For the Kentucky Derby, you need Mint Juleps, right? Well for the Derby, or any time, this is a fabulous ice cream recipe for those Summer (or almost summer) days…

This gelato was inspired by our neighbors, Sara & Paul, and their wonderful mint juleps that they make for the Derby.  Their recipe is a little nontraditional, as it calls for lemon, but I like their version even better than then typical Mint Julep drink.

Gelato is healthier than ice cream because it has less fat in it, and it’s texture is just wonderful.  And while I don’t have a real gelato maker, I fake it by using my Kitchen Aid’s ice cream freezer attachment, and using the lowest speed.   (And if you like this, check out my Southern Iced Tea ice cream over on Foodwhirl, it uses a similar process.)

The instructions below take three days, but you can cheat and start today on this, to  have it ready for tomorrow.  Just skip to Day 2, and add your lemon/mint after you add your milk.

Ingredients

• 2 cups milk (I used 2%)
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/2 cup sugar
• ~3/4 c mint sprigs, loosely packed
• 1 to 2 oz bourbon
• 1 teas vanilla extract
• zest of 1 lemon

Method

I took many of these instructions from the Ice Tea Gelato recipe, so refer to that more instructions, and more photos of the actual freezing process.

Day 1: Infuse the milk with mint & lemon zest

(Photos 1, 2, 3) Zest 1 lemon. Crush your mint leaves in your hands to release the flavors, and place all  in large glass jar with 2 cups milk.  Let sit overnight.

If you’re using an ice cream maker that requires freezing the bowl (like my Kitchen Aid) don’t forget to freeze your bowl.

Day 2: Make  your custard:

(4) Strain milk to remove mint /lemon (put the lemon/mint back in the jar and stick it in the fridge for later use).

(6) Combine egg yolks and sugar in a bowl and beat thoroughly with a whisk until lightened in color and smooth.

Heat milk and cream on stovetop until bubbles are just forming around the of your pot.  (7) Slowly add the hot milk mixture, a little bit at a time, continuing to stir.  When the all the milk has been added and the mixture is combined, return to the pot.  Cook over medium heat until mixture reaches 160 degrees, or had thickened enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon – note, for this recipe, mine never gets that thick, so don’t worry too much about it.

(8) Remove from heat, and place custard in an ice bath to chill.

(9) Return the mint and lemon to the mixture, and add your vanilla and bourbon.  Refrigerate overnight.

Day 3:  Make Gelato!

Strain your custard, and place in your ice cream maker (assuming your don’t actually own a gelato maker, of course).  Use the lowest speed possible–gelato ideally should be made at a lower speed, incorporating less air than icecream, to achieve it’s texture.   Freeze until a soft serve consistency is reached. (similar photos here.)

Either serve immediately soft-serve  if you like, or freeze for several hours to a more solid consistency.

(10) Garnish with a sprig of mint, and offer your guests a little extra bourbon for the top if they so desire!

Published on: May 4, 2012

My FedEx Out of Office blog post is up for March, and I almost forgot to share it with you guys before St. Patrick’s Day!   This is a fun printable (with Dot artwork, naturally!) that your kids can fold up and have fun sharing with their friends.

You remember these from grade school, right?  You would make them out of a piece of notebook paper, then play with them telling fortunes until they were confiscated by a mean teacher!  We always just called them fortune tellers, but according to the internet, they are also known as Cootie Catchers.

I’ve got the printable and the instructions on how to fold it up, if you’re a little rusty, over at FedEx Out of Office.

EDIT: Apparently the FedEx blog is kaput, so here are the instructions! 

Here is the Cake.  I decided that I would go relatively simple — a fondant covered floating island… with Candy Clay Chompies.

We have a GREAT sunroom. It’s got a huge vaulted ceiling and french doors on both sides and lots of windows. But, we also have a computer at a desk in the corner, and the light from the windows can cause a glare on the screen. Hence the need to occasionally cover up these gorgeous windows with some sort of curtain. And curtains or shaded on french doors are really a pain in the butt to me. They either get in the way, or they are clunky and unattractive, so I had avoided doing anything about the glaring window til forced to by nagging husband and kiddo.

So, I wanted a solution that would be easy to make, easy to remove, and look nice while it was up there. So what’s the secret? Well, note the 5 lovely buttonholes at the top of each panel. Does that give you any hints? It’s a shower curtain! We found a pretty black cotton waffle weave shower curtain at Target for less than $20.  And it’s held up by buttoning the button holes onto pushpins stuck in the door.  I used clear ones, but you could also do this with some really fun and funky push pins.

Materials:

• 10 clear (or interesting) push pins.
• 1 standard size shower curtain of a nice material, like cotton, with 10 holes at the top. [I originally wanted one with grommets at the top, but didn’t find one, and I think the button holes by themselves work fine.]
• Sewing machine (or a needle and thread and a bit more time and patience than I possess.) Pins, Scissors, matching thread.

How to do the transformation:

1. Cut the shower curtain in half down the middle.
2. Starting with the Left half:  Measure the distance from the left seam to the first button hole.  Fold your right seam and pin all the way down, the same distance from the 5th (last) buttonhole.
3. Noting the size of the hem on the left side, stitch down the right hand side with a similar size hem.
4. Trim the excess fabric.
5. Repeat with the right half.
6. Hold up your curtain to the door and determine where you want it to hang, and mark each button hole.
7. Stick pushpins where you marked, then just slide the buttonholes onto the pushpins!
8. Easy peasy mac and cheesy, you are done. The curtains can be folded back on themselves to let in light, or removed altogether, easily.

There are some really cool shower curtain patterns and fabrics out there, so you can really get creative with this project.  Just make sure you pick one that has 10 evenly spaced holes, meant for inserting the shower curtain rings.

That’s all there is to it…  hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and it inspires you to make something cool !  There are some more sewing type projects in the Related Posts box below, so if you like this, go check them out too…

cheers,

dot

This is a fun project if you’d like an inexpensive way to make your own “canvas print”, and you like a retro, old fashioned feel.  It makes a great gift, too (like the one used in the tutorial, a great wedding momento!)

I did this for my December post on FedEx’s Out of Office blog.  It is easy to do, but be warned it is a bit time consuming when you get to the final step of removing the paper from the canvas, so I wouldn’t go any larger than 8×10″ for this project.

The photo for this project is by the fabulous Sarah Howell, of Kimball Bates Photography (recently relocated to North Carolina, for my readers up there–I highly recommend her!)

Tutorial Summary: Retro Canvas Print

Basically, you just need an inexpensive canvas, acrylic gel medium, and a image you want to use.  For the image you’ll need it slightly larger or the same size as your canvas.  Use an image editing program to reverse the image (so you have a mirror image) and to size your image appropriately.  Then you can have it color laser printed or get a color photocopy.

You’re going to adhere the image to the canvas (face side down) using the gel medium.  When it is dry, you’ll remove the paper from the canvas, leaving just the color.  You’d definitely have areas where the color doesn’t stay, hence the weathered, retro look.  You can then cover the whole thing with gel medium for a finished look.

Full Instructions, with photos (and Lessons learned)

I’ve got all the step by step instructions up at the FedEx Out of Office blog: Retro Photo Canvas Tutorial.

Also, a few lessons learned, based on trying this a few times:

• Like I mentioned, smaller is better due to the time consuming nature of the final steps.  It can take multiple (like 6!) times of rubbing the paper off the canvas.   Let it thoroughly dry after you think you have it all removed, then you’ll see more paper fibres.  Keep rubbing!
• Try a small test piece first.
• Experiment! You might find that it’s better to let the paper NOT dry all the way, and then just try peeling the paper off.  When I’ve done similar projects before (but with B&W photocopies) I’ve found that it was much easier, and worked just as well.  But with color I think it’s better to wait til it’s bone dry, which means much more work getting all the paper off.  But, it’s worth a try to attempt some experiments and see what works best for you.
• Related to that, here’s the technique I’ve used where you don’t let the paper dry all the way: Wooden Photo Ornaments

It’s a little simpler too, if you’re just starting with your photoshop skills, it’s a great one to start with.  The principle is the same, take old vintage photos and in this case, combine two to make one creepy photo which contains a ghost!

Head over to Fed Ex Office blog to see all the details on how to make them yourself, or if you don’t have time or inclination to make them yourself, you can download the sample printable photos!

Update: Related technique and more downloads: Ghost Portraits!

Did you know Great Aunt Gertrude was a zombie?  Or Ancient Uncle Elrod was a tad undead?  Unfortunately for my Halloween décor, I don’t really have ghouls in the family.  But we can fake it with a little photo manipulation.

These creepy portraits will look great hung on a wall, or in small frames on your serving table, at any scary Halloween party.  You can either design your own, using the instructions provided here, or you can download the set provided here.  Then just have them printed in whatever size to fit your frames, at your local print shop on on your home computer.

How to make your own creepy vintage photos

Supplies:

• Photo-editing program.  These instructions assume you are working in Photoshop.
• Vintage photo image files.  Portraits work best, and the larger the better if you want to print big versions for your walls.  You can scan photos of your own relatives, or you can find public domain photos online. [You can find photos from public archives like the Library of Congress with no copyright restrictions here.]
• Skulls:  You’ll need a transparent photographed skull image. The simplest way to get the skull you need is to use a skull themed Photoshop brush set, of which several can be found online for free.

Method:

This is how to add a creepy skull effect to your photo.  There are of course many other possible spooky details you can add.  More detailed instructions can be found below the photos.

1. Open your photo file.
2. Create a new layer, and determine what skull size and shape will best fit your portrait’s head.  Place skull in new layer.  It should have enough transparency to see through it to the portrait layer.  If not, you may need to increase the transparency of the skull layer.
3. Line up the skull with the portrait head as well as you can.  Resize and move as necessary to get the mouth and eyes of the skull lined up with your portrait.
4. Next, fit the skull to the face.  Select the skull.  Under the Transform menu, use Warp.  Drag the dots around to fit the skull to the angle of the face.  In this example, I dragged the right jawline of the skull out to better match the portrait jawline, and pulled in the left side of the skull.  I also moved the nose to match up with the portrait nose.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need the eyes, mouth, nose and jaw to match up as well as possible for best effect.  Don’t worry about the outline of the skull, we’ll be erasing that in the next step.
5. Finally, erase the outside of the skull.  Use your eraser (a soft feathered brush) to erase anywhere the skull exceeds the face (like on the left side in this example) and pretty much all the edges of the skull image, leaving the features intact.  You can also erase any shading that doesn’t fit with the photo.

Once you have your final files, just take them to your local FedEx Office and have them color printed in whatever size you need to fit your décor.

Download the Files

Want the look, without the work?  Click here to download a zip file of the images featured in this post, plus a few extras.

The curse of Halloween food blogging is that many of my Halloween delicacies, made up for the Halloween party, are done at the last minute.  So I can’t write them up very well before Halloween, and it seems silly to post the recipes AFTER Halloween.  So I was noticing that some of my really cool Halloween treats are relegated to quick photo posts, rather than giving them the treatment they deserve.  To fix that, here is the ‘how-to’ on my world famous Mozzarella Eyeballs, classy enough for the fanciest Halloween dinner party!

Recipe/Technique: How to make Marinated Mozzarella Eyeballs

Supplies:

• Big firm olives (black & green).  Try the olive bar at your local grocery, or you can go for the canned stuff.  The olives need to be firm, not squishy.  Jarred black olives work perfected fine for the pupil.
• A large diameter drinking straw (I find McDonalds straws to be the perfect size) .
• Marinated mini mozzarella balls.  I get mine at Trader Joe’s.
• Optional: jarred red pepper slices.

My original version of this just used sliced pimento stuffed green olives, but then I saw the Evil Mad Scientists and their Eyeball Caprese, and adapted that technique to my appetizer.  You basically use the olives to make your nice rounded iris and pupil.  For the most rounded, slice of the end of a green olive, then use your straw to punch a hole in the center.  Then slide of a piece of black olive, and use the straw to punch out a plug of black.  Then place the black piece in the hole of your green olive.  If it does stay level with the green, you can use a little cream cheese stuffed in the open end of the olive to hold the black in place.  You can also do slices off the side of the green olive, but be aware they will be slightly oblong.  you can see I did a little of both for mine in the photo.

So my 7 yr old came home the other day from camp and was like “Mom, we’ve got to go do this experiment, it’s so cool!”

And it WAS pretty darn cool, so I thought I’d share it with you guys!

These are his instructions, and he did the experiment and showed it to me:

You’ll need 3 jars.  Fill the first one 1/2 full with water (room temperature), second one 1/2 full with oil, and the third 1/4 full with water and 1/4 full with oil.

Then take food coloring, and put a few drops in the first jar, and stir.  See how the water mixes with the food coloring and now the water is all blue?

Then put a few drops in the second jar.  Stir it up as much as you can, and the oil and water still don’t mix!

Now for the REALLY cool one.  Put a few drops in your half and half jar–which will now have separated back out so that the oil sits on top of the water.  You’ll see that the food coloring is caught in the oil, and sits at the bottom of the oil, on top of the water.  Now watch and wait.   It may take a few minutes, but as you watch each droplet of the foodcoloring will “explode” like fireworks into the water!

Pretty cool, huh? Looks like my nail polish from this weekend!

Afterwards, we shook it all up and watched what happened. (We took bets on whether the oil would be blue when it separated back out.)
Now I just need ideas on what to do with a jars of oil and blue water… any ideas?? :)