Archives for 2012

Cupcake Liner Flower

January 25, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

I love to wrap gifts. I think the gift wrap is as important as what’s inside. I save every bit of ribbon and fabric I receive during the year to reuse on a present. I recently made a cupcake liner flower to serve as the bow on my best friend’s birthday gift. It was easy and turned out really cute.

Supplies:

Cupcake Liners (the more used, the thicker the flower)

1 Pipe Cleaner

Stickers (optional)

Method:

I stacked the cupcake liners inside out from smallest to largest arranging them with consideration to the colors. Even though it was for a birthday, I used Christmas and Halloween liners as well. When bunched together, only the colors were visible, not the candy canes or bats printed on the liners.

Once in the desired order, a hole punch was used to make a hole near the center of each one. (I couldn’t do them all together as they were too thick. So I did 2-3 at one time and restacked the liners.) Also, if the holes are not perfectly lined up, the liners will be slightly staggered, making the various colors more visible.

A pipe cleaner served as the flower stem, although a wire or twine would work as well. A knot at the end of the pipe cleaner and threaded through the liners becomes the center of the flower in the middle of the smallest liner. A knot on the bottom of the flower will secure it.

The liners peel open like petals on a flower. I attached the stem it to my gift and added a few glittery scrapbooking stickers on a couple of the petals. With scissors, I trimmed a few select petals so that the various colors would show better. Easy!!!

Sinful Pies & Magical Jello

January 20, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

Nana’s Recipe Box!

While scrambling eggs this morning, my mother started cleaning a cabinet in her kitchen. It contained expired cough syrup and gummy vitamins, along with a shelf of old cookbooks. Basically, my mother hung up her apron in 1994 after my dad died, so I doubted these cookbooks had seen the light of the kitchen in years.

As we ate breakfast and drank coffee, she handed me Nana’s recipe box to peruse. I had no idea she had this bit of heritage hidden behind the spice rack like a secret diary. It was a small wooden box exploding with bits and scraps of papers, jammed inside at all angles so that the lid would not close. I loved to cook and try out new recipes so this was a treasure trove! Plus I remembered some of Nana’s delicious pies.

I carefully unfolded the bits and pieces of fragile paper which were yellowed and coated in an oily film- probably Crisco. I loved that I was touching papers that she had touched. Each was written in pencil, in her easily recognizable cursive handwriting. She wrote the way we were all originally taught in elementary school – slanted to the right with loops and curves and each letter gracefully flowing into the next. Most recipes had no title, and they all began with a simple listing of basic ingredients. As I read the ingredients aloud, my mother identified most, “Oh that was her fruitcake recipe”. And, “That was her chocolate pie”. Oddly enough, almost every single recipe included jello. Who knew jello was such a magic ingredient?

Studying the castoff papers on which these recipes were written was as much fun as reading the actual recipes. She was the quintessential recycler! Chocolate Pecan Delight was written on the back of the Keiser Baptist Church program from 1976. Nana was a faithful member of that church until she died. I still remember the preacher there (I’m Facebook friends with his daughter), and I knew the organist and Sunday school director, who were also identified in the program. The sermon on that particular Sunday morning was “Sin is Sin”. I think baking and eating pie every day was probably the only sinful thing she ever did.

Chocolate pie was written on a Bank of Wilson deposit slip, along with her grocery list for tuna, milk and sugar. An unnamed recipe was written on Keiser Supply Company note paper. We always bought our Christmas tree at Keiser Supply, and they sent us a giant smoked ham every year – the best ham ever.

I plan to try out these recipes. It will likely take years, but as this is part of our family history passed down in Nana’s handwriting, it seems like an important use of time. Maybe somewhere in this treasure box is the perfect pie crust recipe I’m determined to master.

talya

Musical Pairings:
Hymn, “Blessed Assurance”

Sleeping in My Bed

January 19, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

I’m home in Arkansas for a week or so. It’s always so good to be home, in the country, in my childhood home. Tonight I will be sleeping in my own bed, in the room my sister and I shared until I went off to college in 1980. It is super quiet and dark, the opposite of our Dallas home with sirens, lights, random gunfire and no stars in the sky.

Although the bright orange shag carpet is long gone, the room hasn’t changed much. I wonder if when the carpet was removed my mother noticed the burn mark under the bed? My friend Anita and I shoved an ashtray and lit cigarette under the bed one night when my mom came to the door, melting the carpet slightly. We tried really hard to smoke for about a week, but were never successful, thank goodness. And I doubt we ever inhaled- we couldn’t really figure it out.

Favorite books. Note – an Elvis book prior to his death.

This bedroom is a time capsule – like Graceland without the jungle room. But it is comfortable. My favorite paperbacks still line the bookshelf above my desk where I did my homework. My boxes of 8-track tapes are piled in a cabinet. Within the built-in drawers around the desk lies an archaeological dig, undisturbed for years, except when I occasionally sift through the hidden treasures. The deeper into the drawers you explore, the older the civilization. Letters my Nana and mother wrote to me at Baylor University, along with my college grades, are scattered on the top. Further down are high school pictures and newspaper articles. Still deeper, there is junior high cheerleader memorabilia. Near the very bottom of the dig are Valentines Day cards from elementary school parties and letters from my 4th grade classmates when I was in the hospital. I’m still really good friends with many of these classmates.

My mother sometimes talks of selling this old house. It needs work and is getting harder for her to maintain. It sits on an active earthquake fault which, over time, has caused shifting and cracking in the walls, allowing in the occasional bull snake. And there is a constant parade of field mice. (So maybe we do have a jungle room like The King…?) Even so, it will be a strange and sad day when we can no longer come back here to re-group, relax and reminisce. There is something comforting about sleeping in your own bed.