Pin Win: Hard Candy Suckers

So I've been testing pins like crazy lately. I have a Pinterest board for pins that I see that either seem fishy, too good to be true, way complicated and easy to mess up, or just a head scratcher. The times we have lulls between emails I test the pins to give us material to put up. I found a pin that just looked too good and simple to be true...

The Original Pin

http://artcanthurt.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/lollies.html/

Hard candy turned into suckers?! There's no way it's that simple and non-messy. Right? 

Well, I bought my candy and sucker sticks, followed all the directions exactly and...

It worked!

Perfectly in fact. There were no problems, no trouble, and no mess. The only "complaint" I have is that they aren't the prettiest of suckers...but that wasn't the point of this pin test. I have to say I was surprised, I wasn't expecting such a successful pin. But, now we know that we're not having our leg pulled...this pin definitely is a keeper. 

It's a pin win for sure.

BBQ Bombs

Easy dinners are my favorite. Finding a recipe like this is gold:

The Original Pin

http://www.thecountrycook.net/2012/04/barbecue-cups.html

BBQ Boat Gold. That's what Amanda thought as well. She says, "I saw these and figured they would be a yummy easy meal for my boyfriend and I. Little did I know, I was creating atomic BBQ bombs in the oven..."

The Pinstrosity

Mushroom clouds of dough and BBQ. So what happened here? 

Amanda got looking at the original recipe to check what had turned her BBQ boats into BBQ bombs and found what may have been the detonator. The recipe calls for "1 (12oz.) tube refrigerated biscuits" but taking a look at the picture in the recipe we find an additional secret to making this recipe work as shown...do you see it?

http://www.thecountrycook.net/2012/04/barbecue-cups.html

The biscuits aren't just your normal everyday size biscuits, their the jr. size, which is why Amanda's full size biscuits morphed into atomic proportions. 

How to fix this?

• Looking at the original recipe, you don't want the dough to be too thick in the pan so that it will form the right sized boats. As all biscuit dough is not created equal, you may have to bring out the inner mad scientist for a minute or two. The dough in the recipe appears to be about 1/4" thick in the cups and they don't reach all the way to the top. If the biscuit size you're using gives you more dough than that, pull a glop off and reshape the dough in the cup. Later you can combine all the extra "glops" into biscuits so dough isn't wasted. 
• If you don't want to be the mad scientist, buy the Jr. size or cut the regular biscuits down by about 1/2. 

Pinstrosity on Facebook

To make it easier for more people to enjoy Pinstrosity, we have just launched the Pinstrosity page on Facebook! 

Go here to check it out, like it, and send it to your friends!

http://www.facebook.com/Pinstrosity

MiO Ice Cube Mess

I've seen the "Rainbow Water" idea as a number of different pins and decided to give it a try. Everyone's drinks looked so fun and cool! 

The Original Pin

http://happyhooligans.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/rainbow-water-2/

One mom just used food coloring to color the ice cubes, then put the cubes in a regular cup of water. Another mom froze Koolaid into cubes then put that in water. Another mom froze Koolaid into cubes and put them in lemon lime soda. 

I decided to make MiO ice cubes since we don't have Kool Aid in the house usually. I squirt a little bit of different flavors (to get different colors) of MiO in each compartment of the ice tray (since a little MiO goes a long way), then filled the tray with water. Once the cubes were frozen solid I plunked them in a glass and filled it with cold water. 

The Pinstrosity

Disappointment. This picture is taken probably about 60 seconds after I filled the glass. Those cubes melted SO fast! And there was only about 2 seconds of color layering before they all just blended together. The ice cubes melted a lot faster than normal and they all floated to the top, erasing any layering that went on. And as careful as I was to try and use just a little bit of MiO, it was WAY too strong. Undrinkably so. Perhaps next time I'll just stick to the original idea and do food coloring and water or Kool-Aid and Sprite and see how that works.

                                                                                                       

Fried Egg "Underflow"

I LOVE fried eggs. Yum yum yum! I'm an over easy kind of girl...gotta have the yolk runny, but cooked on both sides. So when I saw this pin on Pinterest, I put it in on my "Delighting the Taste Buds" board fast. It looks so pretty and is a fun way to dress up breakfast (or lunch...or dinner...or whenever you make fried eggs).

The Original Pin

http://www.apronstringsblog.com/uncategorized/flower-power-eggs-recipe-sunny-side-up-eggs/

I was a little curious exactly how it was going to work though...I could see it being kinda a mess. I wasn't sure how I was going to keep the egg from spilling out the bottom of the bell pepper slice, which is just what happened, and I was worried that if I used too large of an egg or too small of a bell pepper that the egg would run over. So I tried to pick my pepper and my eggs carefully.

The Pinstrosity

I very carefully cracked the first egg into the pepper and immediately it started oozing out the side. That's the top egg in the picture. So the second egg (the bottom one) I tried the good ol' crack with one hand while I pushed the bell pepper down onto the pan with the other hand. It was a little tricky since I'm not very good at cracking eggs one handed. But I got the egg in the pepper and was able to keep it from oozing out the bottom as much as the first egg...but I still got a slight ooze. After that they cooked up beautifully and flipped really easily. So we didn't have an egg overflow, it was more of an "underflow"

added 7-19-2012: We had a question of how to flip the eggs emailed to us. You'll have to wait to flip the egg until it is cooked through quite a bit or you'll get egg splatter all over and have leakage on both sides. Either that, or just go sunny side up. I'm not a sunny side up fan (too slimy) so I let my eggs cook a long time so that they were as cooked through as they could be since I wasn't going to try flipping them.

The taste was a little odd with the two combined, and I'm not sure I liked the crunchy texture of the bell pepper mixed with the soft texture of the egg, but it wasn't bad and it did make them look fancy and dressed up the top of my flat fried burrito (basically a quesadilla with beans in it).

                                                                                                      

Glowing Bubbles Popped

So if you've been following the blog for a while now you probably saw the "It Burst My Glowing Bubbles" post about bursting the glow in the dark bubble myth. I found that the glow in the dark solution diluted the bubble solution too much so that bubbles couldn't even form. Well, since that post I've been wondering about using a larger quantity of bubble solution and seeing if that would work and I finally tested it out.

Just as a refresher, here's The Original Pin

Source: nanachka.tumblr.com via Marquette on Pinterest

I finally remembered to grab a big ol' bottle of bubbles this time. Last time I tested an 8 oz. bottle of bubbles. I could have gone to a 33 oz bottle, but why do that when you could go big and do a 100 oz. bottle?!  I figured if it didn't work with the 100 oz. it wouldn't work with the 33 oz. 

The Pinstrosity

Remember the size comparison last time?

Here's the size comparison this time:

We tested this out last night so that I didn't have to hide in my closet with towels stuffed under the door to block the light. Like the first time, I tested the bubbles first to see if the bubbles were good just on its own (because sometimes you do get crappy bubbles), and it worked great. So I broke the glow stick to make it glow, cut it open and poured it in the bubbles. It just kinda sank to the bottom and didn't want to mix in, so bubbles still formed, but there was no glow on them. So I put the cap back on the bottle and shook it up until the glow solution was all throughout the bubbles. 

Ooh, 100 oz. of glowing bubble solution.  

And the results...didn't work. With the glow solution mixed through the bubble solution, bubbles would not form at all, the consistency had been changed enough. I was disappointed, I thought this might work. So yet again, the glowing bubble pin is popped. 

This morning I was curious to see if bubbles still wouldn't form and pulled the bubble wand out...bubbles! Sitting over night something happened and the bubble solution is again working. They aren't glowing of course, but we do have workable bubble solution again. 

So then I got wondering, maybe the original picture just meant to have a glowing glow stick in the area of the bubbles and it would reflect of the surface of the bubbles. So I retreated to my closet and stuffed the bottom of the door with towels and tested this out. Nope, still doesn't work. 

This pin is officially popped.

Oobleck Watercolor

I was just trying to decide which pin I wanted to test today to post up when this email came in from Carolyn. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Thanks Carolyn! She says, "Who doesn't fondly remember getting to watercolor as a kid? I hated the fact that the watercolors that you buy at the store had so little in them; they never lasted very long. When I saw this pin for homemade watercolors I became pretty excited. I now had a way to make as much watercolors as I wanted, in what ever color I wanted!"

The Original Pin

http://www.meetthedubiens.com/2012/03/make-your-own-rainbow-watercolors.html

"While my darling son napped I quickly gathered up the supplies, and started mixing enough for one color. But my mixture was too thick, so I added some more vinegar as suggested on the original pin. But that made it waaaay too runny. So I thought if I doubled it I could make two colors, and I would add a little less vinegar than supposed to. Still it was too runny.  I threw that out, grabbed another plastic cup to try again. This time I read the directions on mixing it all up a little more carefully. 'You basically want it to be like an oobleck or gak consistency (can be formed but then melts away if you let it go).' Gak! I loved messing with that as a kid. It was so cool that it was a liquid but kind of a solid at the same time! So I started mixing away, using the exact measurements that were given. Still too thick. I reached for the vinegar, but them remembered that Gak get really thick when handled really fast (such as quick stirring, stabbing your finger at it, etc.). I got a spoonful and pulled it out of the cup to look at it. Sure enough it quickly turned runny. I managed to get past my first road block, and had the consistency right."

"Then I started to mix the color in. It took more color than I thought to get it to the shade of green that I liked. But that's ok, because it wasn't too difficult to get the right shade. I then set it on the counter to dry. Through out the day I could see a little layer of liquid rising to the top, taking a lot of the color with it, so the main paint wasn't as vibrant. Annoyingly it took twice as long as the original pin said it would to dry. And the color faded to a really light pastel green."

"When it was dry I grabbed a brush, and a scrap piece of paper to test it out and see if I wanted to make more colors."

The Pinstrosity

The color isn't as vibrant as Carolyn had hoped, but she did end up with usable watercolor paint.

So you don't have to play the mad chemist as Carolyn did to get the consistency right, she suggests stirring slowly so you don't mistake the mixture as being too thick. She also suggests adding way more color than you think you need so you get a more vibrant color in the end (if a vibrant color is what you're going for) as the color fades as the concoction dries.