Hi everyone!! – Kylie here :o)

It’s Food Friday time (YUM!!) and today I’m sharing with you my little twist on everyone’s favorite – Apple Pie!

This is a recipe that my mum made quite often and as a kid I LOVED it. I call it – my mum’s “Apple Lattice Slice”. Back then what I loved most was picking off the little lattice-style pastry strips all coated in sweet powdery-sugar goodness, eating them bit by bit, before I moved on to devour the rest of my slice of apple/pastry ‘heaven’. (I guess I should also admit to eating some of the left-over raw pastry just after it had been rolled out – hmmm, not so sure about that now!) As a very grown-up ‘kid’, I think, now, my favorite part to eat is the apple mixture with its lemon zest-y-ness and just a hint of honey! YUMMY! So let’s not wait any longer – here is the recipe. It’s in two parts – Pastry and Filling. I also created two recipe cards that you can download for free. (I used the Muffin Man recipe card templates found at the Shabby Shoppe – too easy!)

Pastry ingredients

• 2 cups (320g or 11oz) self-raising flour (Click here for more information regarding self-raising flour)
• 2 tablespoons (30g or 1oz) custard powder
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 90g (3oz) butter
• 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind/zest
• 1/3 cup (65g or 2oz) sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/3 cup (85ml or 3 fl. oz) milk, approximately 

Pastry directions

Sift dry ingredients into bowl. Rub the butter in until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add lemon rind/zest and sugar. Mix well. Beat egg yolk and milk together, add to dry ingredients. Combine to firm dough. Add a little more milk if required. Knead lightly on floured surface. Roll out two-thirds of pastry to line a greased 28cm by 18cm (11in by 7in) baking tin, bringing pastry half-way up sides of tin. Roll out remaining one-third of pastry, cut into lattice strips of 5mm (1/4in).

Filling ingredients

• 410g (13oz) canned pie apple (Feel free to use fresh green ‘cooking’ apples – just peel, core, slice thick and cook with the water and lemon juice until soft – but still holding some shape. Add a little more liquid – water – if mixture gets too dry.)
• 1 tablespoon (20ml) lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon (20ml) water
• 1 teaspoon fine lemon rind/zest
• 1/4 cup (50g or 1.75oz) sultanas (these are optional and if you don’t have access to sultanas then you can easily substitute with raisins (just chop them roughly if too big), golden raisins or even currants – whatever you prefer! For more information on sultanas – click here and here or you can search on google!)
• 1 tablespoon (20ml) honey
• icing sugar (confectioners sugar) for dusting

Filling, assembly, baking directions

Put apple, lemon zest, water, lemon juice and sultanas in small saucepan. Stir over low heat for 3 minutes. Cool.

Put cooled apple filling into pastry shell. Drizzle honey over apple mixture. Arrange the lattice pastry strips over apple and press down edges to seal. Bake in moderately hot (210C/410F) oven for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to moderate (180C/356F), cook for further 15 minutes or until pastry is cooked. Dust with icing sugar (confectioners sugar) while still hot.

I hope you enjoy baking this delicious apple slice, and eating it, just as much as I do. :o) Here are the 4×6 recipe cards I created especially for YOU! Just click on the image to download (or click HERE)!

We’ll be announcing our random ‘winner’ for the Shabby Shoppe Blog “Trick and Treat” recipe challenge tomorrow – so be sure to check that out! And, have a wonderful, wonderful weekend!

KylieFood Stuff, Free (not desktops), Uncategorized 17 Comments

Hi Everyone! It’s Karen with today’s blog inspiration.  Thanksgiving is my  favorite holiday!  Oh, course as a kid, it used to be Christmas.  But now I enjoy the more relaxed time of Thanksgiving.  I love getting together with my family, eating all the yummies, but most of all, reflecting on how blessed I am.  For today’s inspiration the challenge is to use a one word title with the theme of gratitude.  I won’t be at all surprised if that doesn’t lead you to some wonderful journaling, too.  On my page I’ve featured SP’s newest title clusters:  Word Whimsy Autumn.

My Page:

Layout by Kylie:

Layout by Trish:

Layout by Lu:

Thanks so much for stopping by the blog today, and I’m looking forward to seeing lots of thankfulness in the gallery soon.  Join us tomorrow for a YUMMY post by Kylie!

KarenInspiration, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Hi, Beckie here.  I had 10 beautiful princesses in attendance at my daughter’s birthday party last month.  Cute as they all are, getting that many people – kids at that – to all smile and look at the camera at the same time is a tough task.  My solution to the perfect group photo?  MASK IT!

It’s hard to see the details in the photos above – but in the photo that was the overall best picture of the entire group, two girls have their eyes closed.  Luckily I planned ahead and shot in burst mode, so I have plenty other photos where their eyes are open.  With a little layer masking, we can “remove” the eyes and/or faces from the original photo and replace them with the parts from other photos!

Best of all – its much easier than you might think! The idea is this:  we’ll use a layer mask to hide the “bad” portions of our best photo and reveal the better portions of the supplemental photos beneath it.

First step: Open all of the photos you’ll need and put them in the following sequence (your layers pallette should look like this):

• Best group photo -TOP
• Supplemental photo with open eyes
• (add additional supplemental photos as necessary)

Once you get your photos arranged in layers as described above, we need to position them so that the parts we need (eyes/face) are positioned directly beneath the top level photo.  This way, as we remove the bad parts of the top photo the good parts will be right where we want them.

Second Step: Lower the opacity of the top layer (around 20-30% to start off) and use the arrow keys to move the supplemental photo around until major features are aligned with the top photo.  In my case, I aligned the girls ears since their expressions had changed slightly between the photos.  Don’t stress out too much over this part, but you do want things as close as you can make them.

{note:  if you’re trying to replace two faces, as in my example here, it helps to have one separate replacement photo for each person.  One of the girls had moved to the right in the photo so I needed to create two separate layers so that I could perfectly position each of the faces beneath the top layer. Being able to move each face independently of the others is critical to get this just right.}

Here’s what my workspace looked like after this step:

The best group photo is on the top and I have the opacity of that top layer reduced so that I can tell that the two supplemental photos below are positioned pretty closely to each girl’s face.

Third Step: Create the layer mask!

With the top layer selected, click on the “Add Layer Mask” button in the bottom toolbar of the layers palette.  You’ll see a white rectangle pop up in the layer image (as above).  You’ll also notice that your colors have changed and your current foreground color is white and the background color is black.  These colors are very important for masking!  White is visible and black is removed.  So you never permanently damage/erase any of the photo  – you simply brush with black to remove and add back in by brushing with white if you need to!

Fourth Step:  Use the brush tool to reveal the better face underneath our top layer!

Toggle your foreground/background colors so that black is the foreground color.  Press the “b” button to select your brush tool, use the “]” key to increase the size of the brush to 75 or 100 pixels.  Set hardness of the brush to 0.   Use Ctrl +  to zoom in on the photo so that you can see the face you’re going to work on nice and large on your screen.  In the layers palette, be sure that your top layer is selected, set the opacity to 100%, then finally…click on the little white rectangle in the layers palette that represents your layer mask. This ensures that as you brush you’re working on the layer mask and not the image itself.  Now start brushing!  You’ll see the the top layer disappear as the layer below becomes visible.  Remove too much? no problem!  Simply toggle the colors again so that white is the foreground color and then brush the area with white to make it visible again.

I brushed over the full face of each girl to reveal the “new” face beneath, leaving their hair in tact from the top level photo.  With only the top layer visible, this is what my layer mask looks like after I finished brushing over their faces:

And when all layers are visible and the image flattened, here’s the final image!

You should DEFINITELY check out layer masks, as the same exact technique can be used for “erasing” parts of scrapbook elements on your page!  Wrapping ribbons around other embellishments, hiding portions of pins or paperlips…a layer mask is a wonderful “non-destructive” way to hide parts of an element!

Thanks so much for stopping by today!  Be sure to check back tomorrow when Karen joins us with some brand new scrappin’ inspiration!

BeckieTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 17 Comments

Hi everyone! Denise here with this week’s Product Spotlight – the Organic kit. On sale this week for $4.25.

I loved the rich fall colors of this kit and rustic metallic embellishments. Beckie picked up the repeating circles in the kit with her circular holes to make an eye catching layout. The Journey Round Labels as seen in Karen, Katie, Anna and Kylie’s layouts add just the right touch to vacation layouts.

The coordinating Journey Round Label Collection is on sale this week for $1.00.

It was fun to see the different ways the ladies used the Organic kit. You can also see the teams layouts in the gallery.

I hope the team has inspired you with our layouts using the Organic kit, on sale this week for $4.25.

Happy Scrapping everyone…join us tomorrow for a great new TIPS AND TRICKS post by Beckie :)

DeniseProduct Spotlight, Uncategorized 7 Comments

Happy Monday morning Shabby Shoppe blog readers!!! I (Anna) love doing the layout of the week blog post! I enjoy looking through the gallery and seeing so many fabulous ideas! I think the gals who post in the Shabby Shoppe inspiration gallery are some of the most talented scrappers around!

It was hard to decide!  I ended up choosing a scrapper who is new to the gallery.  She had two posts last week.

One was a wonderful Halloween layout and the other was the most incredible Christmas card!

The winner is melanie34!!! CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Doesn’t she have the most gorgeous girls?!

Melanie, you have inspired me to get going on my Christmas cards (Wonder of wonders; I’m actually excited to get started.)

Watch your e-mail for your Shabby Shoppe $10 gift card and have fun shoppe-ing!

Join us tomorrow for Denise’s Product Spotlight! :o)

AnnaLayout of the Week, Uncategorized 6 Comments