Pie Glorious Pie!

Have you seen this? Pies, homemade delicious yummy pies...in a Jar! LOVE to the max extreme!

I first saw this on Our Best Bites, I used to do a lot of shipping with cupcakes in a jar (post to come soon!) so I pretty much always have mason jars on hand. 

I used Alton Brown's Pie crust recipe. I really like it the pie crust is a nice mix between flaky and buttery. 

Here's a step by step picture tutorial on making absolutely delicious pies! 

1. Gather all of your ingredients together from Alton's recipe. I also like to add cinnamon to the pie crust recipe and a tbls of sugar.I also chill my bowl in the fridge for 15 minutes before I make the dough.
Note: I actually ended up quadrupling the recipe because I mostly had taller jars on hand so it took a bit more dough and I wanted to use up my ripe fruit. 

2. Add your flour, sugar and cinnamon to your chilled bowl. 

3. Next add your butter and using your hands mix your butter into the flour mixture.
Note: You can use a food processor or a pastry blender as well.

4. Mix until your flour looks a little mealy. 

5. Add your shortening and repeat step 3. 

6. Slowly add your ice water to your mixture you won't need all of it so add it only a tiny bit at a time.

7. Place in a ziplock baggie and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

8. Gather all of your ingredients together for your pie fillings. I made plain Peach, Peach-Cherry, Apple and Apple-Cherry. I also made Apple peanut butter and Apple carrot (Apple carrot sounded really yummy!).

9. Chop up all of your fruit.

10. Then add a little bit of sugar and cinnamon. I don't generally add too much sugar especially when I know that the fruit is nice and sweet. For the apple peanut butter I added a 1/2 cup of apples and 3 tbs of peanut butter; in the future I would add more.

11. Take your dough out of the fridge and place between two pieces of well floured wax paper. 

12. Roll until you have a nice even and thin crust. Plus shape doesn't matter now because you're going to be fitting it into the jars.

13. use the tops of the jars to cut out pastry for the top of your jar.

14. Taking scraps of the pie dough gently fit the dough into the jars and press to make the dough seamless in the jars so no filling escapes.

15. Add fruit! It will cook down some so I liked to add it all the way to the top.

16, break out your cute tiny cookie cutters and cut out some neat shapes so the steam can escape.

17. For the Apple Peanut Butter I added a crumb crust. I didn't have any oats on hand (doh!) so I grabbed a package of instant apple cinnamon oatmeal and added a little bit of butter, about 1 tsp until it was nice and crumbly. 

18. Then I melted a little butter and brushed the tops of the pies with the butter and sprinkled some cinnamon sugar on top. Bake in a 350 oven for approximately 50 minutes. I checked them at about 40 and they still needed a good 10 minutes.

19.  Once the pies have cooled a little bit grab a glass of milk in an adorable bottle and a cute straw to drink out of...don't forget your spoon. 

20-21. Then eat and eat and eat! Don't you love that picture (20)? So flaky and so absolutely delicious. A great peanut butter and soft apple taste. 

22. Look at those lovely pies!!!Marvel in your wonderful creation! Tell your friends call your husband just to tell him!

I ended up making 9 pies. I baked 5 of them and put the other 4 in the freezer. for upcoming birthdays and for special surprise gifts for friends!!

Best part? If you visit the link above for Our Best Bites, at the end of the post you will see a free printable to dress up your jars to give to friends as gifts!! 

If you make pies in a jar tell us about it and I will add links to the bottom of this post so everyone can see the delicious creations!!

Mmm Eggplant Mmmonday's!

For Mmmonday's this week I've created a delicious Eggplant dish!


Hey! Where are you going? Don't you like Eggplant? Even my kids will eat eggplant when I make them! This is delicious and simple I promise!


I used a leftover eggplant I had an made semi thick slices about 1/2 an inch. Then I drizzled olive oil over them and threw on some salt and pepper and headed to the grill. 
Then......I sort of accidentally forgot that they were on the grill because I was tired and really when do I ever use the grill in the morning? But don't fret I did eventually remember I had put them on the grill and they weren't too bad!

Once the eggplant had finished grilling on the second time (total grill time: 15 mins) I started the poached eggs.  

I have a fancy (it's not that fancy) egg poacher. I don't like the water method I always end up screwing it up and I never have vinegar on hand. So I use my egg poacher, cover and cook 3 minutes.

When I uncover I check the eggs to make sure the whites are fully done...I am checking for jiggly-ness. No Jiggle so we're good!

Then pour your favourite cup of coffee, top the eggplant with your poached eggs, add a little pepper and salt and dig in!

Look at those perfectly delicious runny yolks!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! This was so good my mouth is watering all over again!

This is my daughters plain egg. She took this picture and I just had to share! What more could you ask for than a 5 year old asking for the camera so she can take a picture of her own food?! Love!

Cameo Friday's

Yay Cameo Friday! Every Friday I will try to post something I make using my Cameo. 


This week I made these absolutely adorable Cupcake Boxes. I used Design #30339 created by Rivka. She's awesome by the way! She's so nice, answers all of your questions and has some really great designs. Check out her blog!


On the silhouette I was able to print out two of the longer pieces on one piece of 12x12 paper and the remaining three pieces on a second sheet. By the way, I love double sided scrapbook paper; it's so awesome!

1. Transfer two of your cut outs to one sheet of scrapbook paper, and the other three shapes to the second piece.
2. Peel off the excess scrapbook paper, then slowly and carefully peel off your cut shape.
3. Once you have all of your shapes you're ready to start!

4. I cut a piece of vinyl to the size of the window, then used double sided tacky tape (love) to glue the vinyl window into place. 
5. Presto Window!
6. Then I glued the bottom of the longer pieces together and then the bottom of the smaller pieces on top. 
7. Last but not least add the sticky tape to each of the sides and then attach to the sides of the window. '

And Brava! Adorable Cupcake boxes! Aren't they so cute? Again love the double sided scrapbook paper you can make two boxes out of the same paper and you get two different looks! I will admit I like the Chevron pattern on the outside with the pink inside a bit better, the chevron on the outside looks a bit trippy :) 

Olympics 2012!

I know everyone is going crazy for Olympics this time of year and I am one of those crazies!


Opening night of the Olympics I decided to bake cookies with my daughter Ava...aka she randomly came into the kitchen once in a while to ask if the cookies were done yet. 


I was very happy with the way they turned out! I used Bake@350's sugar cookie recipe, which I have to say is by far the best recipe I have ever used. And I used Sweetopia's Royal Icing recipe, which again I have to say is far better than the recipe on the Meringue Powder package. Since switching to her Royal Icing recipe I have found that my icing is drying higher, puffier and shinier. 


I cut out the cookies using a circle set I bought at William Sonoma aka the mother ship. I used the second largest cutter and the third smallest.


I flooded all of the cookies in the Olympic colours, then I added sprinkles and edible glitter. Surprisingly (not really) I had all of the sprinkle colours and edible glitter colours on hand! As I was flooding the cookies I couldn't help but notice how much they looked like donuts! How fun would that be? Cookie Donuts...I love decorating cookies! The absolute endless possibilities!!

I think they turned out great only wish the Olympic rings on the white cookie had come out a little crisper. I think my icing was a tad too thick.



How are you celebrating the Olympics this year? What's your favourite event? Who are you cheering for? 

Fairy Party

Last year we celebrated our princess's 5th birthday. As I am gearing up for her 6th birthday party (a Pajama Party more to come!) I looked back at her Fairy Birthday. 


I started out hand making her invitations. I bought some tan coloured scrap booking paper and roughened up the edges with scissors and then some brown stamping ink (you can also use a soaked tea bag, but it can leave the paper a little wet). I hand drew all of the treasure maps in pencil first then followed it with a dark scrapbooking pen and added some glitter glue to the compass  and palm tree's. 
I added the rhyme to vellume paper and rolled them up like treasure maps! Then I wrapped them with some ribbon and a gift tag distressed with the stamping ink again. 


So cute all of the girls loved them and I had several Mom's apologize for not RSVP'ing sooner as they couldn't find the invitation because their daughters had them up in their rooms and were looking for lost treasure! LOVE

Then it was off to the races, I couldn't get my hands on enough idea's! I made ridiculously sweet party hats using the tutorial on Tradewind Tiara's. I also hand sewed some red circular cushions which I placed over our large silver drink buckets to make it look like toadstools! I bought the red and white fabric at Joann's in the clearance section (scoooore!)...and let's be serious when I say hand sewn I mean I kind of pieced together a way to make it into a circle...but certainly lumpy looks more realistic right? Because I can't really sew. 

The night before I was frantically hanging decorations with my husband who was annoyed at me for continually standing on chairs, we also had just found out I was expecting so I get it! I used a lot of crepe paper in the living room to create a sweet fairy affect in the living room where we would be decorating wings and tinkering with necklaces. I used our chandelier in our dining room and wrapped the glasses with more crepe paper to make them look like flowers and hung some tulle and poms. 
I hit up friends for different coloured table cloths, I apparently only have white and one black table cloth! 
I found the fairy wings at Micheal's, they came two in a package and thought it would be a really fun craft for the girls to make and take home with them. 

Next came the cake. It was my first time sculpting a person and I'm pretty happy with the way Tinkerbell turned out. I wanted the cake to kind of look like a stump so I added extra icing in different area's of the top cake so it looked uneven and rustic. 
I found the wood pieces at Micheal's as well and had a 50% off coupon. I love coupons!

And last but not least was the food. I was pretty happy with all of our creations: Baby Snail Sandwiches (Tortilla's with PB&J), Toadstools (hollowed out cherry tomatoes on top of string cheese), Acorns (Hershey Kiss attached to a Nilla Wafer), Fairy Berries, Fairy Wands and Make a Wish Dandelion Cake Pops. 


I was actually able to find a lot of the moss rocks and green table runners at the Dollar store, the Dollar Store is a great resource for parties you find all kinds of random things you would never expect to find!

Sharing my idea on the Celebration Shoppe's What I made Wednesday link Party!