Just a quick post to share something exciting with everyone! The Huffington Post recently featured Read Make Do’s Lemon-Lemon Ombre cake on their Taste page. Check out the slideshow here! Why, thank you HuffPo!
Thanks everyone for reading, and for the love and support!
P.S. If any of you ever give the recipe a try for yourselves, send me your photos and let me know your experiences! I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts, it’s seriously a really fun cake to make 
love, kate <3 
All this for under 100 bones? Yep.
Let me explain: Our kitchen wall has needed some love. It’s been bare-bones empty for a few months, but I’ve been having a hard time thinking of something great to hang on it + wall art is typically not cheap.
Really, the only changes it has seen since we’ve lived here are the addition of a dog door (the dog door seriously deserves a post all its own, it’s so cool), and it was our paint-swatch area for a few weeks while we decided on an interior paint color:
(I still can’t believe how far we’ve come, geez!). After the wall was painted, it just kind of sat there for a few months.
Yes, me and my blank wall were perfectly fine with one another. That is, until I was shopping at Ellington & French in Berkeley and stumbled upon this calendar.
Words. Cannot. Express.
My feelings for this calendar : Everyone’s Feelings for Ryan Gosling :: SRSLY THIS CALENDAR : THE RYAN GOSLING OF CALENDARS. (That’s how analogies work, right? It’s been a long time since I took the SAT…)
I fell in love with this calendar from the moment I saw it. I’d been to FIVE of the twelve featured cities! Four of them I’d been to TWICE.
But now you’re thinking uhh Kate, you can’t just hang that one calendar in the middle of your wall and expect it to fill up the whole space, right?
Of course not. Also, since the world is ending in 2012, I figure I need to use this calendar before 2013, doi.
That is why I went to IKEA and bought some white frames + pre-cut mats for $10 each.
See where I’m going with this?
Luckily, these cutie prints fit pretty much perfectly in the pre-cut IKEA mats. Dope.
All I had to do was take a straightedge ruler, x-acto knife, and trim the prints down, then (using acid-free tape) tape them into place. Easy peasy.
I took measurements of the wall, frames, roughly how much space I wanted them to take up, and then sketched out where I wanted everything to go.
Then, I made my measurements on the wall and taped the paper from inside the frames to the wall.
I used the pieces of paper as guides, and would hammer in nails over them, as guides. Cakewalk.
So here’s how the price broke down:
For a grand total of $86. Not bad at all, considering most framed wall art can easily go for that much PER picture. And the result?
Now I guess Jason and I will have to go to Rio, since that’s the only city on the wall I’ve never been to!
I’m super happy with the way this turned out, it’s just enough to visually hold up against the big wall, but not too busy. Plus it’s nice that the artwork has some personal meaning to me, and to Jason too (since we went to Paris and London on our honeymoon). Hooray!!
Tuesday’s post featured my current favorite cake recipe: The Chocolate Coconut Dream Cake. So where did I take my most recent cake? To my beloved friend Stephanie’s birthday party!
Stephanie rang in the big 2-4 with the classiest tea party I had ever seen. She made the obligatory tiny sandwiches (goat cheese & cucumber, and salmon & cream cheese), raspberry tartlets, homemade sangria (putting the PARTY into tea party!), and my personal favorite: MINI PIES.
My favorite thing about the Mini-pies (aside from the fact that I got my own pie all to myself, and a mini-pie has way more crust than a normal slice of pie. YESSSSS) is that she was able to make tons of different flavors really easily. There were blackberry apricot, pluot & berry, pear, the list goes on.
Other friends contributed homemade scones, decorations, and flowers. It was truly a very classy party. The decorations were adorable vintage tea and cake stands, vintage china, and of course, a good helping of lace and crochet everywhere.
Why don’t people throw more tea parties? I want to start a book club now, where we don’t actually read books but we really just eat crumpets and put lemon curd on everything. Stephanie, your domestic prowess inspires me–now pinkies up, let’s throw another tea party soon!
Sometimes I joke this blog should be renamed Read Cake Do, or Read Make Cake. Probably because of my undying love of cake. Which is why I wanted to share one of my very favorite cake recipes. This is the cake that inspired me to start this blog in the first place, this is the legend: The Chocolate Coconut Dream Cake.
The thing that makes this cake so awesome is probably my favorite “secret” ingredient: Buttermilk. It is one of those things that you never usually would buy otherwise, but it makes ALL the difference in the world in creating a really moist, fluffy cake. Don’t have Buttermilk? Can’t get any at your local store? Try plain yogurt instead, it works great too.
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
2 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup Kaluha Liquor
1/2 cup cocoa
3 cups sifted cake flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 sticks butter
6 cups powdered sugar
4 Tbsps whole milk
1 tsp coconut extract
1/2 cup shredded coconut
3 drops pink food coloring
So that is how you make my current favorite cake creation, which we have come to call the Chocolate Coconut Dream Cake. I hope you enjoy it!
I’m very excited to have help with this post from Caty of Omnom Treats! Caty answered my prayers: I’ve been dying to learn more about decorating cakes (sometimes I think this blog should be renamed Read Cake Do), and she stepped in to share some of her know-how and talent. So without further ado:
You will need:
– whatever flavor you’d like!
.)
Caty and I found it helpful to remove the bottom of the cake, and really focus on crumbling the middle to have really fluffy cake crumbles. Just pick up a piece of cake, and break it apart in your hands. Easy!
Add about 1/4 cup of frosting at a time, mixing it in thoroughly before adding more. This isn’t really an exact science, you just want to mix the frosting in until you can form the cake into balls that won’t fall apart–but at the same time, you don’t want them to be too “wet” from the frosting.
Roll the cake-frosting into small round balls, smaller than a ping-pong ball, about 1″ in diameter. Place them on a cookie-sheet, and then pop those bad boys in the freezer for about 15-20 minutes, until they’re firm.
You need to get your double-boiler going and melt down those candy chips. Then, take the pops out of the freezer. Dip the tip of your stick into the melted candy-coating, and then gently push into the cake forms.After you finish all of them, stick the almost-ready-to-go cake pops back in the freezer for 10 more minutes and then get ready to decorate!
Dip each pop individually into the melted candy, taking care when you remove it to tap off the excess coating, rotating the pop as it cools so the coating is even. If you feel like you want your pops thicker, you can always go back later and re-dip.
While the candy is still hardening would be the best time to add your sprinkles, so get in there! Get whimsical with those things, they are crazy!!
We dried our cake pops by pressing them (by the sticks, not the tops!) into styrofoam squares. You can always improvise, or it won’t be the end of the world if you lay them on waxed paper while they cool, they’ll just have one flatter side.
So that’s it! They are so easy, and really really delicious! My favorite thing about these is they are about 2-bites each. It feels like such a treat, rather than having to eat a whole cupcake, or an entire slice of cake.
Thanks again, Caty!
So tell me, what is your Cake Pop plan? Any super cute decorating ideas? Killer flavor combos? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks Again, Caty from Omnom Treats!
I know it’s been WEEKS of waiting. Partially because I don’t know how to use an amazon.com shopping cart (I’ll explain). But the kitchen chalkboard is DONE!
Super fun! Here are some things I’m excited about using this bad boy for:
With all these uses, it makes me wonder how have I lived this long without a giant kitchen chalkboard?
Skipper is into it!
So let me break it down what’s been going on:
I painted the Rustoleum black paint onto the wall as our first coat, and was really taken aback by how dark it was. Okay doi, it’s black paint, but I just didn’t realize how heavy it would look.
I then ordered some slate-gray paint on Amazon.com, and it was not nearly enough. Then I tried ordering more paint, and I waited. And waited. And waited. And then it turns out, I never clicked “submit” on my amazon.com cart. Genius!
After that, the paint arrived shortly and I got it up on the wall, but then it needs at least 24 Hours to cure. Then you prime it with ground up chalk, and voila! Done!
I’m so happy we went with the gray. It’s like just a shade lighter, but it makes it seem less heavy. And some other site’s advice kept me from freaking out by letting me know that once you “prime” it with chalk, it seems way less harsh. Totally true!
Now what should I do with this lifetime supply of leftover chalkboard paint? Ideas?
Hi there! So the usual Thursday post has been postponed (ok not funny) because, if you haven’t noticed, the site has gotten a bit of a facelift. I know you totally noticed though, because you are perceptive and caring like that.
While I am a major nerd, I’m not major enough to be able to pull off installing a new theme, setting up a new database, fiddling with CSS for an entire evening, AND getting a new blog post up.
I know, I’m the worst, right?
Don’t get too attached to them. They’re gonna get changed. However, if you’re already attached to them, you’ll be happy to know you can buy this brand of tea at almost any World Market, and sometimes Safeway. Then you can keep them in a drawer in your kitchen for 6 years until you decide to turn them into something else. Sweet!
P.S. Thanks to everyone who helped me figure out the CSS madness with this site. There’s still a lot more to do, but I’m confident that it will be awesome with a little help from my friends.
Last week I realized I needed to make my dream of having a chalkboard in my kitchen become a reality. Never one to sit around and let the world pass me by, that weekend visited the Home Depot and purchased some Rustoleum Chalkboard paint.
Rustoleum apparently makes a variety of tints you can mix into the chalkboard base, but deciding that my fiance probably wouldn’t be too stoked about a hot pink chalkboard in the kitchen, I played it safe and opted for their basic black.
When I got home, I cleaned off the surface with TSP and water (and made sure to wear plastic gloves, since TSP can really burn your skin). I was so glad I did. The previous owner of our home was a smoker, and even though we had cleaned the walls with TSP when we moved in, there still was some residual nicotine on the walls.
Gross.
Seriously friends, don’t smoke. I didn’t need a deterrent already (after making these bad boys with my best friend for Halloween two years ago...yes those are real cigarettes, and yes we had to burn them all down individually. Pro tip: Don’t buy menthols if you are hoping they smell like mint. They just smell like casino), this just solidified everything D.A.R.E. taught me in the 1990s.
After learning some 21 Jump Street style life lessons, I continued to prep the wall by carefully taping off the trim, floor, and ceiling.
Uhh, no I didn’t just stand on a chair and do this. That would be unsafe. So unsafe. Didn’t D.A.R.E. teach you to make better decisions than that? I’m sure they did.
So after the space was all prepped, I started painting. And whoa.
Queue the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This thing looks like a freaking monolith.
So the black was pretty harsh. Who’d have thought? Oh that’s right, most people.
Well, I started looking around on other Blogs for what other people’s opinions were, and a lot of people were very happy with their black chalkboards. Especially once you “Prime” them with chalk (grind some up and distribute it all over the surface, it turns the board more of a soft gray).
After taking in the monolith and contemplating its virtues in interior design, I decided it was still a bit too much for me. I looked back at my original inspiration, the chalkboard my mom got me as a gift. 
I realized that one of the things I really love about this particular chalkboard is it’s soft slate gray coloring. So I fired up the internet and found a “slate gray” chalkboard paint on amazon. Booyah. I painted a swatch on, and am now waiting for it to cure so I can get an idea as to it’s true color.
For now, the Monolith awaits it’s next coat of paint. Or the next phase of man, not sure which will come first.
(Note: If you’re scratching your head about all the monolith references, sorry. I just assume that the majority of the population has [because you should] seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you haven’t, you need to do that the next time you have a spare 3 hours. Then come back here and re-read this post, you’ll laugh.)
This post all starts with a simple gift. This:
No, not the super cool chicken. The awesome chalkboard! A few months back, my mom bought it for me as a housewarming present. I loved my little kitchen chalkboard so much my mind turned to how we could take it to the next level. So I started looking for inspiration online.
Source: Uploaded by user via Kate on Pinterest
This might be a little too much chalkboard…but it’s very cool. Seriously, how else would strangers know where you keep your comprehensive collection of ashtrays??
Still a lot of chalkboard, but I love the stark contrast with the white in this kitchen..
Source: refinery29.com via Kate on Pinterest
DING DING DING!! We have a winner!
Originally I considered painting a large, blank wall in my kitchen, as a chalkboard, but the wall is textured and would be way too much visual space. We considered building a faux frame on the wall and maybe painting it a fun, bright color (Teal is one of my all time faves), but it still seemed like it might be too much. Here’s the wall as it looks currently, with charming paint swatches (we’re painting in April).
Then it hit me:
Well lookee-loo what we have here!
Seriously, how do you describe this? I know part of the cabinetry for the kitchen (it charmingly hides the refrigerator, which otherwise would totally be visible from the living room), but it just feels so random.
It is as if this cabinetry has been sitting here, waiting its whole life for a purpose. And that purpose, is to become a chalkboard for me to write sassy messages on.
Any other great ideas for chalkboard paint? Have you ever tried using chalkboard paint anywhere in your house?
