Ooey Gooey Butterscotch? Chocolate Brownies

In my church we have a young women's group that I'm a leader for.  All of us leaders got together for a meeting one day, and the Young Women's President made these delicious chocolate-y peanut butter-y marshmallow-y treats.  I was searching for the recipe for a couple of weeks before I finally broke down and asked her for it.  I should have known it came from Our Best Bites!!  I love that blog and would not at all mind having the cookbook.

The original recipe calls for peanut butter chips, but my friend used crushed up Reese's PB cups--YUMMMMM!  I didn't have PB chips or PB cups, but I did have butterscotch chips and really didn't want to have to run to the store.  The butterscotch chips were okay, I think the PB chips would have been better, but the PB cups are seriously the best idea ever!!  If I make it again I will be making it a point to go out and buy some Reese's.

Chocolate, peanut butter, sweetened condensed milk, and marshmallows...seriously, what is better than that?!?

Update on the Twiggy Vase

A couple of weeks ago I made a "vase" out of twigs.  Now that we're officially in the holiday season I switched out the fake flowers I had in it for these winter-y Christmas-y branches, and I love it. 

I'm still trying to accumulate Christmas decorations and our house seems to be looking a little sparsely decorated, so this is perfect for one of our counters that needed some Holiday cheer.  (And, yes, I did do my Christmas decorating before my dishes...at least one of those sinks in the background is full of clean dishes!)

Cinnamon Roll Pie Crust

I found this pie crust on pinterest and knew I had to use it for an apple pie this year for Thanksgiving!  This was really easy and fun to make!  

I just used a Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, buttered it, and generously sprinkled cinnamon all over it.  I rolled it up, cut it into small, mini-cinni-rolls, and squished them into the pie dish.  I used the ends without much cinnamon to fill in some of the cracks where the dish was showing through.

I forgot to get a picture after the pie came out of the oven (and it didn't last long), but here's the recipe of my mom's that I used, anyway.

Apple Crumb Pie
5-7 apples (5 cups of sliced apples)
1/2 cup sugar
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
2 Tbsp flour
1 9-inch unbaked pie shell

Arrange apples in unbaked shell.  Mix sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and flour and sprinkle over the apples.

Topping
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/3 cup butter

Mix the sugar and flour, cut in the butter, and sprinkle over everything already in the pie.  Tap it down a little, if needed.

Bake for 40 minutes at 400 degrees or until done.  Cool.

This is the easiest pie ever, and the crust made it even better!!  My mom usually uses tapioca instead of flour in the first mixture, and I actually like that a lot better, but I don't know how she does it!!  Next time, gadget.

Turkey Onesie with Felt

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

For the little guy's first Thanksgiving I had to make this cute onesie I saw here.  I think she used puff paint or something, but I just used felt and some googly eyes.

It was a little tricky sewing all the pieces on.  I really wish I had just done an iron-on transfer or something.  It took a little while, and the , but it turned out really cute!  

How to Make Laundry Detergent

A lot of the things I pin are budget-friendly ideas.  Even with my husband in school, we're trying to stay as much out of debt as we can.  He works full time while going to school full time, and I work part time from home while I stay home with the baby.  It's busy, and we don't spend nearly as much time together as we would really like, but we keep telling ourselves it will be worth it when we don't have student loans for years and years.

I found a tutorial on how to make your own laundry detergent and decided I had to try it out.  The detergent supplies cost less than $10, and since you only use 2 tablespoons per load, it is suuuuper cheap!!  All the tutorials I've seen for this say it costs between 5 and 8 cents a load.  To compare, I found that Tide powder detergent is about 17 cents a load and liquid Tide is 20 cents a load.  Since I added the Sun Oxygen Cleaner (not pictured) to mine, it added another few cents a load, but I would be adding that to any detergent I use, so I didn't add it into the price.


First, get the supplies.  For each bar of Fels-Naptha (or other laundry soap), you will need 1 cup Borax, 1 cup Super Washing Soda, and 1/4 cup Baking Soda.

I used Fels-Naptha (which also is great to pre-treat clothes and get out stains of anything--we used this at my house growing up and it works miracles), but I've also seen tutorials using Pink Zote soap and Kirk's Castile.  I've even seen some using plain old Ivory soap, but I think something made for laundry will work better.  For the bar soap I think you can use whatever you like or have at your local store.

I picked all of this up at Wally World (even though my husband is trying to convince me not to go there), and it was relatively cheap.  I'm sure that you could find even better deals if you're a coupon-cutting deal monger, but I don't have patience when it comes to shopping around.  I ended up using a different container that I already had because I wanted something I could scoop out of instead of pour.


Then, you grate the bar of Fels-Naptha (or laundry soap bar of your preference).  When the entire bar is grated, dump the shavings into a food processor and grind it up until it's a coarsely ground powder.

Lastly, you mix everything together, throw it into an airtight container, and find/make a cute label to slap on.

The original "recipe" doesn't mention any kind of oxygen cleaner (like Oxi-Clean or Sun Oxygen Cleaner), but I'm obsessed with it, so I figured out you need about equal parts laundry detergent and Oxi-Clean.  It's easiest to add the Oxi-Clean after you mix everything else up; you can just dump approximately the same amount into your container and shake it up.  This isn't an exact science; I added about 2 cups to the 3-ish cups of detergent I made.  Then use 3 or 4 tablespoons of detergent instead of 2.  

The blog I got this tutorial from had a cute label that I copied into Word (don't worry, she made it available to use) and tweaked just a little.  I've only used it in a few loads so far, but I'm loving it!  It smells nice but isn't too strong (except while you're stirring all the detergent particles into the air) and is so cheap I don't know if I'll ever go back to buying detergent.

Sticky Muffin Buns

I seriously have no idea what to call these.  The Pioneer Woman calls them Monkey Muffins.  You can look at her website for the recipe and lots of pictures that will make you drool so much you'll have to make them before you do anything else.

The great thing about these is that you don't have to mix anything at all!!  You just dump it all in a muffin tin and let it bake.  And you can make as few (or as many) as you want.  These would be easy in ramekins for just one or two people.

Here are a couple of pictures to get you enticed (although Pioneer Woman's look a little better...).

We may have been too excited to eat these that I forgot to take a picture right when they came out of the oven...

The cinnamon and sugar kind of slipped down the sides of mine instead of staying on top...and f.y.i. that is extra sweetened condensed milk in that empty tin (does that look like an egg to anyone else....??).

Even though the tops didn't look perfect, as soon as I popped them out onto a plate they looked absolutely delicious.

They tasted ten times better than they looked.  And they are super easy.  These will definitely be made again (maybe one morning that the family is together this week...??)

Twiggy "Vase"

I've been big into decorating lately....or at least trying.  The house we're living in is kind of overwhelming to me as far as decorating goes.  We've lived here about a year and a half and I haven't really decorated at all because we weren't supposed to be here for very long.  We're still here, and I'm starting to think that I should try to make this a little homier for us.

This little project I've seen a lot on Pinterest.  I saw this first:

picture via the Fossil blog

A super cute candle holder.  I really like this idea because you can see the flames through the twigs, and it seems so perfect for fall.  

Then I saw this one: 

 picture via thewonderforest.com

And I knew I had to make it.  Immediately.  

I used an old cho mein noodles can, covered it in black paper, cut the twigs to size (a little bit random, but all roughly the same height), and hot glued them on.  Easiest, cheapest fall decoration ever.  

I filled it with some rocks I had been using as a filler in a vase (you could easily use rice or beans or something else) and threw in some fake flowers I had.    

I love that you could put whatever you want in these.  I love the look of the one above that is completely full of twigs and fall leaves and a little sunflower.  I'll probably run outside and cut some more twigs to put in mine to fill it up some more.