Friends and Food

With Halloween coming up I wanted to do something festive with my friends, but it was a little difficult with our limited resources here at college and in dorms. Initially I wanted to organize a trip to a nearby pumpkin patch (this was dependent upon my two friends with cars wanting to attend), but with the only pumpkin patches being pretty far outside the city and finding a day that everyone had free, we quickly realized that was more hassle than it was worth. I then thought of caramel apples, which ended up being perfect! We have a bus that runs on Saturdays from campus to the grocery store, so I went and bought apples, caramel wraps, and other toppings. About ten of my friends and I gathered in our dorm kitchen and baked away. It was a great experience that yielded some delicious treats!


We had a sort of assembly line going with the various toppings. We had Nutella and peanut butter, both melted to make them a little runnier; M&Ms; mini chocolate chips; and crushed Hershey's Symphony Bar (it's a chocolate almond toffee bar; I wanted a Heath Bar but found this instead. It might be my new favorite chocolate).

We found that the caramel didn't get quite as sticky as was necessary for keeping the candies in place, so we all had to put on Nutella or peanut butter if we wanted extra toppings, but that wasn't a bad thing :)

Mine was a combination of everything, and it was delicious. It was so sweet I had to have a friend eat part of it because I couldn't finish it.

They were so easy to make, even in the dorm, and they were really fun, also! They are a great idea to make with limited resources, and they are a great way to get friends or family together, too!

Pinterest addiction

I took a little inspiration from Pinterest lately and decided to try doing something creative with my nails. I wanted them to be fall-like, so I decided to try an ombre effect with an orange nail polish and a brown glitter one.

First I painted my nails with two coats of the orange and let them sit for a day to ensure they were fully dry. Then I took a cosmetic sponge and painted on a strip of the glitter and a strip of the orange and dabbed this on my nail with the glitter on the end. At first I mostly just got a solid line because I just set the sponge on my nail and just put pressure on it repeatedly. This didn't make the sponge move at all, though, so no blending occurred. Then I discovered that the key is to be fully holding the sponge and just kind of blot your nail with it haphazardly, making sure that the sponge moves around on your nail. That's what blurs the straight line and gives you the ombre effect.

The glitter polish mostly just put the glitter on my nails while the brown was absorbed by the sponge. That might be a problem for trying this with two solid colors, but I actually really like how it worked for this look. While they're not perfect (as I mentioned I kind of learned along the way) I a quite pleased with how my nails turned out!

Curiosity

Something in the air

My favorite time of year is upon us: fall. As much as I love spring, it just can't compete with the crisp air and colorful leaves of autumn. Although Houston doesn't exactly experience these in full effect (the air is still humid and has no fall smell whatsoever, and only a few leaves have begun to change), there is something about knowing it is fall that is extremely comforting. There's a coziness about fall, the desire to put on sweaters and scarves and boots and sip a cup of warm tea. It makes me want to make applesauce and bake sweets. There is also a pretty significant secret to life that comes with autumn. It is a season that marks the coming of death, or even death itself, with the leaves slowly drying and falling from trees. But in this death is beauty. Looking down a tree-lined street in fall is a breathtaking sight, like looking through a kaleidoscope of reds, greens, yellows, oranges. If nature knows how to do anything, it's to go out with a bang. There simply is nothing like the hued foliage of autumn that comes as we say goodbye to the leaves of this year as they make room for the leaves of next. As Albert Camus put it, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." The leaves' death is almost a rebirth of sorts, a last hurrah. They receive new beauty as they die away. There is also a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that expresses the magnificence of the diverse world we live in, which I can't help but think of whenever I look at the widely ranging colors of fall leaves.

Pied Beauty 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.