Friday Food Craft: Blueberry Muffins

I LOVE fresh blueberries. They are a weakness of mine. So you can imagine my delight when I saw that in the dead of Winter, my grocery store had some good looking ones on super sale for my enjoyment! I may have bought several pounds... ok, I did. What better way to enjoy them than in some amazingly tasty muffins? You will note that I use cinnamon in both the streusel topping and the muffins themselves. I think that blueberries and cinnamon are a combination created by the gods themselves, if you disagree you can certainly omit it from the actual muffins, but it would make your topping fall a little flat.

To make these at home you will need:


For the Muffins:

1-½ cup All-purpose Flour
¾ cups Sugar
½ teaspoons Salt
2 teaspoons Baking Powder
⅓ cups Vegetable Oil
1 whole Egg
⅓ cups Milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Cinnamon
1 cup Blueberries

For the Streusel Topping:

½ cups Sugar
⅓ cups Flour
¼ cups Butter
1-½ teaspoon Cinnamon


Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease muffin cups or line with muffin liners (I always go with the liners to ensure my muffins come out of the pan easily).

To make the muffins, combine flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Place vegetable oil into a 2 cup measuring cup; add the egg, milk and vanilla. Mix this together and add to the flour mixture. Fold in blueberries. *This makes a very thick batter that bakes up surprisingly light, you've been warned. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full, and sprinkle with streusel topping mixture.

To make streusel topping: Mix together sugar, cup flour, butter, and cinnamon. Mix with a fork to cut in the butter (a pastry cutter or food processor may also be used), and sprinkle over muffins before baking.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Enjoy!

Paper Flower Roundup

As promised, here is a roundup from around the web of some gorgeous paper flowers! All of these would be great for weddings, home decor or a gift for your special someone this Valentine's Day!

Above you will see a rose that I made thanks to a great tutorial and template from Ellinee. I tried several roses, I will post more photos of mine at the bottom of this post, and I can say that regular copy paper (or paper of a similar weight) is easiest for these, though you can also make them with card stock and vellum without too much trouble. I really love these as I have seen several tutorials for roses around the web that are either too simple and so don't look very realistic or need you to cut out every single petal individually (and who has the time to do all that?).

The rose template even comes in several colors so you could print it out onto white copy paper and get a variety of colors! I chose to print out a template onto card stock and trace it onto some fancier paper I had lying around. I also left out the leaves and glued mine into stems so I could make a bouquet. To add a stem, just poke a little hole in the center of your petals and string them on, in the correct order, before gluing them in place.


Of course, no paper flower roundup is going to be complete without mention of my own tutorials! If you happened to miss them, I made a couple of cute tissue paper flower tutorials: Tissue paper pom pom flowers and tissue paper flowers with individual petals.

My favorite of my own tutorials was, of course, my paper calla lilies.


If crepe paper is more your style, there are a multitude of varieties available with tutorials from Martha Stewart Weddings. These even have tutorials for making several varieties of faux stamens to build your flowers around!






Are you into quilling? Then these double fringed flowers from Inna's Creations might be right up your alley. I haven't tried these out myself yet, but when I do I will be sure to let you all know how they turned out :)


Have some leftover party streamers? Check out these cute centerpieces. It's an easy version of a poppy and the crepe paper streamers used are readily available (I know I've seen some in my local dollar store!).


Have you seen any paper flower tutorials that shouldn't be missed? Let me know, I'd love to check them out!


Here are some more of my paper roses. Which is your favorite?

Embroidery How To: Satin Stitch

Welcome back for another embroidery tutorial! Today I am showing you the Satin Stitch. It has a few variations, but they are all used for pretty much the same thing: filling in an area of your embroidery with solid color. The satin stitch is basically a series of stitches made very close together, which leaves a solid block of color and a satin finish.

To start, I selected a little chevron pattern and transferred it to my fabric:

Next, select your embroidery floss, thread your needle and start your first stitch by pulling through your fabric from back to front, as shown below.

Finish the first stitch by going back into your fabric at the top of your end line. I am working this satin stitch in an up and down motion. You can work in any direction you like, but it is very important that all of your stitches be in the same direction and are made evenly. If you are just starting out, I recommend working either straight up and down, or straight side to side. Diagonals can be very hard to space evenly without practice.

Once you have made your first stitch, continue along in exactly the same way, following your pattern lines and spacing your stitches as closely and evenly as possible.

Once you are finished you will end up with a nice solid patch of color like this:

When starting out, you may find your outline is a little less than perfect, so you can always go back and outline it with a backstitch or some other stitch you like.