Category: Susie’s Corner

Cocoa and Cookies

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It’s that time of year when the cooler weather seems to make us crave some hot cocoa. We have set up our ‘Beverage Station’ at home and the kids asked for cocoa. It just happened that we had some packets in the cupboard so I added them to the assortment of things they could choose from along with some marshmallows in a jar for them to use.

These recipes would be great for taking along with you on a car ride to look at Christmas lights. Many of them could even be used to make Gifts in a Jar to give away for the holidays. These would even be good to sip and snack on while snuggled up with your favorite book on a cold winter evening… mmmm.

You can create some really wonderful memories with your kiddos or grandkids as well by letting them help to make cookies and cocoa… these would be memories that stick with them!

Here are some of our All-Time Favorite cocoa recipes:

Cocoa In A Crockpot

Hot Cocoa (Powdered)

Single-Serve Hot Cocoa

The Best Hot Cocoa

You could easily replace the sugar with another sweetener if you are trying to eat healthier.

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Update with more pictures! Preparing for Christmas… St. Nicholas, Gifts in a Jar, and so much more!

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog5 Comments

We’ve had a busy weekend… well, I have. I’ve been working on my pantry makeover and I’ve completely moved things around 3 times already! I will post pictures as soon as I have it the way I like it but it is an improvement already and I think it makes better use of the breakfast nook space that just didn’t work for us.

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Creative Gift Wrap Ideas

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I don’t know about you but my phone has been going crazy with notifications about packages that will be arriving as we just finished up the majority of our Christmas shopping. I have a huge black tote in my room that I am keeping the gifts in… yes, I believe they will all fit in the one tote this year.

Now, I have to figure out how to wrap them. I have a bunch of leftover paper from years past. There was a time when I liked to have things color coordinated and usually each kiddo had their own paper to keep things a little more organized as the tags seemed to get lost before Christmas morning. I have always seen the towers that people do with different figures and they look so cute but I don’t want to buy special paper for them.

I have an idea of just buying some fabric and making reusable bags but maybe making them so that they could stack and make these adorable gift towers… with our new 3-4 gift rule it might make this a real possibility!

Here are some cute pics of the ideas I have from Pinterest:

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Holiday Planning Progress

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How is everyone doing? I hope we all made it through Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday without any serious damage. I also hope everyone has a good plan to get through the next month… we have definitely had some unexpected challenges around here like my oven and some sickness but we will survive!

We’ve been enjoying our Advent Study by Amanda Bennett with the lap book and other Christmas activities that we have been doing. The kids have been reading ‘A Christmas Carol’** aloud and doing a unit study** that goes along with it and we plan to watch the movie when we finish the book. **You can find the unit study HERE.

So far this week we have been able to gather all of our notes, menus, and lists from Thanksgiving to add to our Holiday Planner. We have put away the Thanksgiving folder and have pulled out our Polar Express folder, St. Nicholas Day notes, and of course our Christmas. I also probably need to pull out the New Year’s folder too but I haven’t just yet.

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Easy Homemade Bread

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog16 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned in a few posts that we’ve been making our own bread again. We love sourdough bread but a few of the kids had mentioned that they really wanted something more like store-bought so I tried a few recipes and with a couple of tweaks we have found a combo that we really like… Mr. Awesome and I haven’t been eating much bread but we have tried a slice here and there as it smells so good! It is quite exceptional when it’s still a little warm and smeared with real butter and then drizzled with a bit of local honey… mmmmm!

This bread is great to use as rolls and as an alternative to English Muffins for breakfast. It also toasts up really nicely! We save all the breadcrumbs in a baggie in the freezer to use in our recipes where breadcrumbs are needed.

I recently converted my sourdough starter ‘Fran’ to a pasta madre/lievito madre/stiff dough and I like the results so far. You can learn more about this process HERE. I think I want to try to make some Panettone for Christmas this year so I wanted to get some starters going and get a little more familiar with the process.

I’ve also been researching about the Herman starter and Charlie starters so I may want to them out as well.

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