Machelle, Author at A Joyful Riot

Chocolate Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies | Pinhole Press Holiday Cookie Bake Off

November 27, 2018 ·

A holiday favorite candy gets baked into soft and delicious cookies, with a special ingredient (orange olive oil) to make them extra Christmas-y! Chocolate orange chocolate chip cookies will be a new tradition.

Honestly, with the way the last month has gone, I wasn’t sure we’d get any Christmas posts up this year! My family was hit with a few sicknesses (we’re battling a new round again right now!) and we also got to go out of the country for a whole week! It’s been crazy. With all the craziness that already is the holiday season, I had sort of written off all of my fun blog ideas this year. And I seriously had some good ones :( But I just had to make time for this one because not only is it super delicious and festive, it’s also part of a contest in which YOU could win $1000 in amazing prizes!

Did that catch your attention?! It should of, cus this is seriously fun! We’ve teamed up with a bunch of awesome bloggers, and Pinhole Press, to bring you a Holiday Cookie Bake Off! You can read all about it on the Pinhole Press blog and there’s even a fun short video.

The short story is, you can follow our Pinterest board of amazing cookie recipes, try any of them out and upload a picture of your cookies under the “tried it” section of the pin. Every photo gets an entry into the contest and the chance to win the amazing grand prize!

Now, I cannot wait to try out some of the fabulous recipes on the board which includes favorites like spritz cookies (a staple in our holiday baking) and soft sugar cookies, to cookie butter and caramel sandwich cookies (yum!) and lots of candy cane goodies! For our recipe, I decided to go to one of my favorite Christmas candies for inspiration! Don’t you just love those fun and delicious chocolate oranges?! It was one of the candies we got every single year in our stockings and I absolutely have to enjoy at least one a year still!

You obviously cannot go wrong with chocolate chip cookies either and this year I’ve discovered a delicious little trick when making them! Have you seen those flavored olive oils at farmer’s markets or olive oil stores and wondered what you would even do with orange olive oil? Well you can actually replace some of the butter or vegetable oil in any baked good recipe and have a scrumptious spin on your usual desserts! It’s especially yummy when chocolate is involved!Continue Reading

Big Boy Burger Costume DIY

October 18, 2018 ·

A costume for those big-eyed, juice-box-bellied babies in your life. Recreate the iconic Bob’s Big Boy Statue with this Big Boy Burger Costume DIY!

Ok. Even if you don’t get this costume right off the bat LOOK AT THAT YUMMY BOY!!! Are you kidding me?! It’s a miracle I haven’t eaten him up already. This was his first solo blog modeling job and he was the sweetest, cutest little dude the whole time! AND, he turned two just yesterday (or today as I write this!!) Can you believe that!? I shared his first birthday, a Halloween Carnival here just a couple weeks ago and even that party feels so recent! But it was a year ago!! I love that he’s getting older though, TBH. It’s so much more fun (and way easier than when he was baby) haha.

I’ve always thought my kids had very vintage-style faces. Like Kewpie dolls. They have these very timeless, yet young, features. And one night, my brother in law says “You know what Otto looks like? There’s this vintage statue… It’s like of a little boy, holding a plate of donuts or something…” And I knew exactly what he was picturing! The moment he said it I thought “OMG YES!”

But, neither of us could remember exactly what it was we were thinking of! We knew it was a boy holding something and he had a round ol’ belly and that it was an iconic thing. We just could not put our finger upon it or find what we were looking for by Googling. I never forgot it though, I’d sometimes try to find it again, I just knew it looked just like my son!

Fast forward a couple months and finally I said it to my husband: “Otto looks just like this vintage image I can think of but I can’t remember what it is. It’s like a sign or a statue or something…there’s this cute little boy holding a plate of donuts or something I swear..But I can’t find it online…”

Without a seconds hesitation he knew EXACTLY what it was I was talking about! He whips out his phone and brings up this picture of the Big Boy statue from a Southern California burger Joint, Bob’s Big Boy. (Here is a fun little history on the place.) And I was like “That’s it!!!” Just like that, he understood my cryptic message and solved the mystery haha!

OUR FIRST VIDEO! DIY Balloon Animal Soft Toys | A Joyful Riot on Youtube, Crafting (or at Least Trying to) with Our Kids

October 15, 2018 ·

Our first foray into YouTube is silly, frustrating, and very mommy-relatable! Make DIY Balloon Animal Soft Toys with your kids (tugging at you) and our easy-to-follow Spoonflower designs!

We did it!! After the Party Starters videos we shot last year for food.com we had the desire to get into making our own videos. But, like everything else this last year, it’s been really hard to get done! We’ve had a hard enough time just completing our blog posts, let alone learn a whole new medium and website!

I finally had the idea to try and incorporate my kids into the videos because heaven knows that it would be near impossible not to! I also thought this would just be fun! As moms, our kids are always right around wanting our attention and to “help” with projects.

I think there is a tendency to see things online and wonder if that mom has a lot of help. Maybe the kids go to daycare? Is here a nanny? Could she be so lucky that her kids play by themselves? The truth is, those things are the case for many blogging mommies out there. I’ve heard stories of bloggers who send their kids to daycare all day, and bring them back just to pose for pictures. But that’s certainly not the case for me. While it would be so nice to have even a couple hours a day, it’s not something we’re able to do.

Otto’s ONEderful Halloween Carnival Birthday Party

October 6, 2018 ·

This ONEderful halloween carnival birthday party was to celebrate my baby boy turning one and is full of colorful, whimsical, and spooky details!

Now that it’s been almost a whole year, I can share Ottos halloween carnival birthday party! I know I could have shared earlier, but I wanted it to be at a time of year that made sense, so I’ve held onto it for all this time. And, looking at these again after a year was so enjoyable! Planning a halloween carnival birthday party was so much fun and I love how the colorful, and a little bit spooky, decorations turned out.

One thing I wish I could remember better is to take photos of my invitations at the party! I love when I do that, because they fit right in amongst the decor that I picked out to match them. But the invite for this halloween carnival birthday party is available right here and I used the same motif through the rest of the party printables. Since it was a carnival theme, I went with the phrase “Otto is ONEderful!” throughout it because it felt like the kind of phrase you’d see on a flyer for a circus or something, and of course I loved the pun!

My son’s birthday is Oct 17th and honestly, I never thought I’d do the whole Halloween-themed thing for him. But I absolutely LOVE Halloween and my husband and I were planning a Halloween party with our friends for that evening. So, I decided using Halloween decorations for Otto’s beforehand would be fun and versatile to both parties. There was silly puns, potion making, games, a petting zoo, and costumes! Check out all the silly, spooky fun by clicking ‘read more’!

DIY Birthday Party Family Halloween Costume

September 22, 2018 ·

As we get ready for Halloween this year, here’s a look back at our last year’s DIY birthday party family halloween costume! Complete with cake, party hat, presents, and confetti!

I’ve been brainstorming our family halloween costume for months, and as usual, I am planning a few costumes this year haha. But before I can share those, I had to take a look back at our family costume last year! We went as a birthday party!

Our 3 year old daughter went as a party hat which was a costume she absolutely loved! She still dresses up in it often :)

And our 1 year old went as a birthday candle in a sheet cake wagon!

He was a big inspiration for this group costume as a whole because I was planning his one year birthday party at the same time so birthday things were on my mind! Plus, I knew I wanted to incorporate either his stroller or our wagon into his costume. Even if he had been walking great by that time, I would never plan on a baby doing well around the neighborhood for trick or treating! I’ve always loved the baby costumes that use transportation (there are some seriously genius stroller/wagon costumes out there!) so I was excited to try my hand at our own version and a sheet cake seemed to be the perfect fit.

As for me, I went as a bag of confetti and my husband went as a stack of birthday presents. All the costumes were fairly simple but I thought I’d share the DIY for each of them here. Sit tight, there’s a lot of birthday themed costumes to see here :D

Chocolate Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies | Pinhole Press Holiday Cookie Bake Off

Big Boy Burger Costume DIY

OUR FIRST VIDEO! DIY Balloon Animal Soft Toys | A Joyful Riot on Youtube, Crafting (or at Least Trying to) with Our Kids

Otto’s ONEderful Halloween Carnival Birthday Party

DIY Birthday Party Family Halloween Costume

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