Swedish Horse Cookies

This was another Paige birthday baking

Coconut Cream Pie

For Paige's birthday we made her a coconut cream pie! We melted unsweetened and semi sweet chocolate and put it on the baked graham cracker crust.
We cooked the eggs and milk and sugar and added the coconut!


And put this into the pie shell. We added whip cream at the last minute!

Ode to knits

Bronwen has made me many lovely wonderful knits that I use all the time. I just want to take a post to reflect on these. Spring time here is a bit cold and fingerless gloves and scarves are handy (and pretty).

Bee knit me this head scarf, I love it. Emily and I saw a neck knit warmer and I fell in love and then she made it for me! (sometimes in the thick of winter I wore the neck piece under a scarf.....)


This is the gorgeous shawl Bee knit me as a wedding present.


And my rose hat (Dan and I got into practicing winks for the camera)


And we practiced jumps....
Dan was using an old fashion camera!

Mayday Parade

This weekend was the Mayday Parade, one of our favorite Minneapolis events. The Heart of the Beast Puppet theater puts on a huge event that tells a story through sections of a parade and a ceremony that follows. This years theme was "Our Common Treasury":

As we experience the failure of our economic systems built on debt, consumer waste, the theft and sickening of earth resources, we gather to rebuild an economic system that protects and sustains our Earth as a “Common Treasury for All.”

We were a part of the spider puppet in the section led by our friend, Bart. With 18 puppeteers, this puppet had more people holding it than any puppet ever in the parade.

Photo credits to Colin on a few of these, including the next three.

These pictures are from the parade staging area where hundreds of people were somehow organized into a parade.

Tired before it even started.

Some of the puppets were covered in chia seeds so that sprouts would grow out of them. (Incidentally, on the culinary front, we recently had some chia seed pudding that a friend made that was quite tasty, a lot like tapioca. I had never realized that chia is not a proprietary name, but actually an ancient Aztec food plant.)

The land on the globe is real grass.

The spider web that went with our spider. The sides were passed along through the crowd.

Bugger!

Jealous of Colin's "croozer", Dan has been wanting a bike trailer for a while to make larger bicycle grocery trips and other errands possible. After following the craigslist postings for the spring, a deal was finally struck this weekend in an Arby's parking lot for a vintage "bugger" trailer.

Old thyme Uptown youngsters Easter Brunch weekend jam




Beets for the beat. Heart shaped beets!

Our friend Brooke was the mastermind of Katie and Erin's wedding cake. Kate and Erin eloped in Canada on a ski hill. To welcome them back we made chocolate chiffon cakes, 7 minute frosting (homemade fluff), and marzipan figures.

Pi Pie

For Katie and Erin's party, Dan and Brian made a pi pie in honor of a statistician and economist getting married. It was close to March 14 (3-14), but that was just a coincidence.Dan was proud of his Pi cutout.

Book of Pockets

Dan and I made a book of pockets for Katie and Erin. The idea was that people could put things in the pockets, they could put other things in the pockets later, and mostly that we would make a cloth book of pockets. (Everyone loves pockets!)

First I sewed pockets on red felt (felt for sturdy pages).

then I laid out all the pages and pockets to decide the layout of each page and of the entire book.

The local hardware store was very helpful with ideas for book binding - we thought we would use wood, but decided cardboard was easier. It works very well to sew (with the machine) onto cardboard. A little fabric glue was needed to cover over the stitches and make the inside cover. Dan was the binder, I was the pocket maker.