Elmo's Weird

Oh kids just don't know what they're missing by not knowing how awesome Sesame Street used to be. It's just not the same anymore. Anyone else have "The Word is No" or "I Know a New Way to Walk" running through their head right now? I hope so.  Even though it's just not the same, I'm glad it is still around. I love how you can get Cookie Monster anything right now. I have a Cookie Monster clutch purse, adult sized footie pajamas with cookie monster head baubles on the feet, and a cookie monster beanie hat. No, I don't think I'll ever fully grow up. I love how Sesame Street characters are all over Pinterest. Okay...I love how Sesames Street characters are everywhere. Cookie Monster has been big for a while now. People have made Cookie Monster cookies, cakes, cupcakes, cake balls, etc. We all saw this picture floating around the Internet before many of us even knew what Pinterest was:

source: all over the internet...this picture is everywhere

You've even seen a Cookie Monster Pinstrosity here on the blog before at http://pinstrosity.blogspot.com/2012/08/arum-num-num-num.html:

The Original Pin

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/873655/cookie-monster-cupcakes

The Pinstrosity

Well today we'd like to add another Sesame Street character to the Pinstrosity family...Elmo. My brother used to love Elmo's World. He went around the house singing "La la la la! La la la la! Elmo's Weird!" (he couldn't say the "rl"). He didn't really watch Sesame Street...just Elmo's "Weird". Cristina, today's submitter, has a daughter who is also into Elmo, even though she's never seen Sesame Street. Cristina's daughter's birthday is coming up and she's been trying to figure out just the right thing for her birthday party. With the love of Elmo strong in the house she decided to give this a try:

The Original Pin

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60194687@N00/3919878115/

While these are cupcakes, Cristina figured it wouldn't be too hard to turn into a full size cake. Here's her "Elmo" creation:

The Pinstrosity

Cristina explained what happened. "Now, a few things went wrong here. The first being that I couldn't get the buttercream frosting Elmo red. It didn't matter how much red food coloring I put in, Elmo would have been pink. So I did the logical thing and added some drops of blue food coloring. Instead of making it a darker red, it turned into a poop color. The actual frosting was so runny because of the food coloring that Elmo's "fur" actually looks like what would happen to someone's digestive system if they had food poisoning." 

"I actually didn't have marshmallows for the eyes, so I tried using buttercream for that. The problem was that I was laughing so hard that the eyes look awful (either that, or I completely lack any type of frosting skills....which is probably the actual case). I also didn't want to waste an Oreo cookie on his mouth, so that's that!!"

"All in all, the cake was still yummy. If "Sesame Street" had a character that dealt with teaching kids how to poop in the toilet, this is what he would look like."

I've actually run into this same issue with coloring frosting. Regular food coloring just doesn't quite cut it for things like this. You can get frosting dye now in many grocery stores. Our Walmart even has it (in the cake decorating aisle next to scrapbooking and painting supplies...which seems weird to me. I'd put it over next to the baking aisle, but Walmart doesn't ask me my opinion on these matters). These dyes are made specifically for frosting. It takes less dye to get a vibrant color and helps preserve the texture of the frosting. 

The other thing that would help this project is placement of the various facial features. If the eyes were a little higher on the head so that there isn't cake visible at the top it would give more of the illusion that the eyeballs are sitting on top of the head. The other thing I would change is the size of the mouth. Muppets' mouths take up nearly half of their face/head. With those two small tweaks, the Muppet will look more Muppetish. 

Luckily with cake decorating you can make a cake exquisitely beautiful, plain and boring, funny, or super ugly, but it usually doesn't ruin the taste. As long as it tastes good, I'm not going to complain and luckily I think most kids have the same view on life, cake, and dirt.

GCT Level Examples

Happy Monday! This is so me this morning:

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/10/02

When we started Pinstrosity we knew we wanted a way to rate the projects with some sort of a "fail scale". We had already seen with our own projects that there were some near misses and there were some catastrophes. Every project was not created equal. As we thought on it, Em came up with an idea to base our scale off of one of our projects and immediately we turned to this post:

Not So Grilled Cheese

Hello All! This is the first post by Emilee, and well it's not actually mine! This one was The Mr. Chip's disaster project. Ahem. Here Goes!

The Original Pin

Awesome right! Who knew?! Grilled Cheese, easy on the Grilled.

http://www.thekitchn.com/lunch-tip-from-jamie-oliver-to-144021

The Pinstrosity

What Went Wrong

 A few things went wrong here:

If you read the directions, instead of just going off of the picture, it would have told you that this "trick" doesn't work on ALL toasters, however, it then goes on to say that this only works on a toaster without a "Toast Cage", AND (here's where they get ya') if the cheese does NOT melt off the side. So in all reality this only works if there is in fact no cheese involved at all, lame right?!  Because really what is a Grilled Cheese without melty cheese?!

In Chip's experiMELT he turned the toaster over, put in the cheese and bread, just as the pictures shows, and well...our toaster caught on fire. So this project is a bust.

How to Fix This

Go to your local Wally World, and buy a Toaster Oven!

...and well another option is to carefully place your cheese on the bread, and make sure you REALLY watch it, because the cheese can get out of hand really quickly. Another thing to consider is that toasters were not meant to be on their sides, so the heat has no where to go if it can't vent up, causing to much heat, and then fire. Overall this "trick" was a bust and safety hazard, so if I were you I would stick with traditional toast, or traditional Grilled cheese, on a grill, the way they were meant to be. Happy Toasting!

After we chose this project as our basis for the fail scale, the rest of the ideas flowed fast and easy. It quickly became dubbed the Grilled Cheese Toast Fail Scale (or the GCT Scale for short).


We've all had issues making toast. One time we'll get a beautifully toasted piece of bread, other times it won't toast at all, and then there are those lovely occasions where we set off the smoke alarm. Let me go through each of the levels of the scale (with the addition of Pin Wins and Pin Spins...which aren't a fail so they're not on the scale) and give you one of our favorite examples for each.

Pin Win:
A project that worked out just like it was supposed to. This is what we all hope for when we start our projects, but we all know not to hold our breath. One of the Pin Wins we have featured is the Penny Stain. You know...the one that says "put a bunch of pennies in vinegar for 2 weeks and you have a great Caribbean Blue stain". I decided to give that pin a very thorough test and here's what I ended up with:





Next, we have Pin Spins:
Pin Spins are projects that people took and made them their own. They are pins that people tweaked to personalize, improve, or change. They don't turn out just like the original pin because of the tweaks, but they still turn out fun and great.

One of the projects that inspired this category was submitted to us by Jean. She was trying to do the "60 years of memories" idea (only she'd do "51 years of memories"), where you have people from every age of your loved one's life send in letters with memories. You then put them in chronological order and give the sentimental and fun gift to the special person. Jean wrote 100 of her Dad's friends/family members, figuring she'd get at least half . She ended up with 15. That wasn't quite going to work. She said, "Since I was a far cry from the intended 51 letters, I had to work with what I had. I created a magazine, and gave each friend a full page to tell their story. This resulted in a large, easy-to-read fonts and big pictures."



When things don't turn out just exactly how you imagined them, look for ways you can salvage it and turn it into something new! I know not everything is salvageable, but you'd be surprised what you can save even out of the biggest Pinstrosities. 


Now on to the actual Fail Scale. 

GCT Level 1 (aka Pindifferent)

1: White-It didn't even toast at all!   This is when a project varies from its intended finished product slightly, but it's fairly close.

And the example? The birthday balloon avalanche. We all have this idea of a wall of balloons falling onto the happy Birthday Person, covering their whole person in balloons. Instead of the wall of balloons though, these guys got a bit of a balloon slump/avalanche:

GCT Level 2

2: Two-Toned-Toasted on one side, but not the other.  This is when a project doesn't quite turn out, but it's still usable. More of an "It's not ideal, but it still kinda worked" mentality. 

Here's our example for Level 2 projects:

The original pin:

http://www.lizvetteblog.com/diy-easy-christmas-lights-background-photography/

The Pinstrosity:

http://pinstrosity.blogspot.com/2012/11/faux-depth-of-field.html

GCT Level 3:

3: Brown-Darker than preferred, but still edible. This is when a project definitely went wrong, but all hope is not lost. Maybe it's usable as something else. Maybe it's semi-usable as intended. It's definitely not quite right, but not worth throwing away either.

The Original Pin

http://busy-mommy.com/2009/12/cooks-ham-tortilla-christmas-tree.html

The Pinstrosity

http://pinstrosity.blogspot.com/2012/12/party-palate-planning.html

GCT Level 4

4: Black-Charred, but maybe the dog will eat it. This is definitely a project gone wrong. It's no longer usable as originally intended, but maybe it's still usable in pieces? Maybe you can dismantle it for the future?

The Original Pin

http://www.wikihow.com/Curl-Hair-with-Bobby-Pins

The Pinstrosity

http://pinstrosity.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-hair-raising-experience.html

GCT Level 5

5: Up in Flames-Past saving. This is when a project hits disaster zone. There's no saving any of it. Time to chuck it all out.

The Original Pin

http://juicy-bits.typepad.com/juicy_bits/2011/02/173-unicorns-and-rainbows-party-part-1-the-details.html

 Tutorial is here: http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/yarn-eggs-670275/

The Pinstrosity

Okay...I'll give you my two favorites for GCT Level 5:

The Original Pin

http://www.maniacworld.com/How-To-Make-Glow-In-The-Dark-Mountain-Dew.html

How to make Mt. Dew glow. The video looks convincing. Looks like fun. But this is the result:

The Pinstrosity

"There's nothing in that picture!" you say. Wrong...my husband is in that picture holding the "glowing" bottle of Mt. Dew. Seriously. As you can see...it doesn't glow! Just look at the Cam-man's disappointed and disgusted face below when the flash was used.

We love it when people rate their own projects. It's fun to see everyone's perception of how their project turned out. 

Spring Cleaning

It's March! It's March! It's March!! I'm slightly excited. Okay, I'm really excited. February is a rough month...it's cold, it's busy, and cloudy. At least that's how it is here. I think that's why February is the shortest month, to get us all through it. I'm excited for the oncoming warmth and bliss. While I'm excited for the warmth, it also means that it is time to get serious about getting my house in order and getting reorganized. That's a daunting task to me this year. I feel a little overwhelmed. But I'm finding some things that are giving me some ideas to help with the spring cleaning and getting motivated to jump into this project and I thought I'd share some of them with you. 

First off, Martha Stewart. Now, don't let those to words scare you off. She has some really neat daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal checklists that seem quite doable. These are definitely on my list of things to try out. 

http://www.marthastewart.com/274764/cleaning-checklists/@center/276998/organizing-checklists

Another cleaning list I found that looks pretty doable is this 30 minutes a week deep cleaning schedule:

http://www.thecountrychiccottage.net/2013/01/30-minutes-per-week-house-cleaning.html

Our house is in desperate need of a deep clean and I'm hoping those two schedules will help me get that done. I also found these pins that give some great tips on how to get specific items cleaned:

http://www.crunchybetty.com/clean-your-drains-with-baking-soda-and-vinegar-surprise

And natural cleaners are highly popular right now. Here's a great post with 2 recipes for some great natural cleaners:

http://missabigailshopechest.blogspot.com/2011/10/home-ec-lesson-natural-cleaners.html

And the fridge. Isn't that always one of the worst jobs when it gets time to deep clean the kitchen? I hate  it. But I did find an awesome idea that will help me out next time. After I clean the fridge this time I think I'm going to make me some of these awesome fridge mats. Just pull the mat out and clean it rather than having to climb into the fridge and awkwardly balance in the half squat position while trying to scrub the shelves. 

http://www.itsanorganizedchaos.com/tutorials/day-3-the-coolest-spot-in-the-house-just-became-even-cooler-fridge-coasters-tutorial/

In addition to wanting to get the house clean, I want to get organized and put together. I need to get the house where there is a specific place for everything. Right now we have a lot of floaters. Items without homes. But the problem is...we don't really have homes for them. There are a lot of things we need to get rid of, but there are the things we want/need to keep. We just need to create homes for those items. One idea I found will help give new homes to items and it will help free up our seating issue in the living room:

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-build-window-seat-from-wall-cabinets/index.html

I would love to have window seats. That'd by so handy and warm and fun. This is definitely on my to do list for this spring. 

There's a great idea on Miss Abigail's Hope Chest about creating a Homemaking File Box. 

http://missabigailshopechest.blogspot.com/2011/09/homemaking-file-box.html

At first I thought, "Hey! I should just make a Homemaking File Box Pinterest board!" but as I've thought on it I've realized reasons why having a physical box might actually be good. Right now I have full access to the internet at home, but that hasn't always been the case and it may not always be the case in the future, so it would be good to have it all handy and in place. Another thing is that with the Pinterest board, the pins would just be scattered all over the board and I've have to search through them all for the pin I want. With the file box I would know exactly which folder to look in for "Removing stains" or "Planning a Menu".

I've also decided lately that I want to learn to cook with fresh herbs and to have my own little herb garden, but I didn't want to use up counter space. They wouldn't survive outside either (we'll see if I can even keep them alive inside...I don't have a good history with plants). I did find this idea for a hanging herb garden and I love it. 

http://www.houseofhepworths.com/2011/08/18/kitchen-rail-turned-hanging-planter/

This would kill two birds with one stone. I'd have my herb garden, but then I'd also be fulfilling number 3 on this list I'm trying to incorporate in my home:

http://theclassywoman.blogspot.com/2011/03/decorating-mantras-to-live-by.html#.UTJWLzD_l8E

And then there's the decorating. I have so many ideas for how I want to decorate out home. I like a mixture of styles honestly. I'm kind of a shaker/arts and crafts/cottage/county/classic/naturalist kind of girl. Now I know, some of those styles contradict each other a little bit, but I'm slowly finding a way to make them work. Once I get the house clean, I want to try to decorate a little more. I've gotten some good ideas from this little gem from an earlier post we did:

http://www.lincolnapts.com/Apartments/module/blog/action/view_content/?p=542

Here are a few of the things I want to do in my attempt to decorate my home:

The Wall Vases:

http://www.shanty-2-chic.com/2012/02/wine-bottle-wall-vase.html

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/5-favorite-wall-vases-119729

A framed pin cushion (which I'd hang on the wall right by my sewing desk):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/made_in_monty/4471670922/

Photos in Pie and Cake Tins for the awkward space between the tops of the cupboards and the roof:

http://homerestyleruk.blogspot.com/2011/10/bake-your-cake-hang-tin-on-wall.html

Pillow Cases:

http://www.honeybearlane.com/2012/01/ten-minute-pillow-cases.html

Embellished Dish Towels:

http://sweetwater.typepad.com/makelifesweet/2011/09/the-fair.html

So I know those are huge projects or ideas, but it's the little touches that can really give a good pop I think. We'll see at least. What plans do you have for Spring Cleaning and decorating? We'd love to see what you've got planned!

Waffle Iron Brownies

Who doesn't love a good brownie?! I LOVE brownies. Is anyone starting to notice that I love just about everything? It's a blessing and a curse...

Well even more than I love brownies, I love brownie batter. I get that from my mom, and when we go over for dinner she is sure to save some batter in a bowl for me. Go Louise!

 Is it totally unhealthy for me to eat with the raw egg? Probably. 

Meh, I'll risk it. 

Here is a pin that I hadn't seen before (gasp!) that Kelsey sent to us about her brownie mishap. Check it out!

The Original

 

http://www.chow.com/food-news/54485/common-appliances-uncommon-uses/

This article is about uncommon uses for common household items. I dig it! They even have their very own brownie recipe that you can find here!

The Pinstrosity

Here is Kelsey's not so yummy finished product...

Fail.

Bummer dude.

Now I am not sure if Kelsey used their recipe or her own, however I can say that this just isn't appetizing at all!

Seeing as the original website tried their recipe out with their waffle iron I would suggest sticking with that! It has been tried and true! Also it says to not grease the pan, but I would probably go ahead and give it a hit of Pam just to be on the safe side. Now I haven't tested this out and if you try that and it turns out disastrous please don't come knocking down my door with pitch forks, I gave you warning! 

I haven't tested this!

Anyone want to try this out for me?! I will give you a metaphorical shiny nickle ( that's an honor in my family!).

I do know that waffles have a hard time if they aren't greased beforehand so that's why I would go with the assumption that grease would help. However we all know where assuming gets us. *sigh*

Another thing that might have happened is that they were using two different types of waffle irons. I know that different products cook at different times and temperatures so that may have had something to do with it.

Kelsey I would suggest sticking with the oven until you get it figured out though. 

Anyone have any awesome tips for her? Help a sister out!!

 This girl says she LOVES brownies. 

Wanna start a club Kelsey?! 

Happy Friday Pinstrosipeeps!