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