Speaking of Heaven...

I finally managed to upload the pictures from our trip up to Vermont and I'd say that these reflect a little slice of heaven too. 

While we were there, we went up to visit my brother's new digs in Burlington. It was pretty amazing up there... We went to some delicious restaurants and hung out in downtown Burlington, we also did the Ben and Jerry's factory tour (yummm!), beer tastings at Rock Art Brewery, visited the Lake Champlain Chocolates factory (although we were 20 minutes too late for the tour), and just generally had a good time as a family!

Check out the scenes from Burlington...

Lake Champlain at sunset

Mitchell works right off the lake, so he sees this every day.
Officially jealous.

He can also walk here from his apartment,
so he can get here pretty easy.

Mitchell's work home (kind of)

Ben and Jerry's Factory
Flavor Graveyard!

Glad none of my favorite flavors have a headstone here yet!

A Little Slice of Heaven

My parents are currently ensconced on a balcony at 5,000 feet altitude somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains... or as my mom called it,  "heaven."

Check out the views.

Are you jealous? Because I am!

A Little Meal Time Humor For Your Tuesday Afternoon

{via}

I was going through my old emails today and I found this little gem from my amazingly articulate father... Enjoy!

Dearest Melissa,

It has come to my attention that I have not the slightest idea what you would desire to tempt your pallet while you dine at our humble table.

Only you can remedy this fearful dilemma. The cats have made some suggestions but I've tried to explain that you have never gotten into a diet of fresh insects, rubber-bands, and other assorted things they find delectable.

Please help solve this towering imbalance in the universe.

With humble anticipation,

The Bearded feeder of the flock (do cats come in flocks?)

An Evening in the Battlefields

Last weekend my brother graduated (yes, that's right graduated!) from Gettysburg. The evening before, my cousin and I took a drive through the battlefields for a little sunset tour. It was beautiful.

Here are just a few of the sunset/battlefieldscapes I took... 

I realize that many of you can't handle as many semi-repetitive versions of a sunset as I can, so to spare you, I've put the rest of the pictures after the break...

p.s. if you click on the pictures, they get bigger and you can see the sunsets in all their beautiful glory.

So. Much. Driving.

Well I'm officially calling my vacation season to an end. Bummer! Throughout the month of December (and start of January) I basically traveled the whole length of the east coast 1.5 times, put nearly 3,000 miles on my car, and saw a whole lot of friends and family.

Here are some of the highlights from the super southern leg of my journey...

Magic Kingdom in the morning... so pretty 

Pretty at night too...

Sea World!

Shamu show!

Getting ready to drive a race car in
the Richard Petty Driving Experience!

My new favorite "family photo"

Apparently I got tired of taking pictures because I basically have none from Christmas/New Years in Vermont, and really have none from my secret santa party in PA. That realization makes me very sad.

A White Christmas!

Sherman Christmas at the Welshes

Getting ready to hand out drinks for
our homemade holiday drink contest 

Homemade Kauhla with milk,
Lemony-Gin Fizz,
Chocolate-Peppermint Martini,
and Welsh Christmas Drink (aka a Scarlett O'Hara)

When I finally got back to Arlington (almost for good)
I was treated to the snow storm we never got in Vermont.
Pretty!

Here's to an exciting 2012!

Birthday Cake Art

My cousin Megan and I made this amazing cake for my brother's birthday last Saturday.

We tossed around the idea of making him a gun (he has a lot of those), but didn't like it. In the past we've made him a racoon (when he shot one in my aunt's backyard) and a deer (he's shot one of those too).

And then, my aunt suggested we make him a kayak cake... and a genius idea was born.

We decided to create a kayaking scene!

Megan molded the kayak using orange starbursts
(I thought Mitchell's was orange, but apparently it's actually red... whoops)

We thought it would be funny if we depicted Mitchell crashing...
He loved it.

We used balloon candles as the paddle... it broke in the crash
and the arm (which belonged to a Bratz doll my aunt had lying around)
represents Mitchell struggling to grab one half of his paddle.

The rocks are made out of chocolate raisonetts and donut holes.
The trees are icing-, sprinkle-, and dyed-green noodle- covered ice cream cones.
We also used Swedish fish 'cause we thought they were cool.
The cake itself is funfetti cake (best. ever.) with rainbow chip icing.
We used a spray to "paint" the icing blue and green

A side note: The Bratz doll that I cut the arm off of is now a resident of my apartment because my aunt refused to let me leave it at her house... she thinks it's going to haunt me and has advised me to dispose of it some where far far away from anywhere that I am.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree

On Saturday, my family (mom, dad, brother, grandparents, cousins, cousin-in-law, aunt, and uncle) and I drove down to this cool cut-your-own-Christmas tree farm and picked out our Christmas tree! Well actually Christmas trees plural... we left with three.

We picked out my grandparents' tree first... it was pretty tall 

So after they cut it down, they cut off the bottom.
Apparently they didn't cut off enough though,
because it was still too tall to stand up in the garage... 

Then we picked out the McDonald tree

My cousin Megan was concerned that it was too skinny...

We had to cut that one down to size too...
Pretty (and unintentional) sunburst in the picture!

Then my super clever family decided that the best way to get the trees out of the woods was to put them on a tarp and drag them with down with the car... so Peter devised a "trapezoid" with bungee cords to do the job

And of course, they took about 100 years to attach the trees to our cars.
Megan and Nate's tree (never pictured here) was the best, because it fit in the back of the car! 

Homemade Caramel Apples

This weekend my mom and I made super yummy caramel apples.

FROM SCRATCH!

I've recently re-discovered the amazingness that is a caramel apple and have fallen to temptation and picked one up every time I've gone to Safeway in the past month (it's only been 3 times... so I'm not too fat yet). So when mom decided to make some while I was home over the weekend, I was pumped.

I found this super cool way to make caramel by cooking a can of sweetened condensed milk on low for 8-10 hours in a slow cooker on Pinterest (my new favorite site). We decided to try this approach because it was less work than the sugar, lemon, cream, and butter recipe that she had found on Fine Cooking.

And frankly, we sort of didn't believe that it would actually work, so we had to try it out!

Before doing anything else (aside from cooking the caramel) we washed and dried the apples. Then we jammed popsicle sticks into the tops of the apples.

We actually ended up cooking our can for about 10 hours (dinner and Beauty and the Beast on ABC Family got in the way of our apple plans) and personally I think that was a little too long... whoops.

I think it would have been a bit more liquidy and a little less brown if we had taken it out sooner...

The caramel was a little stiff, so we decided to heat it in a sauce pan to liquify it a bit... I'm not sure that that worked, but the pan was more convenient for apple rolling.

 

What I didn't photograph was the rolling process, we just dipped the apple into the caramel in the pan and rolled it around until the apple was covered. Then because the caramel was super thick, we took a butter knife and used it to spread out and remove the excess caramel.

Then, I covered a few of them with SPRINKLES! I used the yummy waxy kind because they are the softest.

Don't they look delicious!