Strawberry Lemonade Muffins

I've made Lemon Blueberry and I've made Lemon Chocolate chip, but I wondered what Strawberry and lemon together would be like, and of course, the first thing I thought of was Strawberry Lemonade. I don't usually like lemonade because it's too sweet and not tart enough, but what a better place to be sweet than in a dessert. I looked up a few recipes and decided it'd just be easier to modify/create my own.

And if the pictures don't convince you how good these are, then get this. Eldon, who doesn't like ANYTHING I bake, actually likes these.

Besides what most people already have for muffins, you will need 1 lemons and some strawberries (I used about 15 strawberries, but they are different sizes).



Strawberry Lemonade Muffins

Preheat your oven to 375 and line a muffin tin BEFORE you do anything else. This recipe makes 12 muffins.

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Mix dry ingredients in a small bowl.


2 eggs
1 cup sugar
(mix those up until it's all nice and light and fluffy but still liquidy)
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp of vanilla
Mix all those wet ingredients together in a larger bowl.

Zest one lemon and add it to the wet ingredients.
Zest is the name of the peel of a fruit. You need a zester to do this, because the holes on a cheese grater are too big. There is so much flavor in the peel of a fruit. That is the reason why I added lemon zest instead of lemon juice. I didn't need extra liquid in the recipe, just the flavor.
I don't know how much lemon zest I added to this recipe, but a small lemon zested almost bare.



Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients slowly and stirring constantly. The lemon zest and the acids in the lemon will make the batter a little thick, but the moisture from the strawberries will balance it out.

Cut up about 12 - 15 strawberries, depending on their size. Again, I did not measure this, and just tossed them in. If you feel like you're going to run out of strawberries when you're spooning the batter into muffin cups, just cut up a few more.



Having the muffin tin pre-lined is a great idea because you do not want your batter to sit too long because of the acids in the lemon zest. Fill the muffin cups to the top. Usually I sprinkle the tops of the muffins with sugar to create a crackled surface, but since I am putting glaze on these, I did not do that this time.



Bake the muffins for about 20 - 23 minutes. Remove from the muffin tin and allow them to cool all the way. If you don't, the glaze will melt right off the muffins.



LEMON GLAZE

1 cup of powdered sugar
Juice from one lemon
Some lemon zest

Mix all of that together. Again, I didn't measure any of this, but you want the glaze to be pretty thick so it stays on the muffins. If it's not, add more powdered sugar.



If you're curious about how much flavor is in zest, mix the powdered sugar and the lemon juice together, taste it, add the zest and then try it again.

Once the muffins are cool, cover the tops with the glaze and add a slice of strawberry for looks and a bite of sweetness. I stabbed them with a toothpick because the strawberries were sliding down the side.





Enjoy!

Peach Cobbler Muffins

I decided to try something different. I hope you all enjoy.

This recipe takes a while because of the extra steps, so don't attempt it if you don't have time to kill. I've been procrastinating homework, so I have time to kill.

I didn't like any of the recipes for Peach Cobbler Muffins that I found online, so I adapted my muffin recipe to suit my needs. First, I made a crust, because a crunch topping is always awesome on Peach Cobbler.

The Topping

2 TBSP of melted butter
1 cup of crushed up cereal



I forgot to measure how much Life Cereal I crumbled up, but it made about a cup once it was all smooshed. You can use any kind of cereal for the crust, or Graham Cracker if you prefer. I just had Life at home today. The smaller the pieces and the more butter you use the more the crust will incorporate in the muffin mix. So I kept the butter amount low and kept the pieces of cereal larger than if I was doing this for some kind of cake crust.

Line a muffin tin and put about 1/2 TBSP of the crush mixture in each liner, just enough to cover the entire bottom. Keep the rest, because it will be sprinkled on the top of each muffin.




The Muffins

I used my basic muffin recipe for these, which I'm sure many of you are already aware of, and added some spices for that Peach Cobbler Fall Dessert Yummy Taste.

In a small bowl, mix together:

2 cups flour
2 tsp of baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg

In a large bowl, mix together:
2 eggs (whisk them before adding other stuff)
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

Add the dry stuff to the wet stuff.

1 large peach, diced (I don't ever peel mine, just toss the fuzzy stuff with the pieces. I also use large peach chunks, because it's SO good to just bite into a large piece of peach). Use a spatula to fold in the peach pieces so they don't break apart.



Fill the cups to the top, sprinkle with left over topping. Press the topping down a bit into the batter, so more of it sticks and it doesn’t come off after cooking. Bake for 25 minutes at 375. Makes about 12 muffins.





The Vanilla Glaze



1 cup powdered sugar
1 TBSP of milk
2 tsp of vanilla

This glaze is pretty thick. If you want it thinner, just add more milk.



I hope you Enjoy!!!

Traci Grant's Grammar Tutorial - Cohesion

(The images under google search of "writing cohesion" were really really boring, so I'm using this one because it's fun!)

COHESION

“It doesn’t flow. It’s just awkward. It doesn’t feel right. The words don’t go together. It’s confusing. I get what you’re saying but say it differently maybe?”

Okay, stop. How many of you have heard this before, either in high school or in college or at your job?

People (or readers in this case) know when something is off in a document. They know because, for some reason, people (or writers in this case) try to write in a different way than they talk. You don’t necessarily have to do that.

We talk more fluidly than we write which means that we will do things differently when we write. When we write, we stop to think of what to say and write something that sounds “better” than the way we speak. But you have to understand that when you’re having a conversation, everyone in the conversation gets it (or so you hope; there’s always that one guy that say, “Oh hey, you’re talking about chickens. I saw this cool bug once.”) and so you don’t need to use complete sentences or proper grammar (but omg please please speak with proper grammar!).

So as a writer, you have to do the same thing as when you write. But your writing sounds bad? That does not make you a bad writer because you can write. If you can speak, you can write.

The problems that come from writing aren’t because you are a bad writer or you aren’t using complete sentences or proper grammar. It's all based in the meaning of what you're writing. You have to make sure that your reader is following your meaning (and you can use sentence fragments and break grammar rules to help convey your meaning). You have to make the reader understand what you want them to understand. Just because what you are writing is clear in your own head doesn’t mean it’s automatically clear to your readers. The problem is that meaning is not immediate like it is in a conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to write differently than you speak, you just have to use different tools to help convey your meaning.

Cohesion is the most basic tool that will help you convey your meaning to your readers. Cohesion is how the words on the page work together to create meaning and keep confusion at bay. Cohesion is taught in high schools and in some college classes as “signposting” through the use of transitions. This is a great way to create cohesion on a full document level. But cohesion is useful at more than just the full document level. Your sentences and your paragraphs need to be cohesive too.

Here are some tips on how to create cohesion throughout your entire document.

Word Level
Pronouns

Using pronouns effectively is a great way to keep yourself from repeating the same thing and to shorten your word count. You can take a long subject and shove it into two letters. Look back at that sentence and see what I did. I could have said. “You can take a long subject and shove the long subject into two letters.” Instead, I used a pronoun.

Be careful though because while pronouns can create comprehension, they can also create confusion.

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

“his dad” creates a relationship that would not be there had I used a name. (ie: Tommy wasn’t sure what Charles was doing.) This use of a possessive pronoun creates meaning.

In the second sentence, even though we are using pronouns to cut down on redundancy and word count, “His” and “he” do not signify who they are referring to. Was the dad’s face scrunched up? Or Tommy’s? Is Tommy staring at the garage? Or is his dad?

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

If you don’t want to repeat his dad, rework the sentence:
Tommy wasn’t sure what was going on. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

That is much clearer on who is doing what in these sentences.

Sentence Level
Parallelism

Parallelism is where different parts of a sentence or a list are in the same grammatical form.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world and saw different people and learning about other cultures.

This is not parallel because the list of items are not in the same grammatical form. We get the meaning of this sentence, but it takes more time (maybe a few nanoseconds but really, who has time to spare?) to figure out because of the sentence structure.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world, see different people, and learn about other cultures.

Here is another example using a bulleted list.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fish
-to go on hikes
-boating
-ride your bike
-relax in large campsites
-ATVs

Because the items on the list are not in the same grammatical form, it looks messy. This is a professional document, Billy’s website or a flyer that he passes out in parking lots begging for business. He wants it to look professional and be easy to read, so he has to make the items on the list parallel.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fishing
-hiking
-boating
-biking
-riding ATVs
-relaxing in large campsites

The second one has everything in the list in the same grammatical form so it is easier to read.

Also, Billy changed the order of his list. For some reason that I’m sure a psychologist could explain to you, everything sounds better in a list when the longest one is at the end. Read these two sentences and you’ll see what I mean.

Grandma is good at baking, doing crossword puzzles, and knitting scarves.
Grandma is good at baking, knitting scarves, and doing crossword puzzles.

There’s nothing different in the meaning, but the way the mind reads, the second one is almost poetic. It’s just the way that English language users read a sentence. Again, I can’t explain it.

Practice Parallelism with these Examples
1. It makes me feel better and fortunately.
2. They are expensive in that they cost both money and you spend time on them.
3. Tickets cost $4 for adults and $3 for children's tickets.
4. Last Saturday, there was a riot when the band quit early and the cops will arrive.
5. I went to the store, shopping at the mall, and watched a movie with my friends.
6. Yesterday, angels were dancing on a pin, the oceans all had been changed to lemonade, and the skies turned purple.

End Emphasis

This is just as it implies: put the important stuff at the end of the sentence. Readers will remember what is at the end of a sentence more than the stuff at the beginning.

(Disclaimer: The following sentence in no way reflects this author’s economic viewpoint. She just copied and pasted it from some crazy person's blog.)

The US has created a grand total of $6.3 trillion in trade debt in just a short 10 year time span – money that can only come back to buy us out!

The last part of this sentence, from a doomsayer’s blog, wants you to understand that if other countries try to collect on this trade debt the US is going to DIE!

Yeah, that is end emphasis. You won’t remember that dollar amount or how many years it has been, but you will remember that we’re going to DIE!

End emphasis is also a good skill for document level cohesion. The last sentence of a document is not only what ties everything together, but it will also be the thing your reader remembers the most. So no pressure on that last sentence. None at all.

Paragraph Level
Given-new Contract

This contract relies on the fact that readers expect to know information that has already been given in a sentence or a paragraph. You give them information they know at the beginning of the sentence, and then give them new information at the end. Using pronouns is also a great way to use the given-new contract.

There are many ways that you can conserve energy. An obvious one is to turn off lights and electronics. One that isn’t as obvious is unplugging unused chargers. Even though nothing is charging, people don’t realize that there is energy flowing through the outlet.

In the second sentence, “one” refers to the “many ways” that was given in the first sentence. The new information in this sentence is the example. In the third sentence, “one” again refers to “many ways”, and “isn’t as obvious” goes back to the “obvious” in the second sentence. The new information is “unplugging chargers”.

Can you find the given and new information in the last sentence?

Document Level
Stock transitions and signposting

There are so many ways that you can do this that I will not list them all here. But they have different functions: to add or show sequence, to compare, to contrast, to give examples, to intensify, to indicate place, to indicate time, to repeat, to summarize, to conclude, and to show cause and effect. A few examples are also, after all, immediately, altogether, as a result, because, however, before, first, finally and meanwhile.

But be cautious. Do not use “First, Second, Third, Finally” (or any other very similar stock transitions) as the first word in all your paragraphs. This creates redundancy which is not just a using-the-same-word-too-much issue. You can also create redundancy in your document arrangement.

A Entire Paragraph Example

In my classroom, I give my students the following paragraph and ask them to make it more cohesive.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating important points and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. Using some of these ideas will help. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging.

The meaning behind this paragraph is clear, but there are definitely some problems that will make it even easier for the reader to get the point. What would you do to this to make it more cohesive?

Many students say that they should just reorder the sentences. But when you only reorder the sentences, there is a lot of confusion and redundancy, and the sentence level problems have not been fixed.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating similar effects with parallelism and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Using some of these ideas will help.

Here are the following steps that you should use to make this into a more cohesive paragraph:
-Put similar information next to each other (reorder the sentences).
-Use the given-new contract and pronouns to get rid of redundancy.
-Use parallelism to create sentences that are easier to read.
-Delete any unnecessary information and rewrite sentences.

Here is a more cohesive paragraph (maybe not perfect, because the second sentence is pretty long, but it works for this example):

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging especially when you don’t even know what “cohesive” means. Many times, students come to a writing class without this knowledge, because their previous teachers don’t know either and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or their paragraphs don’t flow. There are a lot of different ways to help add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, parallelism and pronouns.

Can you see all the changes that were made?

I hope you found this brief tutorial helpful! I also hope that you automatically do a lot of this and just never knew there were actually tricks to writing well. If I continue to have time through the semester, I will put up more tutorials on how to use sentence patterns and sentence variety to your advantage, and how to create sentence clarity with word choice and punctuation.

Peanut Butter Brownie Cookie Cupcakes

I have no idea if that is what I would call these things or not, but oh my gosh they are deliciously peanut buttery chocolately.

The best part of this is that it is all store bought stuff which means Eldon will help me eat them.

Anyway.

I saw this picture on tumblr and I decided I wanted to change it.


These are the things I used. I strongly suggest you use and find Kroger's brownie mix. It's less than $1 (at least at my store) and makes the best brownies I have ever tasted.



So cookie in the bottom, candy, and brownie on the top.


Bake them for 18 minutes. You can't really test to see if they're "done" because of the candy in the middle. You might want to bake them for a bit longer. The ones that are a little full did not cook completely like the others. The spot in the middle is not "gooey"; it's just where the candy is.


I strongly suggest you use muffin cups with these because otherwise it ends up in an ooey gooey mess that still tastes delicious but it's hard to serve.


You will need a glass of milk afterwards. I also strongly suggest you do NOT eat more than one at a time. So rich and delicious!

Last Few Days of Relaxation

School hasn't even started yet and I'm already happier than I was all of last semester combined.

Everything that I wanted this semester is falling into place, and I don't have to fight with scheduling or administration to do the things I want to do.

I get to teach at the times I wanted to teach at. They usually shove newbies in the 7:30 and 8:30 classes, because no one wants to teach them. But I love being up early in the morning, and I don't mind. So Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I am teaching two classes. And the two classrooms are right across the hall from each other so I don't have to book it across campus to get somewhere.

The Writing Program has created a "class" that is really just a number that I get to sign up for. It's going to be my "internship" at SLUG magazine. The faculty have been listening to my complaints concerns about not wanting to be a professor and how the Master's program is set up only for those that want to go on to their phD and teach and do research. The director really wants to have options for those students like me that want to do more professional, technical and outside-of-academia work. It is nice, because I get to be the guinea pig, and I'm okay with that.

Because I get to sign up for three credits under this internship, I only have to take two other classes. The two classes I'll be taking are Discourse Analysis and Document Design & Usability. Both of my classes are on Tuesday and Thursday, evening out my school week.

I will still be working at Guadalupe School on Tuesday and Thursday night (if you live in SLC and you want to volunteer, please let me know!), and I expect I will still be rather busy with everything I need to do, but so far everything appears to be much less stressful than the last year.

So, yeah. Totally feeling the school-is-about-to-start excitement that I am sure will be ripped away and drowned spectacularly in a few weeks. But right now. Yeah.

Totally forgot I had to buy textbooks though ... yeah, don't know where my brain went on that one!

Mini Apple Pie Things

Preheat Oven to 375.
Makes six.


1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and diced. Peeling and dicing an apple is a pain in the ass.
Whenever you're baking with apples, it's always a good idea to use the tart ones. For some reason, they taste best when they are cooked.


Mix apples with 1 tsp lemon juice


Add and mix in 1/8 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ginger
1/8 tsp nutmeg


1 pack of Crescent Seamless Dough Sheet cut into six squares. It's kinda hard to use this bc it unrolls at different proportions. I'm just too lazy to make pastry dough, or bother to buy some and roll it out on my tiny non-existent counter space.


Evenly pile apple mixture onto the squares of dough. Take 1 TBPS butter and cut into 6 squares; put on each pile of apple mixture.


Squish them up and close the tops. I tried to make them into pretty square things, but yeah ... whatever.


Bake for 15 minutes at 375. Because of the uneven dough, some of these were a tiny bit undercooked, and I wish I had kept them in for about 2 or 3 minutes longer.


Anyway!
Eat them with ice cream! I'm sure it'll taste really good, but I don't have any ice cream, so I can't show a picture of that.

<3

Copy Editing is My Calling

I'm leaving sewing and art stuff to my talented sister.

Copy editing. It is my love. It is my darling. My little baby, my honey bunny, my lamey wamey ...

For those of you who don't know, I was offered a spot as a copy editor for SLUG magazine (SaltLakeUnderGround). It is an unpaid position (in dollar terms) but I will be able to get college credit, and it's going right on my resume. Here's the website in case you want to check it out www.slugmag.com

I'm typing this now while I'm still on this editing high.

I had a lot of fun on my first night. I was a little nervous at first since it was my first day, but everyone there was really nice and they answered my questions like it wasn't the most annoying thing ever to help the new girl. They have their own way to mark things and their own guidelines that I have to learn, but they assured me that it is something that you learn as you go.

I want to put all this stuff up here so I can remember how much fun I had in case I ever complain about it in the coming months or in case they all actually hated me and they won't let me come back.

Because as always, not being good enough is my biggest fear.

I know copy editing though. I know how to do this, and I'm good at it. But even saying all of this, it's still hard to have confidence in myself.

I wish it was more than once a week. I could do this every single day. But then again, if it was more than once a week, I probably would not have been able to do it. It's going to be another thing to juggle once school starts, but I think it will end up being something I do to keep myself sane.

Hopefully, I'll be able to count it as enough college credit that I only have to take two classes this fall instead of three. My advisor is working on it.

Anyway!

YAY for me!