarns are a bit fuzzy, but each one I make is my favorite so it probably has more to do with the fact that it's the last one I've finished!

I do think after making a few of these now, that for children I prefer yarns with more acyrlic because they are softer and lighter weight.

I made this purple Scarflette for Audrey, because it is her favorite color, and because I just had to try another combination. It uses Vanna’s Choice yarn in Magenta (a worsted weight, cat 4) and Bernat Roving in Plum (a chunky, cat 5). I think it looks cute peeking out from her coat.

And I also love it with this chartreuse shirt! Such a great color combination.

I would love to knit some of these for my nieces. To my advantage is the fact that this project takes just a couple hours and is perfect for stash yarn--you could probably make three Scarflettes from two skeins of yarn if you aren't tempted to switch up the colors. This is the perfect thing for last minute Christmas gifts! Maybe I should knit some for my nephews too. What do you think? Do you think the Looped Scarflette would work on a boy?

I have a women's pattern in the works too. I want one in grass green!

If you are interested in the PDF pattern, which includes some tutorial photos, it's here in my Etsy shop.