The Sweet Mama Life

Swoon Worthy Baking Mixes!

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*This blog was sponsored by Blue Diamond, but as always, the opinions are all my own!*

I’ve been on the hunt to find a box cake mix that delivers bakery quality taste, and that day has finally come!! Blue Diamond just launched their line of Baking Mixes and they are swoon worthy. There’s something about the flavor of the Blue Diamond Almond Flour that gives a nutty richness to these mixes  taking the taste over the top! Plus, these Baking Mixes are gluten-free, dairy-free, and non-GMO, so better-for-you baking is now a breeze!

Blue Diamond’s plant-based Baking Mixes are made with finely sifted Blue Diamond Almond Flour to deliver maximum flavor and ideal texture! They come in 4 varieties – Yellow Cake, Chocolate Cake, Chocolate Chip Cookie and Brownie! Plus, they contain 10 or fewer ingredients with Almond Flour as the 1st ingredient (not sugar) so you can feel good while enjoying these treats!

It’s hard to choose just one, but I think the Blue Diamond Almond Flour Yellow Cake mix is my favorite! It also paired perfectly with my favorite Almondmilk Buttercream Frosting! You can turn this Buttercream recipe dairy-free by simply swapping traditional butter for a plant-based spread!

Here’s the recipe!

Almondmilk Buttercream Frosting

  • 2 tablespoons Almond Breeze Vanilla Almondmilk
  • 1 cup butter, softened (or ½ cup plant-based, dairy-free spread)
  • 4 cups powder sugar
  • Pinch of salt

Mix all ingredients together and that’s it! Seriously the easiest and tastiest Buttercream frosting. We make a lot of cupcakes in this house and this is my go-to frosting!

If you aren’t a cupcake lover (I don’t see how that is possible), the Blue Diamond Almond Flour Chocolate Chip and Blue Diamond Almond Flour Brownie Mixes are also superb! You really can’t go wrong with any of them! Blue Diamond Baking Mixes really are ideal for health-conscious bakers on the hunt for superb quality and taste!

You can find these mixes soon at select retailers starting with Albertson’s, Food Lion, Amazon.com and more, and they will be rolling out to additional retailers! Definitely give them a try, I can pretty much guarantee you will fall in love!

Apple Of Our Eye Birthday Party!

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Annnnnd just like that we officially have a 2 year old! Since Josephine has a Fall Birthday, we went with an “Apple Of Our Eye” theme!  I figure I only have a couple years of getting to pick her Birthday themes before she just wants Halloween costume parties each year, so for now I’m running with the Autumnal themes! So here are some of the fun party details that could work for any Fall party or Back to School themed party ya might want to have!

Dessert Table

Let’s start with the most important part, The Sweets! Needless to say we had to have some Apple Pie and Apple Cinnamon Donuts. But I didn’t stop there! Using our favorite applesauce, Musselman’s Apple Sauce I made the batter for the Cake and Cupcakes out of just 3 ingredients!

Here’s the recipe:

Applesauce Cupcakes!

Cream Cheese Frosting

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 8 oz cream cheese
  • 1 box of powder sugar (3 to 4 cups)

Apple Details

  • Traditional Tootsie rolls
  • Green Apple Tootsie Rolls
  • Red Sugar crystal sprinkles

Combine the first 3 ingredients and simply bake according to box instructions. Combine cream cheese frosting ingredients (add milk to thin if needed) Use red food coloring to dye your frosting red! Top with red frosting and dip your cupcake into a bowl of red sprinkles. Tear a Tootsie roll in half and form a stem. Use a whole green Tootsie roll to form a leaf. Use a knife to press in leaf detail!

The Food!

Soooo back in the day I used to cook a whole spread of food from scratch for parties, buuuuut then kids happened 😉 Now we have a go to bakery that we pick up a few catering platters from, and I throw together a couple easy dishes and that’s it! After all the kids at the parties are always most focused on the snacks! Annnnd we all know the kid obsession for pouches, so of course the most sought after party snack was the Musselman’s Apple Sauce pouches! Cheese sticks were a close second in the race of snacks to be polished off first! I have to say we really do love our Musselman’s in this house, the girls  love how it tastes, and I love that it’s such a healthy on the go snack with no artificial flavors, no high fructose corn syrup, and the unsweetened variety has zero added sugars!

Decor!

Yep Red gingham and Burlap was the name of the Game! I made the Table Center Pieces with little baskets filled with Apples, doesn’t get any easier than that! The photo booth was assembled with a good ol’ Haybale, baskets of apples, and fabric fringe garland, made simply by tying strips of color appropriate fabric together on to a string!

The Drinks!

Apple Juice and Apple Sangria of course! And the Sangria was a hit!

Here’s the recipe!

Apple Cider Sangria

  • 2 ½ cups Apple Cider (I used Musselman’s)
  • ½ cup brandy
  • 1 bottle Pinot Grigio
  • 1 cup club soda (optional, if you want to add a little bubble, but the cider flavors are stronger without)
  • Sliced Apples

Combine all ingredients and chill for at least 2 hours or overnight! So Easy, So Yummy!

Party Favors!

An apple with a 4 oz jar of caramel dipping sauce! So you could absolutely buy caramel sauce and jar it individually. Since I needed about 60 goodie bags, I decided to make the caramel sauce myself since it was more cost effective that way! I love how the Goodie Bags turned out! And so much better than sending families home with a bag of candy right before Halloween!

An Apple Game and An Apple Craft!

I wanted some kind of activity for the kids, so I came up with making simple Apple Bell necklaces/ornaments! Take some Red Bells, Green Ribbon to make leaves, and White Yarn. Simple and Easy!

I didn’t think we could have an Apple Party without some form of Apple Bobbing, but with so many littles ones around, I certainly didn’t want buckets of water hanging out. So a dry form of apple bobbing it was! I picked out apples from the store with strong stems, tied twine around each stem and tied them all to a long rope! Then we suspended the rope from some hooks, and the kids had to line up and try to take a bite out of an apple with no hands! It was pretty hilarious to watch!

Annnnd that’s an Apple Party wrap! I’m sure I’m forgetting some things, but ya know, mom brain is a thing, so that will have to do for now!

And thank you Musselman’s for sponsoring this blog post! I actually took the time to sit down, capture, and record all of the party details  because of you, which I sometimes don’t get around to doing! So now sweet Josephine’s 2nd Birthday is fully documented!

 

3 Ingredient Rainbow Cookies

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Ok, so I made these last night for Annabelle’s school St. Patrick’s Day party today and I kinda loved how they turned out! They seriously only take 5 minutes and are so easy kids can help! Scroll through the photos below because they are pretty self explanatory, and don’t really need any explanation  😉

The 3 Ingredients:

-Those store bought cookies with frosting that they have everywhere

-Rainbow Airheads sour strips, cut in half

-Vanilla frosting in a piping bag for the clouds

And that’s it! They would even be great for rainbow themed birthday parties if you swap out the green frosting cookies for another color!!

 

5 Simple Ways to Prepare for Overnight House Guests!

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Robert’s parents are coming into town from Texas next week, so it’s time to get our guest room ready. Apart from giving the sheets a fresh wash and removing all the fur from our cat’s favorite room in the house, here are 5 lovely ways to prepare and make a house guest feel extra welcomed!

 

1) Water Bedside.

A lovely little nicety is to take mason jars, fill them with water, close them up, and place them bedside. This way your guest has an easy go to glass right from the start and doesn’t need to search your cabinets if you don’t happen to be nearby!

2) Collection of Toiletries.

Between hotel stays and flights we’ve all accumulated a lot of travel size toiletries. An awesome way to put them to use, is to get a little canister and collect them up for your guests. Sometimes when staying at someone’s house, it slips your mind to pack the basics that you might find at a hotel.

3) Rid the Room of Unwanted Guests.

Ok, so our guest room opens right up to our backyard. Plus the room gets the least amount of traffic. So this combo often leads to unwanted crawling and flying guests! So before we have guests over, whether they are staying for the week or just coming for a party, I use Zevo Instant Action Sprays to rid our home of any crawling or flying bugs. This is seriously the Best Indoor bug spray line I have found, because it’s safe to use around Pets and People! Its active ingredients are cinnamon oil, lemongrass oil, and geraniol, unlike the synthetic pyrethroid chemicals that you find in other insect killers. It also has such a light scent you don’t need to leave the room after you spray. And it can be used in any room of your home on any hard surface! I’ll admit it, when I first heard that Zevo used “effective essential oils instead of butane and propane propellants” I was skeptical it would do the job. But I’m here to testify, it certainly does the job and I don’t have to be freaked out about the girls being in the house when I spray! There are 4 varieties of sprays that run the gamut of taking care of ants, cockroaches, fruit flies, or stinging insects. Their bio-science formula quickly paralyzes and kills bugs by targeting a nervous system receptor only active in bugs, and not active in people or pets.

I’m resisting writing 10 more paragraphs right here telling you all the reasons why you’ll want to have Zevo under your kitchen sink ready to be drawn out at the first glimpse of a bug, so you can head to www.zevoinsect.com to learn more and purchase the sprays! Moving on…

4) Put out Towels.

As a guest you never know the history of towels you find in the bathroom or who they belong to. So just place some towels ready to go on their bed. Plus it won’t leave you scurrying around the house to find clean towels when they ask to take a shower!

5) Snack Basket.

Maybe I’ve hung around toddlers too much, but I’m a snack addict! And when I’m staying at someone else’s house I never want to raid their cabinets. So I think it’s so lovely to have some easily accessible snacks waiting in your guestroom!

….well now that I read over this list I think this is actually what I want done daily in my room. Robert should really get on top of that getting my nighttime water and snack basket ready thing! 😉

 

This post is sponsored by Zevo but all of the opinions are of course my own!

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Mamma Mia Pizza and a Movie Night!

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*This post is sponsored by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, but the opinions are of course allllll mine!

That’s right, it’s a Mamma Mia, Mamma Me night in, complete with a Sun Dried Tomato and Hummus pizza! I don’t know about you guys, but when movies come out in theaters, I could care less, I’m not paying for a sitter and dragging myself out to a cold theater to eat over-priced candy and subpar food! (Robert and I vary greatly on that front, but we still manage to co-exist 😉 ) Buuuuut, give me the digital and DVD release date for a movie, and heck yes, we are going to celebrate! That’s the real movie release date in my world! Soooo since Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again  is now available on digital and will be available on Blu-ray and DVD on Oct. 23rd, I am making a night of it!!!! And what better way to celebrate than with a movie inspired, Greek pizza recipe. Annnnnd one that is crazy easy but full of flavor, and actually pretty darn healthy too. Win, Win, Win!  Ok here it is:

Sun Dried Tomato and Hummus Pizza

  • Pizza Dough*
  • 1 tbls flour
  • 1/3 cup sundried tomatoes
  • ½ cup chopped red onion
  • 2 cups spinach
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • ½ cup hummus
  • 1/3 cup feta cheese
  • Wine (optional, but I usually recommend a glass while cooking 😉 )

1.   Pre-heat oven to 475 degrees

2.   Cover your large cutting  board with flour, and work out your dough to desired shape, and about ½ inch thick.

     3.  Place your dough on parchment paper and place in oven for 8-10 minutes.

4.   Combine sundried tomatoes, onion, spinach, and olive oil in a sauté pan over medium heat and cook, stirring frequently, for about 5 min, or until spinach is wilted.

5.   Remove pizza crust from oven. Let cool, slightly.

6.   Spread hummus over crust, top with sautéed veggie mixture and feta cheese! Mamma Mia that’s both easy and delicious!

*Soooo we all have our favorite pizza dough recipes, but we also all have our favorite store-bought pizza dough. And I say when you can take a short cut that doesn’t sacrifice taste, take it! After all we’ve got a movie to watch!

I  have to admit, musicals are basically my favorite genre of movie! It’s all feel good goodness and sometimes that is exactly what the doctor ordered! Annnnd if you love to sing like me, but can’t hold a tune to save your life, turn up that TV nice and loud, and your voice will be tuned out just enough to make you think you’re actually not doing a half bad job of singing along. It really works and it’s kinda awesome to sing a duet with Meryl Streep 😉 So now with Pizza in one hand and wine in the other, let’s get this Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again movie night started! And I highly recommend you doing the same!!

Rosie’s Cupcake Shortcut!

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Yes, I know I look like I’ve had a little too much sugar in this pic, but one always needs a good taste tester on hand and that’s usually me 😉

Ok. So I think cake mixes get a bad rap sometimes! It’s basically just taking the minor shortcut of having your dry ingredients pre-mixed for ya! And let’s be honest any shortcut, or 10 minute time saver I’ll take these days.  I’ve tried this recipe completely from scratch and with the help of a mix and I really can’t tell the difference. I think that’s because with the mix-ins of sour cream and buttermilk you really aren’t missing a thing! So here ya go! Enjoy!

Rosie’s Cupcake Shortcut!

Vanilla Cupcake Mix

  • 3 eggs
  • 1/3 cup oil
  • ¾ cup buttermilk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • ¾ cup sour cream
  • Vanilla Cake Mix not white cake mix
  • ½ teaspoon cinnamon

Cream Cheese, Buttercream Frosting

  • 8 oz cream cheese softened
  • ½ cup butter softened
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 3 cups powdered sugar

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line pans with 20-22 cupcake liners.
  2. In a large bowl, gently combine eggs, oil, buttermilk and vanilla.
  3. Mix in sour cream.
  4. Add cake mix and cinnamon and mix until smooth
  5. Fill cupcake liners ¾ full and bake for 15-18 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
  6. Buttercream: Beat cream cheese and butter until fluffy. Add vanilla and powdered sugar. Adjust the consistency using milk if it is too thick.
  7. Pipe onto cooled cupcakes and top with party theme decorations. OOOOOH Yummy!

 

 

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