S'mores Hand Pies

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S'mores are kind of magical thing for me. They are full of memories in every bite and they make me love what I would normally never eat. 






Like most, s'mores were the epic camping food that somehow would make the whole trip worth while to me. Sitting next to the campfire as a kid, trying to burn my marshmallows till they were about to fall off the stick. All of my crazy family around me, Grampa smoking cigars and playing backgammon with my aunts and uncles. My mom always taking care of everyone and my grandma probably taking care of me and my sister to give my mom a break. Camping used to be a once a year tradition for my family. Go up to lake tahoe, to the same campsite every year, swim in the freezing lake, if only for a second. While those days are very far behind me, from people moving away. And from the last time we went getting snowed on and our tents collapsing on us in the early hours of the morning. I remember my sister getting the bulk of the tent falling on her, so there were tears streaming everyone. My Grampa, standing outside the tent taking photos and laughing. We ended up having to pack up our frozen things, after trying to defrost the shoes filled with snow that were left out, and staying at a hotel. Somehow a next trip never happened... My family is crazy, 100%, but they are mine and as much as I have refused to go to family functions, tell them all they are mental, it was always a good time camping and I love those crazy people.







So back to the food. Chocolate, graham crackers and marshmallows. Two out of three I would generally eat. Marshmallows are something I would normally never eat. Too chalky, squishy, the after taste, everything just always seemed wrong with them to me. Admittedly the only marshmallows I have tried come in big clear packages from the grocery store, I should give those handmade ones a go.

But when you mix just those three ingredients together, add a bit of fire, it's heavenly.
 
So given that I have gone camping once in the past probably 15 years or so, I get massive cravings for s'mores. I've had them a few times outside of camping, probably in someone's back yard or over the stove in high school when we all got bored. So I new I had to do some type of s'mores-ish post for here. Now there will be more variations to come in the future. This one isn't perfect, you dont get that crunchy char from the open flame but it's the gooey marshmallow and melty chocolate that this recipe will tide me over on. 







I used mini marshmallows to stuff in the pies but I'm thinking that mixing the graham cracker crumbs and chocolate together with marshmallow fluff to create more of a batter you would scoop on to the pie would work better. Give it a go, give both a go if you are extra hungry, change it up a bit, these pies are meant to be fun. Don't take them too seriously, how could you, its marshmallow chocolate and graham crackers stuffed into a flaky shortcrust. Sugar overload loveliness

I'm moving!

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Not the blog but me! My 45 minutes (one way) commute to work has now been drastically slashes to 1 minute! (10 if I walk).
I now call the little town St Helena, just north of Napa, home.
So I have yet to actually get Internet or other basic apartment needs, so the next post might be another week or so. But no fear, I haven't forgot about my blog! I'll be more present on instagram and twitter. My only Internet access is my phone, hence no photos in this post.

Yay my own little apartment!!

<3
Julie

new.

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things from bouchon.











































Only a few miles from my house. Dangerous.








So you might have notice now the blog says 'julie takes photos' instead of 'always with butter'

I like the name 'always with butter' its cute, a bit silly but i like it. But I feel like this blog should represent me and the name just doesn't seem to fit it anymore.

I used to get obsessive over foods, in a good way. Amazing butter. Beautiful cheeses. The perfect pie. etc etc.

But photography has always been my main interest and objective with the site. The food is nice but the photos are what I truly care about. And after working with pastries all day long at my day job, this is true more than ever. I just want the photos.

So I switched up the header to 'julie takes photos' a little name that for years and years has always been my email address and probably the only username I have for any silly site. It's my thing. 'julie takes photos' simple, straight forward.

Thats all that changed. The header. Changing my twitter, site address would just be annoying now. No need. Everything else is the same. Including food photos and more often than not the recipe.

I just wanted to see something different when I post on here.


So that is my explaination.

Let's Talk About Snails & Snakes

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Snails yes, snakes no. I am petrified when comes to snakes; spiders and dogs too but that is a different story for another rainy day. I was reading something about snails and let me share this with you. There are more than 80,000 different species of snails, yes 80,000 that is darn a lot. I think I probably seen 20 the most including the one I ate. They are widely distributed on land, in the sea and in the fresh water. Land snails have two pairs of tentacles where their set of eyes reside on the lower set. Water snails have only one pair of tentacles, with eyes at the base.

Now my favorite subject - the snakes. What can I say about the snakes? They hatch from eggs - and no they are not related to the chicken. However, there are some species of snakes that do give birth to live young snakes.

Recent Quakes Definitely Doing Their Job - Relocating Cities & Shortening Earth's Days

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That is all I need - a shorter day! Researchers at NASA calculated that the Chilean earthquake shortened Earth's days. It shortened by one-millionth of a second, still small but shorter. I think this is a second earthquake in a decade to result in a shorter day.

After the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake at magnitude of 7.0 with 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater, a chain of other earthquakes surf through the Earth's crust. The second one to start was Chile with an 8.8 magnitude. If I correctly remember, then it was Japan, Turkey, Kosovo, Japan again. I probably missed some. This may be normal after after all, shake the world and it will move - like everything else.

Well, these earthquakes did shake the world enough to relocate cities in Chile. Researches found that cities and islands physically shifted west. From the satellite data, scientist at Ohio State University and University of Hawaii found that city of Concepcion moved about 3 meters to the west. When compared to Earth size it may not be big shift, but to me three meters is a lot. In addition, the Chile's capital Santiago moved only 30 centimeters. Buenos Aires in Argentina moved 2.5 cm.

Scientists say that this usually happens with earthquakes, but usually too small to notice. However, this time it was definitely noticed.

Giveaway...!

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 This week's kind sponsor giveaway is from the lovely Alice of Backstitch. The fabric on offer is a bundle of 6 Mimosa Linen/Cotton blends in an array of beautiful colours.
Mimosa is a great value linen too. At just £10.50/m for a wider width of 136cm.It is a lovely soft fabric with a fairly open weave and works really well for all manner of projects, from quilting to general craft to dress-making with it's lovely soft drape.


 The image above is a beautiful quilt Alice made. The jewelled colours are stunning and I bet the quilt is so cosy. Alice sent me a bundle of these colours above to have a play with and whilst I am itching to make a quilt myself out of the Mimosa, it just ain't happening this week!

Instead I made this little pinnie for the fair this week.(The pattern is an adaptation from Aunty Cookie's pattern available here.) I teamed it with some of my Scruffy Daisy in Coral which matched perfectly.I found the fabric to be perfect for this project. Being so soft, it's going to be dead comfy to wear.



If you would like the chance to get your hands on a bundle for free, Alice is offering one lucky UK/European reader the chance to win a bundle of 6 fabrics.



Head here to see which you would choose and come back and tell us which one!
And for a further 2 comments come back and tell me you follow Alice's blog and also follow her on Twitter. So 3 chances to win this!

The giveaway will be open until this time next week - Tuesday 4 December - which will give you all something to do while I'm here from tomorrow, which is set up day,  until Sunday. If you are in the vicinity I really hope you will manage to come and please do pop by Stand C60 to see all my creations and say hi. It would be so nice to see you!

ps please PLEASE make sure you leave an email address for me to contact you if you are a No Reply blogger.

Profiteroles with Cranberry Caramel Sauce and Maple Spiced Pecans

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After holding tryouts for Thanksgiving dessert, I of course ended up going in a completely different direction than any of the contestants. Let me explain how this happened. Kurt claims to not have much of a sweet tooth, but there are three similar sweets that he really likes. Those are Boston cream pie, eclairs, and profiteroles. I’d made the first two at different times in the past, but I’d never made profiteroles even though we always order it when we see it on a restaurant dessert menu. I had various ideas about how to change up the classic components of a profiterole to make it a more seasonal, Thanksgiving kind of dessert, and Kurt voted down almost all of them. He insisted plain, vanilla ice cream and standard chocolate sauce was the only way to go. There would be no pumpkin or cinnamon ice cream or spiced pate a choux or nutmeg dusting on top or any such thing. But, there was a Cranberry Caramel Sauce that I absolutely had to try. It’s from the October/November issue of Garden and Gun, and it belongs with a Pumpkin Bread Pudding recipe from Austin’s own Jodi Elliott of Foreign and Domestic. So long as the ice cream remained nothing but vanilla and the pastry puffs weren’t messed up with any spices, Kurt was willing to try a sauce other than chocolate. Then, I went ahead and made the Maple Spiced Nuts from the bread pudding recipe as well. One last, little change from the classic preparation wouldn't hurt.

This dessert was made up of four parts, so I started by making the vanilla ice cream in advance to have one part completed and ready. I used the vanilla ice cream recipe from Eggs by Michel Roux which is nicely rich with six egg yolks and perfumed with seeds from a vanilla pod. Next, I made the puffs according to Ina Garten’s recipe in Barefoot in Paris. I like that she suggests pulsing the eggs into the pastry dough in a food processor rather than stirring and stirring by hand. That recipe is also available online. The great thing about choux pastry puffs is that you can refrigerate them or even freeze them, and then just re-warm them for a few minutes in the oven before serving. The tops will re-crisp and the airy insides will be as puffy as when they first came out of the oven. The third part of the dessert was the cranberry caramel sauce which was a simple matter of cooking sugar, water, and corn syrup until amber and then adding cranberries and pure cranberry juice. The berries and juice were stirred into the caramel and the mixture was brought back to a boil until the cranberries had all popped. Off the heat, salt and vanilla were added. After letting the sauce cool a bit, it was pureed in a blender, and then I strained it before letting it completely cool. Last but not least, the pecans were tossed with maple syrup, corn syrup, sugar, salt, and a mix of cumin, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cayenne. The nuts were baked until toasted through and allowed to cool before I chopped them.

The hint of spiciness and bit of salt in the nuts was perfect with the tart and sweet sauce. And, I think plain vanilla ice cream was the way to go here since it allowed the flavors in the toppings to shine. In the end, we were both completely happy with these changes to the traditional profiterole for Thanksgiving dessert, but I don’t think I’d get away with messing with the classic eclair.

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Favourite Photo Monday and Crafty Tuesday

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I would like to let you know that I have to take a break from hosting these two great link parties - Favourite Photo Monday and Crafty Tuesday.
It gave me the opportunity to visit your blog and see what  you have created, comment on the photos.
However for some time now it is getting harder to commit myself to write a post for certain days.
I have so many other things that keep me away from blogging.
When I started first I posted almost every day, now it seems it is only 2-3 times a week and two of these are link parties.
So I decided to take a break for a while from hosting these two link parties. I hope one day I will find more time and be able to host them again, If I will I will let you know.

I still intend to post from time to time, I will share some photos, recipes or my craft projects.

I want to say BIG THANK  YOU to everyone who participated in my memes. It was a great way of finding so many beautiful blogs.


I still will be posting craft and diy projects that I found on other great blog on my Facebook page, so come by and check it out from time to time

S'mores Hand Pies

To contact us Click HERE












S'mores are kind of magical thing for me. They are full of memories in every bite and they make me love what I would normally never eat. 






Like most, s'mores were the epic camping food that somehow would make the whole trip worth while to me. Sitting next to the campfire as a kid, trying to burn my marshmallows till they were about to fall off the stick. All of my crazy family around me, Grampa smoking cigars and playing backgammon with my aunts and uncles. My mom always taking care of everyone and my grandma probably taking care of me and my sister to give my mom a break. Camping used to be a once a year tradition for my family. Go up to lake tahoe, to the same campsite every year, swim in the freezing lake, if only for a second. While those days are very far behind me, from people moving away. And from the last time we went getting snowed on and our tents collapsing on us in the early hours of the morning. I remember my sister getting the bulk of the tent falling on her, so there were tears streaming everyone. My Grampa, standing outside the tent taking photos and laughing. We ended up having to pack up our frozen things, after trying to defrost the shoes filled with snow that were left out, and staying at a hotel. Somehow a next trip never happened... My family is crazy, 100%, but they are mine and as much as I have refused to go to family functions, tell them all they are mental, it was always a good time camping and I love those crazy people.







So back to the food. Chocolate, graham crackers and marshmallows. Two out of three I would generally eat. Marshmallows are something I would normally never eat. Too chalky, squishy, the after taste, everything just always seemed wrong with them to me. Admittedly the only marshmallows I have tried come in big clear packages from the grocery store, I should give those handmade ones a go.

But when you mix just those three ingredients together, add a bit of fire, it's heavenly.
 
So given that I have gone camping once in the past probably 15 years or so, I get massive cravings for s'mores. I've had them a few times outside of camping, probably in someone's back yard or over the stove in high school when we all got bored. So I new I had to do some type of s'mores-ish post for here. Now there will be more variations to come in the future. This one isn't perfect, you dont get that crunchy char from the open flame but it's the gooey marshmallow and melty chocolate that this recipe will tide me over on. 







I used mini marshmallows to stuff in the pies but I'm thinking that mixing the graham cracker crumbs and chocolate together with marshmallow fluff to create more of a batter you would scoop on to the pie would work better. Give it a go, give both a go if you are extra hungry, change it up a bit, these pies are meant to be fun. Don't take them too seriously, how could you, its marshmallow chocolate and graham crackers stuffed into a flaky shortcrust. Sugar overload loveliness