A Winner and Purim Recap!

I feel like I'm saying this a lot lately:)

The winner of the Ella giveaway is MELISSA, of the comment below:

Melissa said...

Cute layouts! I've been meaning to scrap one of those "day in the life of" pages.

Melissa, email me at keshet.shenkar@gmail.com and I'll send you your ebook info!

In other news, Purim was super fun!

It began with a lot of baking....

[my fave chocolate chip cookie recipe, found serendipitously on the Shoprite chocolate chip bag]


A lot of shalach manos preparation....

FYI, shalach manos are gift baskets that we give to family and friends on Purim. I make around 30 to 40, so that we give to whoever comes by and do our deliveries without having to count. I included candies, a note (stamped with Studio Calico stamps) and a little chocolate chick (more on that later).

I lucked out finding these barnyard boxes on Amazon:

As for the cake pops, that was a very LONG and harrowing saga.

Suffice it to say they are not *quite* as easy as they look. At least not to me;) After much frustration (the fact that my apartment was about 9,425 degrees was not helping) I decided to make little sitting chicks instead of cake pops.


The result was less gourmet than I had hoped, but people seemed to be able to identify them as chicks:

I affectionately referred to them as my little freakazoids.

And here is one little guy, in his treat bag:


While S and I didn't totally match the theme, let alone matching each other, we still achieved a harmonious balance between Minnie Mouse/Stepford Wife (I was torn) and a farmer:


We had a bunch of my high school friends over for the Purim feast, along with a couple in our building.

In honor of the barnyard theme, some guests came impersonating American Gothic (and looking very serious:))


And we got some fun (and some crazy) group shots with the camera self-timer. Loving all the costumes. These are some of my best friends in the world, who I met in high school--and I love that we can still enjoy "old times" miles away from home.



We talked and ate and laughed for almost 5 hours, and it was so much fun.

All in all, a wonderful Purim!

What's YOUR go-to costume?