Things I've Made Lately

Last Monday we were going to be having spaghetti for dinner so I decided to try to make french bread. I've never really made bread before so I wasn't sure how it would turn out. Suprisingly, it looked exactly like a store-bought loaf! It was a little more dense than a store-bought french bread, but was still really good. I used this recipe that I found online. It's actually the same recipe that's in the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

Mollie loves to eat bread. It keeps her busy for a long time in restaurants..
I enjoyed baking the french bread so much that I've decided to bake something new each Monday. This week I made homemade poptarts using this recipe. I'm completely unexperienced at making pastry and this recipe was really easy for me! There are several variations of fillings in the recipe, but I made Brown Sugar & Cinnamon, my favorite kind of poptart! They actually taste almost exactly like real Poptarts, but they have a fresher texture, and are probably much healthier and less expensive. They were good fresh out of the oven, but I think they were actually better the next day. Anyone have any baking suggestions for next Monday?

At one of our last MOPS meetings of the year, back in April, we painted "labels" on flower pots with chalkboard paint. It was right around Mollie's birthday, and I thought it would be a good take-home gift for the girls who came to Mollie's birthday party so I painted one for each of them, and gave them some chalk and seeds to plant. I also bought some basil seeds for me to plant in my pot. I planted them about a week ago, and a few days ago I noticed my first sprout. The next day I looked again, and counted 17 sprouts!

I planted these strawberries too.

A few weeks ago I wrote Mollie's thank you cards for her birthday presents on blank note cards, but had been putting off sending them because I didn't know how to decorate them. Usually when I have to send a card, I just go into my mom' craft room and come up with a card in a few minutes because she has so many stamps, papers, punches, etc. But since my parents are moving this summer, my mom has packed up all of her craft supplies! I don't have many stamps, inks, or papers, so i decided to use what I DO have a lot of.... fabric scraps! I stamped "Thanks So Much" onto a solid fabric rectangle, and used an eyelet to attach it to a bigger fabric rectangle. Then I stitched the whole thing right onto the note card. This is a great way to use your fabric scraps!