Let Me Eat Cake– Chocolate, Please

Who doesn't like chocolate cake, especially this cake. This recipe has been on the blog for a while now, but it was on the "Other Stuff" page. I had intended to put more topics of interest there, but instead I'm reorganizing, and the "Other Stuff" page will soon become "Classroom Design." I post this chocolate cake recipe so it is not lost.

This is a favorite summer recipe. It can be made any time of year, but for me and my life, summer is the only time I have for random baking. And summer is less stressful than the school year so I can live a bit more healthfully and enjoy a piece of not-too-decadent cake. Like all posts on the blog, this is not written as just a straightforward recipe. Gotta throw in a little fun commentary. Life is lived in the small details after all, right?

Died-and-Went-to-Heaven Chocolate Cake

Yum, yum, yummy chocolate cake

This is a great, easy, low-guilt cake. Great because it is super moist thanks to buttermilk. Easy because it is made in a bundt pan and only needs a glaze to pour over top– not frosting to spread. And Low-Guilt because it only has 220 calories and 5 grams of fat, per slice, which is 1/16 of the cake. Here we go!

Ingredients for cake:
1 3/4 C flour
1 C sugar
3/4 C cocoa powder (Dutch Process)
1 1/2 t baking soda
1 1/2 baking powder
1 t salt
1 1/4 C buttermilk
1 C packed brown sugar
2 lg eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 C canola oil
2 t vanilla
1 C strong black coffee

Ingredients for icing:
1 C confectioners sugar
1/2 t vanilla
1 to 2 Tbs buttermilk, as needed so it pours and dribbles

Preheat the oven to 350°

Spray bundt pan with Pam and then flour. I don't have all silicon baking dishes by any means, but with this silicone bundt pan it is super easy to get cakes out.

I was married 25 years before I got my Kitchen-Aid Mixer. I only got it as a poor substitute for a spring break vacation, so it was not without it's sacrifice. But I do love it.

Note the Twin Terrors that live in the bowl... why? you ask... I have no idea. My husband got them for me for Valentine's day and threw them in there, and they just sort of took up residence. I think they are mostly there because the bowl was empty and any empty space in our house forms a vacuum which instantly fills itself. The Twin Terrors are not in ANYway reference to my younger identical twin brothers... nope... not at all... never crossed my mind.

BTW, if you have anyone living in your mixer, take them out before the next steps. grin.

In a large bowl, whisk flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and baking powder.

Stir together the buttermilk, brown sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla. Then add to dry ingredients and beat with an electric mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes. This is where I REALLY appreciate the ol' Kitchen-Aid. After 2 minutes whisk in hot coffee until completely incorporated. This will for a very thin batter– not to worry!

Pour the batter into the prepped pan. Note I keep my silicone bundt pan on a small cooling rack as it makes the soft pan easier to handle and keep its shape. I lift the cake and rack and leave both in the oven to bake.

Bake 45 to 55 minutes, or until the tester comes out clean.

Cool cake on rack for ten minutes and then remove the cake from the pan and let it cool completely.

Whisk the icing ingredients until pourable. Pour over the cake on the plate. I make this cake for my health conscious friends, and my not-so-health conscious friends, too... they get ice cream on top! :)

I would happily give credit to whoever I got this recipe from, but I have had it for a long while now and have no idea of the source. Whoever made it up– Thank you! I really think it is the buttermilk and coffee that give this cake its moist, rich flavor. I never buy buttermilk any other time, and can't really imagine that I'd like it straight up, but in this recipe– yummmm. And coffee? Well, everything in life is better with a little bit of coffee. It's kinda funny though, this cake does not taste like a mocha cake. It is just good, straight-up chocolate.

Enjoy!

Thanks so much for stopping by for this non-typical, non-teacher post. I hope you'll swing by again... though you are not likely to find another cake recipe, there is a great oatmeal bake recipe hiding somewhere in these pages if you search. Next up on Monday, will be a new video I made. It's just a short one for the kiddos. Good for viewing to learn about fledgling birds and text-to-self connections, and Mo Willems There's a Bird on Your Head.  You just never know what the next post will hold.

See you next time.

This post first appeared on the Other Stuff page as Died-And-Went-To-Heaven Chocolate Cake on kidpeopleclassroom.com

Student Bobbleheads for Display: How-To

Hi Folks! Happy Monday! I'm here with a Monday Made It to share. I am particularly fond of these little bobble head displays. My students are cute anyway, and the bobblehead style shows them off even more. They were a BIG hit with all our hallway visitors!

I have a long strip of hallway in which to show off what we do in the classroom. I like to make a yearlong spot for each student so I can swap out student work, without having to create a whole new display each time.

I saw a Pin that showed little boy and girl bobble head clipart, and it got me thinking about how I could use real photos of my students in a similar fashion. Because I am a somewhat low tech kinda girl and I didn't want to have to crop and alter photos, I took the photos for this project with the end project in mind.

I took a snapshot of each student's head with their head pretty much filling the entire frame in my camera.

No, this is not one of my students. This is my long suffering husband demonstrating how the student's head should fill the photo frame. Yes, he's wearing his yellow lego head and standing against a yellow wall in our kitchen because I wanted it to be a plain wall... we have no plain walls in our house...

Then I took a photo with the student's entire body in the frame... well, actually, I didn't. This first year I took the photo half way through their head– it helps if you have their entire neck to attach the big heads to later– down to their knees. This coming year I am going to take photos of bodies all the way down to their feet. I think the bobblehead element will be more obvious if the body is a little bit smaller in proportion than it was this year.

Next time the body photo will go all the way down
to include their feet

I printed the head and body photos in the standard 4 x 6 size. Then I recruited anyone I could... again, ever patient Jonathan, and we sat and cut out the heads and the bodies. Be sure to cut these out right on the outer edge of the figures– you don't want any excess.

I glued the big heads to the little bodies and laminated the whole thing as one piece. Then there was more cutting– this time I cut around the laminated figures with a quarter inch border because I wanted those little guys to last. You can laminate at school, of course, but I used my home laminator to do this... I tell you those things are great. They laminate with a thicker, stiffer plastic which keeps them flat and sturdy.

The trickiest part of the cutting was cutting into the bodies and around the fingers. You need to do this so that the display sheet can slide up into their hands and look like the figure is holding it. I laminated black sheets of paper, slide them under hands, then taped them to the back of the figure with Scotch packing tape– you know that wide, crystal clear kind that this teacher can't live without.

The laminated display sheet is there so the student work can easily be taped onto the sheet. Otherwise the student work itself has to be removed from the hands each time it is switched out. The fingers on those little figures are very tiny so you don't want to have to mess with them too much.

I discovered a great new wall hanging system through this project, too. I don't know about your school, but at ours, stuff likes to leap off the walls. Some kinds of poster putty work, but it is expensive and students have been known to take it. And masking tape works sometimes, especially if you hit it with a rubber mallet... ah ha! I bet you didn't know about the old rubber mallet trick, did you? Yep, I keep a rubber mallet handy and give posters a little pound after I put them up with masking tape. You can find rubber mallets like this one at the dollar store.

The Old Rubber Mallet Trick

This time, though, I knew I was going to be touching those little figures each time I swapped out the artwork and I really wanted them to stay put even when monkeyed with. So after a little exploring online, I found these tack squares.

These little double sticky squares work wonderfully!! Just two or three of them held each little bobblehead figure to the wall all year!

And the best thing about them is that they are repositionable and reuseable. They came right off the wall with no problem when I took them down at the end of the year. None of them tore or clung, even though they were still very sticky... SO sticky in fact, I kept them! I put them on the back of one of the black display sheets– yep I kept those, too– and I'm going to see if I can reuse both of them next year. It can't hurt to try.

And let me tell you, my kiddos LOVED getting to take home their own bobbleheads at the end of the year, too. They were one of the most favorite end of school "gifts" that they got. I wouldn't be surprised if they are up in bedrooms right now holding treasured masterpieces.

So there you have it! A brand new display idea to start the year and use all school year long. I hope you like it! If you do, would you please Pin It!

For more classroom display and set up ideas, keep scooting by. I am doing a series this summer on classroom design. I put together a page with links to everything from standing movement centers to valances to a classroom tour video. Click on the button to see!

One more thing... there's going to be a GIVEAWAY here in a few weeks... three giveaways to be exact! It is part of Teacher Book Talk Tuesday. More details will be on tomorrow's post. And teacher bloggers, if you would like to be part of the giveaway, then link up tomorrow with a book review!

Now, it's time to head on back to the other Monday Made It posts to fine more inspiration. There is always great stuff to be found at one of my favorite linky parties. Thanks, Tara!!

Don't forget to PIN today... if you're like me, you'll get ready to make the Bobbles and think, now what did she do again... and then forget where the heck you saw the idea! So Pin, Pin, Pin! And do feel free to share any way you'd like.

Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!

No Sew, Drop Ceiling, Classroom Valance

Are you interested in having a window valance in your classroom, but you can't see a good way to hang it, or you don't have an easy way to sew it? Well, if you have a drop ceiling classroom like mine, I might be able to help you make a valance like this one.

You will need:
• fabric
• ribbon
• ponytail elastics
• and binder clips

Yes, that's it. No sewing and no additional hardware.

Start by measuring the width of the windows. To that, add one foot for each rise in the scallop. In the picture above you see I have eight rises between the scallops, and then two more, one at each end.

At first I was going to do a rise at each of the window frames, which is traditionally how it is done. But then I thought, I want more of the window showing, not the frame, so I put the rises between the windows with the scallops hanging down to hide the frame. You don't have to do it this way, it's up to you.

So now that you have the total length and know how many rises you're going to have, you can determine how much you need of everything. What follows are directions to make approximations of the materials you'll need. You might get a bit more of each supply to be on the safe side. (Note at the end of the post I mention getting more fabric for the end swags.)

I wish I had these directions when I started this project, but I could not find any curtains or valances on the internet that would work for me. I thought about it a bunch and then sort of made it up as I went along. All in all, I made pretty close guesses and had enough or a bit too much of everything when I was done, so I think you'll be fine, too.

For each rise you will need one ponytail holder and two medium sized binder clips. I used the heavy duty jumbo ponytail elastics so they would hold better than just regular rubberbands, which seem to disintegrate rather quickly. You will need three or four extra clips to attach the mid point of the valance– more on that later. I got both the elastics and binder clips at the dollar store.

Dollar store purchases make the valances cheap

You will also need two feet of wide ribbon for each rise– I think mine was two inches wide. And for each rise you will also need about two feet of thinner accent ribbons. Mine were about half an inch wide– pictures below. I purchased spools of ribbon at JoAnn's, with a coupon, of course.

Because most fabrics are a standard 45 inches wide, and the valance only needs to be about two feet long, you can cut the fabric in half, width wise. Then you only need half the length of the window in fabric. The fabric I used was indeed 45 inches, and you can see how far it hangs down on my windows when I sliced the 45 inches in half.

Here's a hypothetical window example: you have twelve total feet of windows. In that length you have four framed windows, so you want four scallops, or three rises. You need to add three feet (for the three rises), and then two more feet for the ends. 12 + 3 + 2 = 17, so you need a total length of 17 feet, or roughly six yards, of valance. Because you are going to cut the fabric in half lengthwise, however, you only need half that in fabric, or three yards. With a decent coupon of 40% or 50% off, you won't be spending too much.

Here I am cutting the fabric in half lengthwise on its fold

When you are done cutting the fabric you will have enough for the entire window, with extra to be taken up in the rises.

So let's think about how this fabric is going to scallop and how it is going to attach to the window. A picture is worth a thousand words and will illustrate what I'm talking about.

Here is a photo of my window before I started. You can see that shorter top window, the one I want to hang the valance in front of, is about 21 inches tall. You can also see that the windows have blinds on them.... well, not all of the windows do... how can blinds go missing? Anyway, I don't use the blinds as I have north facing windows that don't get direct sun, and I wanted to cover the blinds up.

Also, note in the same picture below, the most important feature of the ceiling is highlighted– this edge allows the valance to be hung. The frame for the drop ceiling runs right along the edge of the window. This is the edge that the clips attach to, which allows you to hang the valance.

Oh, geez. Never mind that giraffe. He's only there to show that the window is up high. That husband of mine and his photoshop...

See! One clip on.

Now two clips on! The binder clips hold the fabric to the drop ceiling frame, allowing the valance to be hung! Easy-peasy!

But I get ahead of myself. What is that bunch of stuff attached to the ceiling??

The fabric swag is held in place with the ponytail elastics. You gather about a foot of fabric along what will be the top edge of the valance and secure it with the elastic. To bring the bottom edge of the valance up, you use the wide ribbon. The ribbon starts on the front of the fabric and loops under and up in the back, bringing the valance up to the height you want. The ends of the ribbon are held in place with the same elastic that is holding the excess fabric that allows for the scallop. Again, here are some photos to illustrate.

Elastic holding the excess fabric and ribbon end.

Elastic holding the fabric and the ribbon that forms the scallop by pulling up the bottom edge.

Since I wanted to hide that big black elastic and add a bit more color and accent to the valance, I cut lengths of three colored ribbons, two feet each.

Then I tied them around the elastic, covering it.

And now you see where the two clips will go when hanging the valance to the ceiling frame. I bet it makes a bit more sense now.

To bring the end of the valance to a neat finish in each corner, I let a length of fabric just drape down at the end. I attached the wide ribbon, but instead of pulling the bottom edge of the fabric up to the short rise length, I let it hang down, so there was just half a scallop where it came to the wall. Then the extra fabric hangs down beside it.

Here's a close-up.

If you want to have as long a finishing swag as mine, you need to add a yard of fabric to the total that you buy. That extra yard will do a yard long swag on each end. If you are doing several separate windows with wall in between them, then you'll need more fabric. If that had been the case with me, I would have made those end swags half as long– which would still look fine, but require less fabric.

The hardest part of the whole project, after you get your head wrapped around what it is you need to do, is the actual hanging. I did the first couple of scallops by trial and error. Then I measured what I had done, and could better place the elastic and clips in the correct spots. I did the actual gathering of fabric, and placement of elastics and ribbon as I was standing up by the window. I kept supplies in my pocket and at my feet on the counter, and then only needed to climb down a couple times.

Oh, one more thing. Because you are cutting the fabric to get twice the length from one piece of fabric, the valance will need to be attached in the middle. You could sew it on a machine. I didn't want to schlep my machine to school, and I really wanted this to be a new sew project, so I ended up just clipping the fabric together with four binder clips. I have the clips holding the raw edges on the back side of the valance, facing out the window, not into the room. I overlapped and folded the fabric at the top and clipped it on to the frame the same way I did it everywhere else. I rolled the fabric a bit from the bottom before clipping so the unhemmed edge would sort of curl up on itself, something that happened naturally to it all along the bottom of the valance. Here is a close up of that spot on the valance.

Because I let the scallops come down on the frame and not over the window, the middle of the valance ended up being at the full scallop. It still looked alright just clipped together. This won't be an issue for you if you pull up the scallops at the vertical window frames instead of allowing more uncovered window like I did. Your fabric will come together at a rise instead of the middle of a scallop, and the fabric will be easier to clip together and hide with the ribbons when it's up near the ceiling.

Voila! Valance! I hope this all makes sense and inspires you to add a curtain valance to your classroom windows. I think it really puts a nice finishing touch to my room. I get TONS of compliments on it. More important than the fun of it, I believe it is conducive to learning because it helps make my classroom comfortable and homelike... isn't that what brain science says is helpful for growing dendrites?

Thanks for stopping by! PLEASE do leave any comments or questions below– I'm sure I missed something in this how-to. Also, please, please, please, Pin this idea. I searched the internet to find something that would work in my particular classroom and found nothing! I know lots of teachers keep Pin boards on classroom decor and I hope this will be useful to many, not just my loyal followers– oh, how I love you.

Pin Please!

And ONE last thing... this is another post in this summer's series on classroom design. I'm working on a video and posts on various aspects of setting up and organizing the classroom. Hope you'll follow me so you don't miss a series post. Look for this new button to find the series... and Pin it, too!

Now head on back to Monday Made It by clicking on the button! A big thanks goes out to Tara as this linky is one of my favorites and I always find ideas... especially in the summer when there is more time to create. I'll be linking up again.

As always, thanks for stopping by!

Monday Made It– MAKE

Well, here is a third day with a third post in a row... must be summer! I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Frolics to post about a little project I did for my new classroom. Yep, I'm moving rooms. Might as well have a little fun with it.

So, this is nothing especially original– letters that say words in your classroom. Imagine. But in the new room I am creating a new maker space. I mean, I think I am... I've written this several times now... publicly on the blog... so I hope it does actually, eventually, by end of summer, come to be... sigh. Anyway, I want to designate an area in the room as a maker space and what better than to have a sign that says so. Besides, MAKE is a good word for the kiddos to know.

So here is mine all finished. I show it to you on top of a doorway in our house, so you get the idea that it is going to be up on top of a bulletin board in the classroom.

I bought the wooden block letters at Target for four bucks each. Then I painted the letters white with acrylic paint, also from Target. You don't have to paint the letters white, I just wanted the washi tape colors to really show up. Then I covered the letters with four washi tape patterns I liked. Here are the letters half done. I did not use any rhyme or reason applying the tape, just wanted the letters randomly covered with no repeating patterns to be seen.

When the 3D letters were completely covered with tape on the front and sides, I painted them with Mod Podge so the tape wouldn't peel away over time. Mine have a shiny finish but you can use matte finish Mod Podge, if you prefer.

One little tip to share– place any painted object on crumpled foil when you are done painting. The crumpled foil makes a sort of easy drying rack which allows air to circulate, cutting the drying time, and the objects don't stick to the surface as much. Pin to remember!

I'll show you pictures of MAKE when it goes up in the classroom. Hope you are inspired to try some words for your room– math, read, learn, laugh, play... so many great words to choose from. It wasn't hard to do and it gave me a nice feeling of accomplishment at the start of summer. If I don't get to any other fun thing for the classroom, at least I did this one!

Click on back and find lots more inspiration on the Monday Made It list! Thanks, Tara!

And, oops, almost forgot. I'm part of a blog hop giveaway– a $100 TPT gift certificate. And for just the next few days I have my letter writing packet as a FREEBIE on TPT, too. Not. Too. Shabby. Click on pic to get everything... but hurry!

Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!