♥ Happy Valentine's Day ♥

I hope everyone had a lovely day. After two days of being out and about, today we had a relaxing day watching movies, cooking chili and of course, baking something sweet. We made these easy individual fallen chocolate cakes, aka molten lava cakes. We had ours with a side of french vanilla ice cream. Here's the recipe that makes 4 individual cakes. Enjoy!

Ingredients

1/2 stick of butter
4 ounces bittersweet or semi sweet chocolate
2 eggs + 1 yolk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon flour + more for dusting
Confectioners sugar for sprinkling

Instructions:

- Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease and flour 4 ramekins. Melt the butter and chocolate in a heat proof medium bowl. Beat the eggs, yolk, vanilla, salt and sugar on high speed for 5 minutes.

- Scrape the egg mixture over the melted butter and chocolate. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture. Gently fold egg and flour into the chocolate until mixture is uniform in color.

- Pour batter into prepared ramekins. Bake for 11 minutes. Run a paring knife along the edges of the ramekins to loosen the cakes. Invert the ramekins onto serving plates and cool for 1 minute. Lift ramekin and sieve a light sprinkling of confectioners sugar. Serve immediately.

Coconut Macaroons

I know, not very Christmas-ee, but my mother in law likes coconut, so I made these for her as a gift. They are also super easy to make, here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

- 1 (14 ounce) package flake Coconut
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 6 tablespoons flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 4 egg whites
- 1 teaspoon almond extract

(As you can see, it's pretty easy to half the recipe, which is what I did)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease and flour baking sheets; set aside. Mix coconut, sugar, flour and salt in large bowl. Stir in egg whites and almond extract until well blended. Drop coconut mixture into 36 mounds, 2 inches apart, on prepared baking sheets, using about 1 tablespoonful of the coconut mixture for each mound. Bake 20 min. or until edges are golden brown. Immediately remove from baking sheets to wire racks. Cool completely.

You can also melt some semi- sweet baking chocolate and dip or drizzle the macaroons in once they have cooled.

And happy whatever you celebrate too :)

Our Tree

I like to look at it a lot, then I sing "Christmas time" And by singing, I mean repeating those two words over and over. Just four more days till Christmas, are you ready?

Today has been a good day!

• I started my day off with an email from someone wanting a custom set of my hand painted Christmas ornaments. I can't wait to get started on them.

• I had a very silly portrait taken by famous rock star photographer Brook Pifer, at her studio earlier today. Even my friend Isabelle was there.

• On my way back home, I stopped at Whole Foods to get some grass fed beef and I noticed that my favorite cookie dough was buy one get one free, score!

• I came home to find an amazing Christmas present under my tree and also some more awesomeness in my bank account. We are truly loved around here. It's been a wonderful holiday season this year!

December

I'm running kind of late in my December blogging, oops! Not much to report though. I tried looking back in my blog posts to see what was going on around this time last year and I didn't even talk about Christmas! I guess I just wasn't in the mood for it. We didn't even put up a tree last year, so that explains a bit.

Mike came home from work with our tree on Monday and it's all set up and decorated :) We still have the same ornaments we bought a few years ago... I hope next year we can have a different color scheme, something more colorful. Right now it's gold and red hues, I mean it's nice and elegant looking, but we can't have the same every single year now can we?

I'm also excited about Christmas because we are hosting it at our place. I mean it's only Mike, his mom and me, but still. It'll be the first time we do it. We're thinking about making a prime rib roast, scalloped potatoes, a fancy salad and for dessert, individual chocolate molten lava cakes. I haven't had pumpkin pie since thanksgiving but I had pumpkin pie ice cream from Jeremiah's... it was SO good! I might make a pumpkin pie as well, I haven't had enough this year.

I made another set of ornaments for the shop, so go check them out, there's still time to get them before Christmas. I also have my Christmas cards sealed, stamped and ready to mail. We still have some shopping to do, but hopefully we'll get it done this weekend. Anyway, my shop needs new illustrations, so I'm off to keep cutting paper and sketch. Good luck with all your holiday preparations.

We're back!

I'm so glad that Mike decided to spend Thanksgiving with his dad and his family, it was worth the 13 hour drive... not that I did any driving, but still, I had to try very hard not to fall asleep. Lily did really well on her first long road trip too. We left Monday morning and were back home last night around midnight.

It was nice being around a lot of people, I really miss that here. Everyone was very happy to see Mike. I also think they liked me, it was their first time meeting me... they sent me home with lots of goodies... among them the Pioneer Woman cookbook and a cast iron skillet to try some of her recipes, how cool is that?!

We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner. I even made a pumpkin pie, but for some reason I didn't like the way it came out, I'll have to make another one here at home. The weather was perfect, nice and cold. They said it wasn't very pretty because all the leaves already fell off the trees, but it was still a nice change of scenery for me.

Cute Ornaments

I made these three Christmas ornaments for my Etsy shop. They were pretty fun to make, even though they took longer than I expected. They are painted on wooden ornaments that I found at the craft store. What do you think? Are you ready for the holidays? We haven't even started thinking about Christmas shopping yet, I'll start thinking about it after Thanksgiving.

(Click on the image to go to Sugar Village)

Happy Birthday my love...

We had some friends over for a little early birthday celebration for Mike this past Saturday. Food was great, we made a cream of mushroom soup, following a Julia Child recipe, spinach and asparagus salad with goat cheese and roasted chicken with a pan sauce. For dessert (yes, we cheated a bit on our diet with the dessert), an orange souffle with ice cream. Everything was delicious!

We also played a little bit of boardgames, watched a movie (The Wrestler) and went over to Avalon Park to see some fireworks. It was a good day overall. He got these speakers for his birthday. On Sunday, we headed over to Cool Stuff for another birthday present, a boardgame of course! He chose one called A House Divided. Happy birthday baby, I love you more than anything, can't wait to share more birthdays with you ♥

Etsy Favorites ♥

Since today is Easter, I thought today's post would be completely appropriate. I mean, can these bunnies get any cuter?! I love the mix of fashion, art and of course, cute overload. Check out Fifi Lapin's blog too see more work and her bags from the LeSportSac collection, I totally want one. You can also find her here. Happy Easter!

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade fifilapin.etsy.com

Hi

We decided to go out to dinner tonight to beat tomorrow's crowd. We might go see a movie and bake something cute and delicious tomorrow. In Mexico, Valentines Day is known as "Day of Love and Friendship", so even if you are single, I hope you still have a great day! Have a good weekend.

A little homesick

This is the time of year I miss the most, wishing I could be in Mexico. Even though I'm not super religious, I really miss the way my family celebrates Christmas in Mexico. Christmas Eve was more important than actual Christmas day.

We would usually get together at one of my aunts or uncles house to celebrate on Christmas Eve. We would have a posada, the whole family would split up in 2 "teams" and actually sing the litany to pedir posada. We would also have our gift exchange, have a fancy dinner (not lunch), and wait till midnight to see what "baby jesus" or sometimes Santa, left under the tree.

A traditional drink would be ponche, a hot drink, sort of like tea, but with nuts and different fruits, and we could add some sort of liquor if we preferred it that way. We would also make buñuelos, just for this day.

But instead, i'm at home, waiting for Mike to finish working. We are driving over to my mother in law's house later, have a normal day and wait until tomorrow to open up some presents and cook a nice lunch/dinner. I miss my family so much. I would love for Mike to experience a Christmas in Mexico one year.

I hope everyone has a great Christmas with their families and loved ones. Remember that presents are just temporary material things, love, friendship and family are priceless...corny I know. Merry Christmas!

I'm back!

I'm so sorry! I feel like I left without warning. I went away to spend Thanksgiving in Anaheim, CA with my parents. I had no idea I wasn't going to have internet access. I feel so left behind now! I have a lot of blog catching up to do.

Thanksgiving dinner was delicious, just like I imagined it would be. My step dad makes the best stuffing ever! He also makes a great Cesar salad dressing from scratch. I made the pumpkin pies, but my parents tiny oven didn't have any numbers on it, so I had to guess on the temperature, they also didn't have any measuring spoons, so I had to eye-ball the spices that went into the pie.


I had the opportunity to go see Kukula's paintings in Santa Monica, it was the last day, so I was so happy that I got to see them. They were beautiful! After that, we went to the pier and just drove around Beverly Hills and then walked around Hollywood.

I'm glad to be back home, I enjoyed my time with my mom, but there's nothing like your own space and things. I was also missing my little Lily like crazy, I was so happy to see her. She stayed with my mother in law and a few days with our friends, she was in good hands.

So that's about it, we didn't do anything exciting, it was even a bit boring I would say. We were broke, so we couldn't do much. Right before Mike left for CA, our water heater broke. So that was a chunk of money we weren't expecting to spend. At least I got to spend time with my parents.