Girls Weekend!

We had such a fun weekend with all girls here in Portland. It was and extravaganza of shopping, eating really great food and mostly just having fun together! Thanks Mom for making all that happen, you are great! We are all glad we have such a fun mom!

So this is Audrey and I trying on Motorcycle momma jackets. Laura found the cutest hot pink faux leather jacket all of us had ever seen. So Gabe and Maile chipped in for her birthday and bought the jacket for her!

We went and saw Wicked in Portland and it was so fun to go to that all together! The singing and music was outstanding. All of us girls learned some attention getting manuveurs from the main star Galinda, "Toss, Toss!"

Pictures courtesy of Audrey!

Oh Yum! Danish Brunsviger

Danish Caramel Cardamom Cake "Brunsviger"

When I lived in Denmark there was this amazing treat called "Brunsviger" that you can buy in the bakeries. This is a speciality of the island I lived on "Funen." I have thought about this treat several times since living there and wanted to see if I could recreate it. Danes often have this on birthdays or special occasions.

So I found some recipes online and had to do lots of metric conversions and fooling around. I made two batches, the first one was pretty good but wasn't quite like I remember then I did a second batch and changed some of the amount of ingredients and it was much better. So here is the yummy treat recipe.

For the dough:

½ cup milk, lukewarm
1 ½ Tbs yeast

1 tbsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

1 egg

2 cups flour

4 Tbs melted butter
1 ½ tsp cardamom- this is good but you don’t have to have it

For the topping:

2/3 cup butter-

1 cup brown sugar-use dark brown sugar, it tastes better

Preheat oven to 400.

* Dissolve the yeast in the milk. Add egg, sugar, salt, cardamom and flour, holding back a couple spoonfuls of the flour - beat well. Add the melted butter, beat again. Add more flour as necessary, kneading until you have a glossy, slightly sticky dough, sorta like the dough for cinnamon rolls. I did this in my Bosch, but it can of course be done by hand. Transfer the dough to a clean bowl and leave to rise for 1-1½ hours

*Grease your 9 X13 pan with butter. Deflate the dough and push it into the brownie pan - make sure you cover the entire pan - it will rise again, Leave to rise again, ½-1 hour.

* Make the topping: in a small saucepan melt the butter with the sugar. Let it come to the boil, then take off the heat. Dimple the now risen dough, so you'll have lots of holes to be filled with sugar. Pour the sugar-butter mixture over the dimpled dough and put everything in the oven.

*Bake for 15-20 minutes- Let is cool for 10 minutes- I didn’t and I burned my tongue on the flaming hot sugar.

Tagged and V-Day!

Tagged 4th of 4th! This is actually perfect because this was valentines day almost 2 years ago. It shows mostly how Mark and I are, pretty goofy.

I make a heart sugar cookie for him each year, with something pretty cheesy like "my hunk" on it! So this year I am looking for some ideas for the V-day cookie! Any suggestions?!?

Oh I tag Laura Morgan, Amanda, Andrea, and Laura Wheeler!

New Job

Mark got a new job today and we are so happy. This is an answer to a lot of prayers, our prayers and so many others. Mark has a very very tough commute of literally 2 blocks from our house to his new work. He will be be building new modular classrooms. We are so blessed to get this job, especially with the state of the economy and it gets him away from a difficult job he is currently in. We are so thankful for this change and know Heavenly Father's hand helped to make this happen. Can't wait for Feb 9th, his start date!

My Mom the Snow Angel

I love this picture! My Dad emailed it to us this weekend and I had to post it. It is my mom laying on the trampoline in the back yard in all her snow gid-up doing snow angels. They have tons and tons of snow as you can see. The snow is almost as tall as the trampoline.
Life is good for a Montana Mom!