In the Kitchen – Cinnamon Roll Casserole

Usually for Christmas Eve we have dinner at my house, but this year due to downsizing our house before we move my sister volunteered to have it at her house. This was her first time ever doing it and it was a huge success and a wonderful evening. Mr. H and I went over first thing in the morning to help out as much as possible so I volunteered to make breakfast for everyone. Of course I decided that I wanted to make breakfast for all of us the day before so I didn’t have very much planned. Thankfully I hopped on Pinterest and knew I had a few things that I could try. I made a cinnamon roll casserole that was absolutely delicious. There are definitely a few things I’d like to tweak on the recipe the next time I make it but really you can do whatever you like to this and it will still taste fantastic! Mr. H already said that he wants sliced apples on it next time.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons of melted butter or baking spray
• 2 cans (12.4 oz each) Pillsbury® refrigerated cinnamon rolls with icing
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• 2  teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2  teaspoons vanilla
• 1/4 cup maple syrup (I did not measure this out, I just poured some over the rolls)
• Icing from cinnamon rolls

Directions:

• Heat oven to 375°F. Pour melted butter into ungreased 13×9-inch baking pan.
• Separate both cans of dough into 16 rolls; set icing aside. Cut each roll into 8 pieces; place pieces over butter in dish.
• In a medium bowl, beat eggs. Beat in cream, cinnamon and vanilla until well blended; gently pour over roll pieces.
• Bake 20 to 28 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 15 minutes.
• Place icing in microwave 15-30 seconds until warm enough to pour over rolls. (REMEMBER TO TAKE METAL TOPS OFF, I almost forgot)
• Pour icing over rolls, serve & enjoy!

 

I hope you all had a lovely holiday & a happy New Year! Follow me on Pinterest & pick what I make next!

Coffee Filter Wreath

Apparently I am one of the last people in the blogosphere to find out about using coffee filters to make wreaths, but boy am I glad I finally stumbled upon them! I’ve seen all the different kinds of mesh wreaths you can make and I will admit that I am a little frightened when it comes to trying to make those. I wanted to start off small, with something easy & you literally cannot get easier than this project. The finished product of this project is so beautiful you’ll want to make one for everyone on your Christmas list. I followed the directions I found on Recaptured Charm.

 

You’ll need:
200 coffee filters
Foam wreath form
Glue gun & glue
Ribbon
Ornaments/any decorations

Scissors

 

You want to fold the coffee filter in half and then run it through your hands scrunching it up. After that I folded it into threes and created a small triangle on the bottom to place some hot glue on. You want to start placing the filters on the inside of the wreath and work your way around. At first I started placing them very close together & then I eventually got bored and started spacing them out more. Pick a space and stick with it to make your wreath look more uniform (I loved the way it looked packed close together & wish I stuck with this) You don’t need to place coffee filters on the back of the wreath since you want it to lay flat against the door. Once you are done putting all the coffee filters on the wreath you can take scissors and trim the filters since some will be further out than others. Once you are done with that you can add your ornaments and decorations however you want. Lately I have been really into gold, which is strange for me because I usually hate it & we don’t own anything gold, so I decided to go with all gold decorations. Mr. H also insisted we get nutcrackers so of course my nutcracker has gold glitter all over it! Needless to say Mr. H wasn’t very happy with that choice.

 

There are a couple of different ways to hang your wreath, most people suggest putting the ribbon on before you glue on the coffee filters but I wasn’t sure what I was going to use so I waited until I was done. I just took some ribbon I had from Dollar Tree and hot glued it to the back. If you add enough and make sure it dries 100% you shouldn’t have a problem with it falling off (at least I haven’t…..yet). Also sidenote: these cannot go outside! I just hung mine outside to get a good picture because our house has NO natural light, the wreath lives happily cornered on our bar.

 

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday & I am very happy to be back! I can’t wait until my next project. Follow me on Pinterest & pick what I make next!

Pinterest Project – Pallet Garden

The long awaited second Pinterest Project is finally here! Let me tell ya, this one is a doozy. Plus it wasn’t because I’ve been lazy that this took so long to post, this has been a very dragged out project that unfortunately sent Mr. H to the doctors and ended with stitches and x-rays! I have been wanting a garden ever since we moved in here and had a yard, but it’s always been one of those things that we plan on doing & it just never happens. I did all my research and emailed Mr. H and finally a couple weekends ago we set out to make this pallet garden. We already had about 4 pallets in our backyard thanks to having pellets delivered in the winter for heat so that wasn’t an issue. Unfortunately the pallets had seen better days and were very hard to take apart. We used 2 pallets and cut them into 3 pieces each, Mr. H was trying to pry the boards off the pallets when the hammer head shattered and actually shot into his chest. He didn’t think anything of it at the time and just bandaged himself up and continued to work. Fast forward to a couple days later & he can actually feel the hammer piece inside of him. Sure enough the hammer was still inside his chest so they ended up cutting him open to try and take the piece out. Long story short, the hammer piece is still in there and will forever stay. We finally finished the garden last night & I can finally post this amazing garden creation!

You will have 6 pieces of pallet in total after cutting them, nail 2 pieces together to make the front and back of the garden. Using one piece for the ends nail the edges together creating your pallet garden. We also used rope to quarter off each plant, I wanted to start off small and only plant a couple things since I haven’t had much luck in the past with plants. Our garden has been doing amazing, but we have a visitor who apparently decided everything looked very tasty and started digging everything up. I managed to save almost everything and in turn we put this netting around the whole garden along with some lights on the edges & one inside.

I was inspired to make this garden by looking at Crafting Creatures post about their garden, although I didn’t do everything exactly the same & we also just eyeballed everything.

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Pinterest Project – Date Night Jar

Mr. H & I constantly sit in our living room trying to come up with ideas on what to do now that we get to have weekends together. Needless to say we usually end spending all our time THINKING of what to do instead of actually doing anything. There is always plenty of things we talk about doing, but we never actually end up doing them. You know the “oh we should do that sometime” or the “we should try that place out” that never seem to come to be, well I saw a cute project on Pinterest by Life in the Green House that will definitely help us out.

You’ll Need:

• mason jar
• ribbon
• popsicle sticks (I used colored ones, you can get plain ones & paint or spray paint them)
• sharpie
• paper to make tag

I made 52 sticks with all different date ideas that way we would have a date for every weekend of the year, although I must admit I didn’t really think about how we may not be able to do some of the dates during the winter time.

Here are some of the dates I came up with, there are tons of websites dedicated to date ideas  I pulled a lot of my ideas from that:

1. Poker Night (we have a poker table which we’ve used once, so this would be a great way to have fun but for cheap!)
2. Sports event ( we both are huge sports people, I mean hello we grew up in Boston)
3. Homemade pizza & action movie
4. Popcorn & chick flick
5. Car wash (Mr. H details my car for me all the time so I thought it would be nice if we could do it together)
6. Laser tag
7. Bowling
8. Comedy Show
9. Geocaching Adventure (I discovered this while trying to figure out dates & I am so intrigued!)
10. Antiquing/Yardsale

Those are obviously just a few, but as you can see there are dates that both us of want to do & it just never happens. What are some of your date night ideas?!

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