beads by breul

Thursday, September 22, 2011

What to do after all that soup.....

(my soup can be found here)

Pumpkin Spice Madeleines!

For those of you who know me, this is not a stretch. 
I will shortly be turning into a pumpkin. 
I should be grateful that the pumpkin season 
is a short one.
Although, we do have until January! :)

So, I decided that I wanted to try making madeleines, and since it is fall,
wanted to try pumpkin spice madeleines.
So, I googled, found a few recipes and landed on one. 

Know what drives me NUTS? 
When you go through the list of ingredients, 
get everything out and start mixing and they call for an ingredient
THAT IS NOT ON THE LIST! 
Yup - recipe said to mix sugar in and there were no measurements for sugar
on the ingredient list.
(this is a cooking blog, folks)

So I googled a bit more and found the same thing - missing ingredients.
Now, people, if you have a cooking blog, you should make sure that it is
CORRECT!

Can you tell I was a bit hot under the collar?

In searching around I seemed to find a ratio of sugar to flour and went from there. This is a mix of several recipes found by googling.

Below is my recipe for madeleines.
(after that, I hope all my ingredients are listed.....)


1 cup salted butter, melted and cooled
4 eggs
2 cup flour
2 teaspoons salt
3 Tablespoons canned pumpkin (the real stuff, not pie mix) 
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
sprinkle of pumpkin pie spice
2 Tablespoons vanilla
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 cup sugar (I do 3/4 white, 3/4 brown)

mix sugar, eggs, vanilla together
add pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin pie spice; mix until smooth

slowly add melted butter
mix well

add flour 1/2 cup at a time until mixed. do not over mix
put a tablespoon into each madeleine mold.
If you get more, they get "bellies" (according to my daughter)
Translation - very rounded and not as flat as a madeleine.

If you don't have madeleine molds, I would think this would be
good muffin mix. You would need to play with baking times.

bake @ 375 for 11 minutes. They should be light brown on top.
 (see how your oven does and adjust the time accordingly.)

enjoy! (they make the house smell really good)



Saturday, September 17, 2011

Ta Da!

How many of us have waited for this day to arrive? Ok, apart from the last minute panic of getting pieces done....how many of us have waited for today! :)

362 people participating!
Wonderful.

Superwoman Extraordinaire!
Thank you Lori, for this amazing party.

Ok, ok. Without further ado.......
Here are the ingredients that Joanna Matuszczyk sent me.
I immediately fell in love with the focal. So light, summery and fun. 
The clasp is beautiful also. She sent me flowers! I love flowers.
Purple is my favorite color!
Thank you Joanna.


Here is the completed piece.
 Now in this post here I talked about how the ideas were flowing, absolutely flowing and how I had almost disastrous results.

I tried to wire wrap a few things, two different ways. Purple wire! It didn't work out so well. I will share that at the end.

See how beautiful the clasp lays - so pretty.
I knew that there would be silver chain in this - coordinates with the clasp.
Now, Joanna did send ribbon and I tried and tried, but just couldn't seem to
make it work. It all looked ugly. Ugly I tell you. The ribbon would have been a
step out of my box, but I couldn't seem to leave the box.......


I strung/wire wrapped flowers and a few drops/beads on chain and the wire wrapped these wonderful green squares.


Love these green squares.

Such a great piece.
I did my usual sit, touch, play, move, walk away, shop for a few more ideas, sit,
touch routine and have to say that this came really easily for me.  
It must be the great beads that Joanna sent me. 

I managed to save two of the green beads to make earrings with.
I love the color combo, the clear flowers and those green squares!


Now, for my almost disaster. I was wire wrapping beads around the frame of my focal,
and it snapped in half! HALF. 
I promptly hollered for my daughter to come down. 
She came running, must have been the tone of my scream. 
With tears in my eyes, I handed her the pieces and told her to "fix it". 
SHE DID!
She glued, painted and sprayed and you can barely tell that it broke. 
Thank you Caroline!

THANK YOU LORI! 
You  have gone above and beyond to organize all 362 of us.

Now for the fun part,
THE BLOG HOP!
Seriously, this is the best part.  
Getting to see what everyone created, meeting new people and making friends.

You are here, Courtney Breul and my partner Joanna Mutuszczyk

Mix up your visits, hop around and enjoy.

Here are the partners:

The Hostess, Lori Anderson and her partner, Manuela Wutschke



19. Anna Sabina­­­­ and Erin Siegel


































For a total of 362 people making jewelry!

Amazing!