How quickly a year passes.

Last year on this date, my family got together on my parents' deck for a barbeque on a hot summer afternoon; something we've always loved to do. What made August 18, 2012 special is that it was the only date we could all get together last summer: one sister was just arriving from out East, while the other was heading off camping the next day. As it turned out, it would be our last barbeque as a whole family with my Dad, who passed away in December.

I'm so glad that we took the time to mark the occasion by creating this family "fingerprint" tree that I saw in Chatelaine.

We made one for every family, so each person picked their stamp colour and made a thumb print on the individual sheets of watercolour paper. I then went back with water colour pencils and drew the trees around the fingerprints on each one.

Helping our littlest family member (at the time) with her fingerprint.

I am not much of a baker, but I've been exploring my creative side with food over these past couple weeks with some delicious results!

I bought a huge bag of yeast a few months ago to make pizza dough from scratch and became very intrigued by the stuff! I attribute this to the fact that I never took chemistry in high school and am in awe of the reaction between yeast and flour when given some time to work together. It's very satisfying to see your dough double in size!

First I braved caramel pecan sticky buns.  I honestly never knew that cinnamon buns looked like this before they were baked:

Aren't they cute?

And when something turns out looking just like the magazine photo, it is even better:


We crushed these pretty fast around our house, so I am glad that I decided to give half away before we could eat all dozen of them.

I also put aside my usual hesitation to make anything that calls for two types of sugar and both butter and margarine and made some sweet (peanut butter free) monster cookies. I halved this recipe and it still made about 6 dozen cookies.

I'm glad the people I love aren't picky about my baking, because I've had to get rid of a lot of it!

But it is time to dust off my scissors and sewing machine and get back at some projects for upcoming birthdays and other gifting occasions. But before I do, I have some Mother's Day crafting to work on...