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Happy Spring!

March 21, 2011 in Misc by KarenNYC | 1 comment

Happy second day of spring! Here’s a fun poll for all of our readers out there to enjoy. Ready? Let’s go!

On your first day of spring, did you:

A. Wear a hat/scarf/gloves

B. Walk to work in the snow

C. Have to turn the heat on in your house/apartment

D. All of the above.

E. None of the above.

If you answered “E,” then you’re no longer my friend. Kidding….maybe. Never the less, I’m very happy that spring has finally sprung, even if I have to wait maybe a few more weeks for it to find it’s way to New York :)

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President’s Day Weekend Makeover: Part 3

March 1, 2011 in Art & Design, City livin' by KarenNYC | No comments

My third and final installment, (I know you find this absolutely riveting), covers the changes to our bookshelves and bedroom. I’ll keep it short and sweet:

Bookshelves before….wedding.shrine.again.

Bookshelves after, bad lighting again, but the book covers are stripped (remember that conversation?), candles and flowers are added, new pictures placed annnnd I think that’s about it.

Bedroom before, very navy blue and very manly flowers on the wall :)

Bedroom after, still extremely navy blue (we’re working on breaking that addiction), but new pictures and flowers make a difference! Apologies for our lamp exploding on the night stand. No one was hurt.

So all together, I’d say I had a semi-productive holiday weekend. It’s only a matter of time until I get bored again though. Look-out Memorial Day weekend, you’re my next victim!

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President’s Day Weekend Makeover: Part 2

March 1, 2011 in Art & Design, City livin' by KarenNYC | No comments

On to the kitchen and what we like to call the “breakfast nook.” No huge changes here really, just a new food-appropriate mural on the kitchen wall, (no more dandelions for me!), and then some rearranging in our “breakfast nook.”

Kitchen before…a dandelion field?

Kitchen after, a bit more appropriate!

Breakfast nook before, wedding picture overload!

Breakfast nook after! Gotta keep one wedding picture I guess :)

Not huge changes, but fun ones for sure and they were free! Score. Final post today: bookshelves and the bedroom.

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President’s Day Weekend Makeover: Part 1

March 1, 2011 in Art & Design, City livin' by KarenNYC | 2 comments

Like I said last week, President’s Day Weekend was probably one of the most productive weekends of my life. What started with just wanting to paint the hallway wall chocolate brown, turned into a whole circus of projects. My next few posts today will highlight all the craft projects I took on over the glorious 3-day weekend. Get excited! Lets begin with what started it all…the hallway!

When we first moved in, we painted the hallway a Carolina blue color and called it a day. Over time, I started to hate the color. It was too bright and when the sun hit it, things got ugly. It just didn’t fit in with the rest of the apartment. It was time for a change. Peace out blue wall!!

And hello new project! Remember when I said I had a lot of random frames and pictures just hanging around the apartment, well here ya go.

There’s a lot of them. And they all had wedding pictures in them. Ugh. I wanted to use them, but I had to switch out those pictures stat! We arranged them into a pattern we could live with and then started plotting what photos we would replace the current pictures with. Willie was a big help, I swear it looks like he’s smiling. See, he likes to redecorate too :)

Holy chocolate brown wall! I actually really love the color, which is good because there’s obviously no turning back now. It’s dark but not too dark and it doesn’t overwhelm you when you walk in the apartment. A win-win! So we started putting the pictures up on the wall and we realized it was turning into a bit of an overkill, pictures everywhere, ahh!

So, our end result was just a few pictures on the wall to balance everything out. Voila! I love the giant picture of Willie in the top right. And sorry about the weird lighting, I’m working on using the manual settings on my camera. It makes the wall color read a bit differently, it’s really much more like the above picture.

And remember when I was just going to paint the hallway wall brown? Well that spilled over into the kitchen entryway and then I scored these awesome wall flower and candle vases from CB2 in SoHo for $1.50 a piece, woo!

And here’s a nice panoramic shot of before.

And after! Excuse the ugly flash. I feel like the brown just fits in so much better. I thought about continuing the paint all the way to the right by the closet as well, but I got tired and decided to call it a day. Oh yea, back in December we added a vintage print of an 1874 map of NYC above the sofa. Get one of your own at Art.com.

Total cost for this part of the makeover: $55 for paint, photos, vases and flowers. Score!

Next up: the kitchen and breakfast nook!

 

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Birthday Cake Success!

February 28, 2011 in Cookin' by KarenNYC | 3 comments

As promised, I’m reporting back about my quest to bake the most perfect chocolate birthday cake! And I’m pleased to say that I think it was a success! I baked the cake on Saturday morning and I’m borderline ashamed to say that I was up at 8:00am because I was that excited to try out this cake recipe. Someone needs a life. But without further ado, I promise not to bore you, here’s my cake baking adventure. And if you do find this boring, well at least you have lots of pictures of yumminess :)

The first step to any great recipe….great ingredients! Look at all this yummy stuff! Thankfully I had most of the ingredients in the baking section of my pantry (don’t make fun of me) but I did have to purchase the yummy Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate bars and cocoa powder, which I had no problem doing.

Silly me, I got so into the recipe and getting everything just right that I forgot to take any pictures of the mixing process for the cake. But, here they are after putting them in the oven. Mmmmm, looking good!

All finished baking, now time to cool! Make sure you let these cakes cool for at least an hour before turning them out of the pan. I learned the hard way that no matter how thickly you butter and flour the baking pans, a little sticking is going to happen. You can see my new kitchen mural in the background too, more on that later.

Now time for the chocolate buttercream frosting, and yes this was ALL homemade. I melted the delicious Ghirardelli chocolate squares over a double boiler….

…and then combined it with my buttercream mixture to make the most beautiful chocolate buttercream frosting ever :)

And then once everything was all said and done, I slapped that frosting all over the cakes and voila! Happy Birthday!

I HIGHLY recommend this recipe from Food Network! It was delicious, not too chocolatey with lovely subtle hints of coffee layered within. Get the recipe here! Bon Appetit!

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Quest for the Perfect Chocolate Cake

February 25, 2011 in Cookin' by KarenNYC | 1 comment

Jeff’s 24th birthday is on Monday, (my little Haley Joel’s growing up!), but we’re planning to celebrate this weekend. We’re kind of weird about birthdays, we don’t really go all out and get each other presents. In fact, I think the past 2 years we really haven’t done birthday presents at all, hmm. But what we lack in presents, we make up for in good food! Jeff and I are such foodies, and NYC definitely does a great job feeding that obsession, no pun intended. Instead of giving tangible gifts for birthdays, we usually go out to a nice dinner at a new restaurant we haven’t tried yet. Or sometimes, Jeff’s cool and instead of going out to dinner, he lets me get super adventurous in the kitchen and test out new recipes with new, sometimes expensive, but very yummy ingredients. And that’s what we’re doing this weekend for Jeff’s birthday! I know that sounds crazy, but I absolutely love spending hours in the kitchen baking and cooking. It’s therapeutic. I wouldn’t consider myself a great cook, I’m still learning. But making mistakes in the kitchen is part of the process of becoming a better cook!

After work today, I spent close to 2 hours in the grocery store on my quest for ingredients for this weekend’s dinner. I love perusing the aisles and learning about the different brands of ingredients I can use for a recipe, and it’s always fun when you find a good deal too! But why did I spend 2 hours in the grocery store today? Well, a good 30 minutes of it was spent looking for things for grilled steaks and a new potato recipe that I’m super jazzed about, but the remaining hour and a half was spent in the baking aisle. I freaking love the baking aisle. Even in my semi-low stocked grocery store, there’s still plenty of baking goodies to read and discover (I once spent almost 4 hours in Whole Foods, that place is like heaven to me, but I hardly ever buy anything because it’s so darn expensive…sigh, one day).

But anyway, back to baking. Jeff’s not really into sweet things, (other than me….ooh bam!), but he has a soft side for chocolate cake. Specifically chocolate cake with chocolate frosting….that’s my boy! So, I spent quite a few evenings this week surfing the interwebs for the most perfect chocolate cake recipe and by golly I do believe I’ve found it. Ina Garten’s Grandmother’s Chocolate Cake (recipe can be found on foodnetwork.com). It’s the perfect combination of crazy amounts of chocolate along with other rich flavors to enhance the chocolate flavor (ie: coffee!).

Long story short, I’m baking this bad boy tomorrow and I’ll do a full blog post about the process….I know you’re quivering in anticipation. But humor me here, I’m really excited. And If I could, you know I would give you all a piece :)

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Work, Work, Work All Day Long

February 22, 2011 in Art & Design, City livin', Holidays by KarenNYC | 1 comment

I don’t know if it was the 3-day holiday, or the bitter cold weather that kept me from going outside, but I had one of the most productive weekends of my life. It was insane! What started with me wanting to just paint the hallway a chocolate brown and hang some pictures (see original post here) turned into an all out crazy fest of cleaning, organizing and redecorating the apartment. I’ve noticed that similar to how I like to change my hair a lot, I also like to change my living space. I don’t know if it’s because I get bored, or I second guess my original ideas, or if I just really like to get crafty, but Jeff has learned to get a little weary whenever I start a sentence with “So, I have this idea….”

It was great though! I got around to painting the hallway first thing after work on Friday and surprised Jeff when he got home, (that was actually one of those projects I didn’t tell him about beforehand. Luckily, he liked it. Whew.) And then the pictures were hung by Saturday. I’m kind of impatient when it comes to projects, I want to get them done ASAP, even if it means hammering nails into a wall into the wee hours of the morning…sorry neighbors. Seriously though, this apartment feels great now! It’s cleaned from top to bottom (a little spring cleaning come early!) and completely purged of anything that we absolutely didn’t need. I’ll be taking several big bags to Good Will this week! Multiple walls were painted, pictures were hung, furniture was removed (RIP Jeff’s college desk), and books were stripped of their jackets and reorganized on shelves. That was a fun conversation that went something like this:

Jeff: “Ummm, what are you doing?”

Karen: With a really excited smile on my face. “Taking off all of the book jackets!”

Jeff: “Um, why?”

Karen: “Because they’re prettier without them and look better on the bookshelf. Anna says so too!”

Jeff: Eyeing the 67 book jackets taking up space on our couch. “And where are you going to put them?”

Karen: “I have a place! Stop asking questions and doubting my ideas!”

Nope, I don’t have a place for them. I told you, I like to take care of projects as quickly as possible, but sometimes I don’t exactly think them through completely. I’ll figure it out though. Once this place is all spiffed up, I’ll be sure to post some pics!

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend :)

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Decoration Inspiration

February 17, 2011 in Art & Design, City livin' by KarenNYC | 2 comments

So I’ve been working from home most of this week nursing my tummy after some nasty food poisoning, (and yes, it is food poisoning, don’t go asking questions about the p-word, don’t get crazy). The only question you can ask is, “Karen, should I get a sandwich from a deli at 9:00 at night after the meat has been sitting out all day?” To which my answer would be, “No fool!” Unless you want to end up like me, ugh. But, while I’ve been posted up on the couch with my computer, a little HGTV has been playing in the background and the wheels in my head have started to turn. I think I want to re-paint my hallway. It’s currently a light shade of blue that I’m really not that big a fan of, see below:

I’m thinking I want to paint it a nice chocolate brown. I know it’s a little dark, but there is a method to my madness. I have a TON of white picture frames just kind of laying around the apartment with no home. I would love to actually hang them on a wall somewhere and my favorite home makeover blog, Young House Love, has inspired me to do a hallway picture collage. I’m imagining something like this:

Anyone want to loan me a ceramic jackelope head?

The second picture is a bit CrAzY, but I don’t have that many picture frames. I dunno, it might be a tall task, but we’ve got a long weekend on our hands with nothing to do. Jeff kind of gave me a blank look when I told him I wanted to do this, so it looks like I’m going at this alone. If I actually go through with it, I’ll be sure to post pics!

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New York’s Hottest Club is BOOOOOOOOOF!

February 16, 2011 in Funny, Television by KarenNYC | 3 comments

I introduced Anna to Stefon from SNL over Christmas. I love me some Stefon and this past weekend’s sketch was HYSTERICAL! Enjoy :)

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Dear Ski Gods….

February 11, 2011 in Travel by KarenNYC | No comments

Jeff and I are going skiing this weekend. If there was ever a time to start praying, now would be that time. I’m a TERRIBLE skier. I don’t know if it’s because I’m pigeon toed and knock kneed, or if it’s because it was just never in my cards to be a good skier….but I am awful. Naturally, Jeff is an amazing skier, (along with all of our friends that we’re going with), leaving me at the bottom of the mountain taking lessons with 5 and 6 year olds and skiing the bunny slope alone. It could be worse though, at least I can do the bunny slope. Small accomplishments. Anyway, so here’s to this year’s ski trip not ending up like last year’s, and maybe I can harness my inner Shaun White.

Or maybe I should tuck away some airplane bottles in the ski pants, get totally wasted and throw myself down the green slopes? I honestly don’t think it would change anything about my skiing ability, believe me.

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