Color me Pink

For a while now all my baked goods have been white.

White sugars, white cupcakes,  white cakes.

Blegh.

You see,  my boyfriend and his family are allergic to artificial food dyes.  Red # 40 in particular makes his depression much worse.

So--- White cakes.

After a while I realized how bland this was and decided to make these.

As you probably realized I'm not trying to kill Josh,  the color in these cookies comes from beets rather than chemicals.

You can either boil or bake these roots to extract the color.  I personally went for baking them because that involved actually putting the vegetable into the the frosting and  I wanted to see if you could taste the beets.

Grating the beets

You couldn't.

Which, if you think about, it is actually a step up from most red food dyes.

I'm really excited to try the other colors in the spectrum,  and I'm going to throw out my food coloring.

Who needs it anyways?

The Housing Gap

Here at BYU we have this lovely little thing called "the housing gap", where your summer housing contract ends about a week before you are allowed to move into your fall home.  It becomes up to the students to decide where and how to live.

For most it's relatively easy to bunk down with a friend or relative for a few days, for others it simply makes more sense to live out of your car.

Anything goes really.

My friends at tribal lunar speak decided to spend the time living in a cardboard fort.

Here it is in all of its glory

They spent several days procuring the cardboard and building the individual pieces. Each section is  three and a half wide, three feet tall, and with a twelve foot exterior length.

Each Piece also folds up into a nice square for  easy storage and transportation*.

It was awesome.

All photos have been stolen from Facebook

The fort had eight connected tunnels with an inner courtyard for playing card games, eating, and the like.

Personally I only spent a couple nights with them since I actually a bed to sleep in,  but those nights were great fun.

So keep this in mind your next homeless period, and may the idea become even more excellent in your hands.

*easier storage and transportation anyways

Simplicity 3678

My friends Gladyce and Ryan got married this last Tuesday.

She the first of my close friends to get hitched here in college land so it was numbingly wonderful. I am truly happy for them both and I hope that the rest of their lives are as awesome as they are.

I am here to talk about my dress.

I've been sewing for quite some time, so I know my way around a sewing machine and a pattern. However, this was by far the most complex thing I have ever tried.  I found it to be both confusing and wonderfully simple.

That's what I love about sewing,  The only hard part is figuring out what the directions mean. After that it's just putting it all together.

Overall I'm quite happy with myself.  I got the dress finished in time, It looked good, and it didn't even fall apart while I was wearing it.

Some of the seams definitely could have used some improvement, but that's for the next dress.

For those of you who are interested I left of the petticoats because I wanted the skirts to be slimmer.

 I also left out of the boning the bodice and opted for straps instead,  Although that was more out of a sense of laziness then of style.