Springerle Cookies

 Today we decided to start our first batch ever of Springerle cookies! Ohhhhh they look so pretty! They have to dry over night and I hope they bake up without cracking. For now, I am in love with them!
The dough is made, then we pressed the molds into the dough and cut them out and placed them on parchment papers. They have to dry and then get baked with the hopes that the designs hold! I hope this works out. They are a tradition cookie that date back to the 1600's. You can read about them on the website from House on the Hill here.....
http://www.houseonthehill.net/
There you can see the molds and a video of how these cookies are made at the bottom of that page. Just amazing!!!!! It is a bit of a process and I am hoping that my dough was good, because there are many things that can wrong after all that and the cookies do not work out. Fingers and toes crossed that they will! :) You can see the one mold in the top of the picture, for the round ones there are 4 in the mold and for the bigger one, there are 24 different molds. Anyways.......enjoy! I will let you know if the cookies bake up as pretty and good as they look now!

 These are the ornaments Amber wanted to make for her coworkers and their tree at work. We bought some old plastic ornaments from goodwill to use. We didn't care how nice the surface was because we were going to cover them. We took gel medium and torn up pieces of their newspapers and collaged them onto the balls.

 Amber had snapped pictures of all her coworkers in the planning stage. We printed the pictures in gray scale and collaged those onto the ornaments covered with the newsprint. We also included their name from the actual paper where we could.

 Then we put the ornaments back together and added some vintage German glass as sparkle at the tops. They came out great! They should look marvelous on their work tree! :)

Have a nice rest of the weekend! It was fun being crafty with Amber and then doing a bit of baking too! Or should I say prepping for baking! :)

Late Halloween Dress Up for Amber

Amber has a dress up party tonight, some later Halloween Fun! She is going as a zombie, so here are some pictures of her.

Zombie's like brains!

And Rufio!

Yum, Rufio likes Zombies.

Scary and scabbie. Fun.

We did her make up here, with a little kit and it even had liquid latex in it to make the scab areas of her skin. She did not want to put any red blood on because it said it would/could stain your skin and she has to go to work Monday! :)
We hope this zombie doesn't scare anyone. Hehehehe.

Earl, Amber and I took a cruise last week for our 1 week a year vacation and what happened? SANDY!
Well, despite the rough seas, the Allure of the Seas proved to be a WONDERFUL ship full of great food, wonderful entertainment, a great Cruise Director Allan, shows that were amazing, and tons of things to do..........since we missed a port and were at sea more, they did a fantastic job of caring for us all!
In addition, the service on the ship was outstanding and our room steward and dining gals were super.

Earl did the zip line on the ship.Brave man and it

went great! He did great! This is him after it was done! He is SMILING!

 See our deck 9....balcony overlooking the boardwalk, back of the ship and aqua theater, with the smiley faces 3 over from the right and one up.

Royal Caribbean is connected with Dreamworks, so all the fun characters from those movies came with us! You will see, we made great fun of it..........being with family is always the best!
Yes, Captain Johhny road his actual Harley Davidson on the ship in the parade. Yes, there is a PARK with trees and all on the ship. Yes there is a full sized vintage car on board! Our balcony is on the picture with the Happy faces, (I hung those so we could see our balcony easily from other areas of the ship) look closely, we actually were on Deck 9 looking over the board walk, with the Yes actual life size carousal. :) Yes, that is rock climbing wall to the side of our balcony on both sides of the ship. How can we complain about this cruise?? I know!!!!!!!
Here are some pictures! Enjoy!