My Overthinking

Philly Area mom, Life forever changed by adoption

Donut (and Ice Cream) Day

Fat Tuesday. Fausnaught Day.

The last day to eat richer, fatty foods before Lent starts.

Or, for our family, a day to make homemade, deep fried donuts that we totally binge on and take to whoever is fortunate enough to be seeing us that day.

Not sure which generation way back when stopped practicing Lent. But, Fat Tuesday got passed on down.  (Of course it did. These things are amazing.)

Growing up, my mom would make about 4 batches throughout the day. Visitors would drop by all day to pick up some fresh fausnaughts. And, the three of us girls would take those babies to school and practices that day. 
Shamefully, my parents went through Dunkin Donuts’ drive thru this year. They didn’t even give the day respect enough to sit down in there to eat their mass produced donut. 
But, this mom? I was up at the crack of dawn, making donuts. And, of the 3 1/2 dozen or so I made, maybe 2 dozen actually made it to Bible Study (and none made it back home). 
Evan alone had 8. 

And, since school was closed for an in-service day, I rewarded them for being so good during CBS by taking them out to lunch.

for ice cream sundaes. 
Fat Tuesday may now be called Fun Mom Day in the Raudenbush house.
Or, Seriously Insane Mom Day.

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A Chinese New Year Cake

Last week, I volunteered to bring some sort of food to Ashlyn’s Chinese school New Year Gala today. What to bring, what to bring?

I found a winner. Easy peezy. I think the word she used was “foolproof.”

If you want to give it a try yourself and wow your kids, Chinese friends, or simply yourself (I’m thinking I have been my biggest admirer on this one), here’s how to do it:

Find a dragon head online to use. My inspiration used this one. I preferred something a little more elaborate and Chinese looking. So, I used this picture I found online that was a bulletin board decoration a teacher made for Chinese New Year.

Gather ingredients. I may be slightly over ambitious to try this thing. But, I’m not insane. Cake mixes are just fine. And, I used two to make my dragon about 26″ long. My inspiration used M&Ms to cover her cake with scales. But, when I went over to the single color bulk M&Ms and realized I would need to spend over $30 on M&Ms alone, I quickly decided that icing with nonpareil sprinkles and gummy orange slices for spikes would be just fine. I did “splurge” on an impulse buy of rock candy on a stick for his horns for $.99 each. And, I spent a whole $.33 on bright colored gummy tulips to use for feet.

Find some sort of board to use to put this baby on (unless you happen to have a platter several feet long). My board was 1’x3′. I wrapped it nice and tight with a red plastic table cover from the dollar store.

“Foolproof” didn’t start out real well when my first attempt at my bundt cake turned out like this.

Here’s my formal thanks to all my Facebook friends who talked me off the ledge and coached me through how to butter and flour a bundt cake pan. I happened to have another mix in the pantry. So, back to work. And, the next two turned out just perfect.

After your cakes are fully cooled, cut them in half and set them up on the board in S shapes.

Mix up your icing to be whatever color you want. For two canisters of icing, I used a whole container of yellow food coloring with a couple drops of red to make an orange color. Then, start icing the thing. I intentionally made the icing “rough” to look textured. And, I used the icing to glue the cake pieces together a little when I got to the seams.

As you finish up icing a half cake, sprinkle the nonpareils or sprinkles if you are going to use any (I used them only behind the head and around the tail) and go ahead and start to set up your spikes since the icing will harden if you wait to the end and make it hard to get those things to stick. When I was buying these in bulk, I had no idea how many we would need, so I bought 3 lbs of these at $1.50 a lb. Turns out, we only needed 28 total and I have about 3 times that left. Orange slices, anyone?

You can see here that cute little foot gummy we used too. We added those last but I wanted to show you the spikes.

Use Twinkies or some other Twinkie-like cake (I used butterscotch crumpets with the icing removed since my store was out of Twinkies…how does that happen?) to form a tail. Mark masterfully cut down the end of the cake and shaped the tail for me like a surgeon. And, after generously icing the tail, I used three orange slices sort of fanned out to make the tail look like a dragon tail and not just a snake tail or something.

When you are all done icing and spiking it, attach your paper head by putting some icing on the front of the cake to use as glue and then just stick it right on there. I had laminated the dragon head at an office supply store but ended up printing out a new one on card stock and using that instead since the laminated one wouldn’t flex enough to work.
For the horns, I had Mark cut off the balls at the end of the rock candy sticks and then stuck them in the first cake on an angle behind the head. 
For the feet, I used a little bit of icing and stuck the gummy tulips opposite each other along the body. I realize that most dragons only have 4 feet. But, we used 8 for fun.
I really got creative then with the streamers and whiskers using Fruit by the Foot. I used one full fruit by the foot in some tie-dyed flavor cut in half for the streamers. Using icing as glue, I sort of ruffled it starting behind the head and looping it around. For the whiskers, I used kitchen shears to cut the fruit by the foot to be thin using the lines on the snack itself and then looped it around behind the head to mimic the whiskers from the picture itself.

Done.

I guess it was sort of foolproof once I got the cake out of the pan.

Now, wake your husband who went to bed a few steps ago and Skype your mom and dad at close to midnight and make them oooo and ahhh at your creation.

Now, I just have to get this thing in the car and to the gala. Lord help me.

During breakfast, Mark suggested you could make individual servings of something similar using bagels or frosted donuts. He’s a genius.

Now, off to make some of our own hóngbāo to give the kids later. No money in ours though. I’m going to handwrite some blessings for them and use that instead.

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The Story of 3 Gifts – How We Do Christmas

$450 billion. Americans spend about $450 billion on Christmas each year.

Way back when we started our family, we didn’t know this number. But, we knew we wanted to “do gifts” a bit differently for our family.

We decided we wanted gifts to mean something.

When we were pregnant with our first child who is now almost 10 (gasp!), we decided we’d use gift giving as a teachable moment for our children.

And, so, we give them 3 gifts. That’s it. 3 gifts. From us. Not from Santa. From Mom and Dad.

These three gifts symbolize those of the wise men. And, each year, before we open gifts, we read the story and remind the children about the wise men and the gifts they brought to baby Jesus, the incarnate God.

The wise men brought Jesus myrrh. 
Myrrh was a valuable gift of practical use–it was used medicinally for all sorts of ailments from coughs to open wounds. It was a good gift to bring a mother of a new baby. And, in addition to daily use, it was used for embalming and anointing the dead. And, so, it was a prophetic gift, already setting up the Gospel story from the beginning. God’s son would have to die.

Our children’s first gift is a practical gift, something they need and can use daily–a piece of clothing, some sheets for their bed, something like that.

The wise men brought Jesus frankincense.
Frankincense is the purest form of incense and was primarily used in worship. When burned, the white smoke and sweet smell it produces is a symbol of our prayers going up to heaven and creates a meaningful experience for everyone present. It’s a symbolic gift, pointing to Jesus fully being God, Emmanuel, God with us, the only one worthy of our worship.

Our children’s second gift, likewise, is an experiential gift, something not tangible but something meaningful to us as a family–tickets to a theater show, a coupon for a night out with Daddy for ice cream sundaes, a night out at the ball park, something like that.

The wise men brought Jesus gold.
Gold was as valuable then as it is now. It was a precious gift, one that some say financed the family’s trip to Egypt. But, it was also a very symbolic gift in that gold was given to princes when they were born. And, that is what Jesus is–royalty, a King in the line of David, King of the world, King of our hearts. When we become a follower of Jesus, we are adopted into God’s family and we too become princes and princesses, heirs to the throne. We don’t deserve it; no matter how good we are, we won’t ever be good enough to deserve it. But, because of Jesus, God sees us like He sees His own Son. And, we become like Him.

Our children’s third and last gift is a gold gift, something they really really want. Sometimes these gifts are a little more costly–like a lego set (shhhh….). And, sometimes, they really aren’t costly at all, but just something we know they really want, something that is like gold to them. And, we just want to give it to them because we love them and want to bless them.

Of course, they have grandparents, all of whom dote on our children. And, now that they are older, we let them choose small gifts for each other that they pay for with their chore money (which is a teachable moment in an of itself). So, yes, they do get more than 3 gifts. Deprived they are not.

And, we know we are doing what we can to set them up to understand that Christmas is not simply about Rudolph, sparkly trees, cookies and milk, and boxes wrapped up with fancy bows.

It’s about Jesus.

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13

The first email. 
(Yes, I printed it out and have it in our wedding scrapbook. I’m like that.)
There’s nothing really significant in it (in case you are tempted to try to zoom in and read all those words printed out from an archaic email system in Grove City’s computer lab). 
But, the conversation was started. 

About a month later, the conversation continued in person when Mark actually bought a plane ticket to Western PA.
And, about a week shy of a year after that, we stood at an altar in front of my dad and had a conversation in front of about 250 or so people and promised to love and cherish from that day forward.

And, it was the perfect day to start a new conversation as man and wife. 

Our 13th anniversary. The anniversary of lace.
13 ceramic hearts imprinted with lace sent all the way from Australia. 
1 red for the year we married. 
4 green for the years each of our children joined our family. 
7 brown for the years in between. 
And, 1 yellow for year 13. 
Mark gave me a card decorated with lace trim that he bought by the yard and glued on himself–always the clever anniversary celebrator. And, he gave me something pretty to make me feel pretty and to remind me that he thinks I’m pretty…
even after 13 years.

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