Chocolate Gooey Butter Cookies – Thank You, Pinterest!

And thank you, Paula Deen, since she is the creator of this recipe.

So, I said I was going to make homemade ketchup. That was until I realized you needed a blender for the task. We have a blender, but I’m not in the mood to take it down from the top of the refrigerator, dust it off, use it, and clean it, so I decided to be unhealthy and make cookies instead.

I dug into my Sweets board and found the pin for Chocolate Gooey Butter Cookies. I followed the recipe pretty much exactly except I didn’t add the powdered sugar since I knew Nick would be eating the cookies and that would just be really messy. You have to buy Pillsbury cake mix because that’s the only brand (as far as mainstream brands go) that is the right size box (who knew…I always thought they were all the same). They are super simple to make. These are honestly the best cookies ever! They are soft and chewy. They taste like cake batter! Oh…so…good!!!

Nick didn’t even know I was baking cookies, but he ran into the kitchen and yelled, “Cookies!” He could smell their awesomeness from the bedroom.

You can’t eat just one!

Canvas Wall Hanging Football – Another Pinterest Project

I am seriously wanting fall to get here. I’m ready for sweaters, hot chocolate, the holidays, and yes, even football. Even though we live in Missouri, we are a house of Cowboys fans. Bryan is from Texas, so he grew up loving the Cowboys. I never had a favorite team (the Chiefs colors are not pretty and the Rams can’t win to save their lives), but I always liked the Cowboys colors and thought Troy Aikman was pretty cute, so once Bryan and I were married I was ok with decorating using a little Cowboys spirit and indoctrinating Nicholas with the blue, white, and silver stars of Texas.

I found this pin on Pinterest and thought that it looked easy enough, so I gave it a try.

The writer of the blog makes it look a bit easier than it actually is in her post. The materials were cheap and easy enough to find. We got everything for under $30 (I bought about $5 more fabric than I needed and some really nice ribbon, so you could probably get by with doing it cheaper if you already had some of the tools at home). I bought:

– 1 yard of dark brown canvas
– blue, white, and silver paint (for the Cowboys colors…but I ended up not even using the silver)
– silver puff paint
– paintbrushes
– a piece of cheap posterboard for the stencil
– 2 rolls of ribbon

Other necessary tools that you already have at home include:

– stapler
– scissors
– pencil (or chalk as was used in the linked post)
– plastic bags

The concept of the door hanger is pretty simple. You draw what you want on the posterboard. Cut the material to match (two pieces, back and front). Then you paint on the decorations (more detail is in her post), staple the ribbon to the back side, staple the two sides together part way, stuff it with plastic bags, staple the rest, cover the staples with puff paint (not one of her steps, but I hate if the staples show…this thing looks cheap enough), and then make the bow look pretty.

However, getting the designs painted on the front to not look like a child did it is not easy. I’m not an artist. I’m crafty. There’s a big difference.

In the end, mine turned out like this:

“Good enough!” I say.

If I were to do it again, I’d buy more puff paint and less acrylic because it’s easier to control. I’d just use puff paint for the whole darn thing. I was also lazy and didn’t stencil the COWBOYS logo, I freehanded it…4 times. What you can’t see is the inside and the back has a half COWB where I realized that I was over too far or not enough to actually get the YS or the S on there. I don’t know if it was the beer I was drinking or the fact that it was 10PM when I was trying to paint the darn thing, but that part was a bitch.

In the end, I’m happy with it and had fun being crafty for a bit.

This weekend’s Pinterest project: Homemade Ketchup with agave nectar. Look forward to the post on that one, folks!