Adventures in cookie decorating

So since I've become a SAHM, I've wanted to get in touch with my Martha Stewart side in the worst way. I love to bake and I love to cook, I just hate the clean up. I've been just aching to make and decorate cookies. Some women love to shop, I love to eat food! So, Wednesday night I rolled out some cookie dough and yesterday I tackled decorating. The first attempt at making frosting did not go so well. I had found a recipe for royal icing the other day but yesterday changed my mind and decided I wanted to frost the cookies. So, when I started making the first frosting recipe I did not follow the directions AND I tweaked the recipe a little. BIG mistake! I ended up with a royal icing type mix. hehe So, I made a batch of buttercream frosting. That turned out fine, but of course, buttercream is a little tempermental. It gets soft to quickly (I did not have shortening, so I was working with true buttercream) and it gets too cold to quickly.
Imagine a girl who has zero cake/cookie decorating experience working on decorating cookies. Do you have that mental image in your head? Great, 'cause that's me. I've dabbled in it many years ago, but I think I was 10 years old the last time I attempted and the frosting was too runny then too. I do have to say, that deep within me is a cake/cookie decorator. I just need to dig for her practice a little. All in all, the finished product doesn't taste horrible and looks okay, so I'm happy. Now of course, I would have loved to use more than one color while decorating, but I have to remind myself that I need to take baby steps.
I spent most of my day decorating and still have a few cookies to decorate, but I ran out of buttercream so I quit for the day. I do have to say, they are mighty delicious. I've eaten WAY to many. Here are some pictures of some of my favorite from yesterday. I just spent my time experimenting since I wasn't really making the cookies for anybody but my family.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

Obviously I ran out of room for the word Halloween on this one, but I ws proud of how semi-neatly the writing turned out on this one. As I got to the end I stopped caring about neatness. lol

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

This bat didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to, but I still like it.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

This cat and the moon below were dipped in the icing-ish concoction that was made with my first batch of flopped frosting. They turned out pretty good.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

I'll probably mix up another small batch of buttercream and decorate the few cookies that are left. This particular sugar cookie recipe is not the type that should be left unfrosted.

Thursday Thirteen - Things I need to do

Thirteen Things about Shan When I was trying what to do a Thursday Thirteen about, the first thing that came to mind was the fact that I probably have thirteen other things I should be doing. I'm not one for remembering to put together a "To Do List" and well, I am the unorganized momma for a reason. ;) 1) I need to get my Christmas card list put together so I know how many to order. 2)I need to color my hair. My roots are showing extremely bad and it's really quite disguisting. 3)I need to put one last coat of paint on the walls of the bathroom. If I was a better painter, I probably wouldn't need to do this. :) 4)I need to vacuum!!!! 5)I need to figure out what we are having for supper. 6)I need to balance my checkbook. 7)I need to get my little guy's Halloween costume ready for tomorrow. (He's going to be a chicken.) 8)I need to do some laundry. 9)I need to put icing on the Halloween cookies I made last night. 10)I need to do something with the Hamburger in the fridge. (Today is the sell-by date.) 11)I need to get caught up on the shows I missed when I was baking the Halloween cookies last night. 12)I need to organize my freezers. They are such a disaster right now and I can hardly fit anything in them. 13)I need to clean up the kitchen after my cookie rolling from last night. What a mess! So, what do you need to do today? Check out Thursday Thirteen for more fun!

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Wordless Wednesday

From Wordless Wednesday

Some pictures just don't need explaining! :)

Tackle It Tuesday

Well, this morning in honor of Tackle it Tuesday, I decided to tackle the bathroom tub. We are in the middle of a bathroom renovation (I will post about it when we are done) and the tub is one of the few things we are not replacing. I painted the bathroom on Monday and dripped tan paint in the tub. My husband got paneling adhesive and caulking on/in the tub as well. It was pretty gross. On top of that, the husband must have decided to pull one of the loose tub floor grip strips off so there was residue from that on the bottom. Yuck.

My tools of choice for tackling this project were: The Works Tub & Shower Cleaner and a Scotchbrite Scrub Sponge.

From Tackle it Tuesday

Here are the before shots.

From Tackle it Tuesday

From Tackle it Tuesday

From Tackle it Tuesday

From Tackle it Tuesday

Pretty gross, right. I love using the Scotchbrite sponges because it takes a lot of the work out of cleaning the tub. I pretty much only use the green scrubby side. I have always loved The Works as my tub cleaner, but there are many other products out there that work just as well. The spot where my husband took one of the tub floor grip strips off was the worst to clean and took quite a bit of elbow grease, but I got it off.

And now for the after!

From Tackle it Tuesday

From Tackle it Tuesday

From Tackle it Tuesday

Isn't it pretty?? I'm pretty proud. Hopefully this weekend we can get the rest of the bathroom looking nice!

Makeover Monday

Well, it's the start of the new week and I have vowed to tackle the housework that has gotten out of hand lately. My husband and I are not very neat people but we both hate mess. The problem is we both will just throw things somewhere and not put them where they are supposed to be. We gotten used to being lazy about things and it's a pain. It frustrates me to no end because why should I bother cleaning when I just have to tackle not only the messes that my son and I make, but then I have to clean up after my hubby too. So today I decided it was Makover Monday and todays project was the kitchen. Now, I know better than to tackle the ENTIRE kitchen, so I just focused on "The Corner." We have a corner in our kitchen that just collects stuff. The mail, receipts, coupons, garbage, etc. all seem to just get tossed here and it becomes a huge, disguisting mess.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

Believe it or not, the above picture is actually a "clean" version of "The Corner." I had already moved all of the clutter to the table when I realized it would be an excellent blog topic and photos would be nice. Please ignore the ugly counter/cupboards and white walls. We are slowly picking away at projects in this house and unfortunately the kitchen is not high up on the list. :(

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

Here is the organizer I used for this project. We actually used this in our previous home. My husband wanted to eliminate "The Corner" in that home, but it was unsuccessful. I always said that we needed labels on the shelves and cubbies. How can you have a nice area if there is no organization to where everything should go?! So, this project was entirely free since I already had everything on hand. A nice bonus to go with a clean corner. :)

I happened to have some blank white shipping labels leftover from something, so I used those to organize each shelf. I drew out a rough drawing of the organizer on a sheet of paper and planned what would go on each shelf and then made labels to indicate what area of each shelf was for what.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

I think it turned out pretty well. The empty shelf on the bottom is for all of my husbands junk that he takes out his pocket every day. His wallet, cell phone, etc. SHOULD all go there. Hopefully he will set it on the shelf, since it's not to far from where he normally sets it. When I was going through "The Corner", I noticed all of the spare change that my husband refuses to put in the jar in our bedroom. I decided to make a mini spare change jar for him.

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

From Confessions of an unorganized momma

I happened to have a small jar that I emptied over the weekend to use. I was going to be all creative and cut a slit in the lid so it was like a bank, but I just didn't have the right tools and I value my fingers to much. :) I took a black permanant marker and wrote "Spare Change" on the jar and placed it on the organizer. We'll see how long the organization lasts.

Paint + Carpet = Mess

I'm sure you can tell by the title that this is going to be a fun post. :) Last night, my little guy was in the kitchen and I could hear a tearing noise. I thought to myself "Oh great, what is he destroying now!" I went into the kitchen and he was tearing the label from a gallon of paint I had on the floor. No big deal, right? So I quickly grab the can of paint away and as I do that, it spills because apparently whomever was painting did not secure the lid properly. I'm not going to name names, but I'm pretty sure that person is very sorry that she didn't double check the lid before she placed it on the floor. So, my poor little guy is sitting in paint. He was wearing a pair of paints that we had just bought him (they were nothing special, but it's the idea that he had never worn them before that bothered me the most). I stripped his pants and scurried him and the "girls" (dogs) into the livingroom and quickly trapped them in there. I looked at the floor wondering what I needed to do to save the floor and hopefully prevent my husband from killing me. Now, keep in mind, that we have absolutely hideous carpet in the kitchen that would actually look better with paint on it. But I was not about to paint the entire floor before supper!! I decided I needed a squeegee and something to squeegee the paint into. I couldn't find my squeegee, so I used a small cutting board and an ice cream pail to catch as much paint as possible. Being the tightwad I am, I pit the paint back in the can. I figured the floor wasn't that dirty, so the paint could be used again. After I took as much as I could off the carpet, it was still a mess. I grabbed a wet rag and started scrubbing, but soon realized that was going to take FOREVER and I still needed to finish supper. So I then decided to pour water on the paint and use the shop vac to suck it up. This worked quite well if I do say so myself. My hubby didn't even notice when he got home. I can see the spot, but it is definitely an improvement. And the pants you ask? Well, I through those in the washing machine right away and it looks like I may be able to salvage those too. What a day!

Procrastination... my own worst enemy

Well, if the title of my blog doesn't give it away, I am quite possible one of the least organized people in this world. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme but I am definitely unorganized. Not only am I unorganized, but I am a major procrastinator. One example would be, I just filed the Sales & use tax for my husband's landscaping business today. It was due 3 months ago today. Thank god he only does it part time and he had done very little this year. It was pretty easy to do because of that.

Of course I had to dig through a box to find the documents I needed. It was ridiculous. We moved into this house 2 months ago and it has been a nightmare. There is no room that is safe to put one of our file cabinets, so I have been even less organized than normal. I'm hoping once the hubby builds our third bedroom, I can put the file cabinets in the closet or something.

Anyone else live in a shoebox? I know I am not the only one. Our old house had much more room for my unorganized mess. I could at least see the file cabinets.