Crock Pot Apple Cider Recipe

I looove hot apple cider! It's so easy to make, it makes your house smell amazing, and it seems fancy if you serve it to company, especially in a charming mug with a cinnamon stick. This is wonderful to drink in cold weather, which makes it perfect in our house, which I keep at a brisk 60 degrees during the winter. (Sexy Nerd adores 60 degrees - our agreement used to be 50!) I make this every time Sexy Nerd puts up our Christmas lights.

He's starting early this year. It seems a bit unfair to Thanksgiving, but here we are.

Our $5 Crock Pot is working hard!

The Best Slow Cooker Hot Apple Cider Recipe (approximately 8 servings)

Make a simple syrup by bringing 1/8 C water and a 1/4 C sugar to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and add 1/8 tsp each of allspice, cinnamon, and ginger. Whisk well and let simmer for 5 minutes before removing from heat.
In a separate pan, bring the following to a boil: 2 C water, 1 can frozen apple juice, 1 cinnamon stick, 9 allspice berries, 9 whole cloves, 1 sliced apple, and the zest of 1 small orange. Add 1/2 of your simple syrup and whisk well.
Transfer your mixture from step #2 to a 2.5 quart slow cooker/Crock Pot set to low heat. Fill to the top with hot water. I usually let everything sit in the slow cooker for at least an hour to let the flavor develop, but it's great right away as well.

You'll want to add more syrup and/or water based on your own preference. Sexy Nerd likes the recipe exactly as written, but I like to fill my mug with 1/2 apple cider and 1/2 hot water because it's a little strong for my taste. It's easy to ladle out helpings that are only liquid, but when serving the last remaining cups, I pour this through a strainer so no one ends up with a mouthful of cloves or allspice berries!

Cake Mix Pancakes

This reader-favorite recipe is *almost* as popular as my Cake Mix Cookie Bars recipe . When making Cake Mix pancakes , the scrumptious possibilities are endless. Red Velvet cake mix pancakes. Chocolate cake mix pancakes. Butter Pecan cake mix pancakes. Funfetti cake mix pancakes. (Yes, Funfetti cake mix pancakes!) With this 2-ingredient recipe, you can turn your favorite cake mix into your favorite pancakes. Pancake making at its finest. Cake Mix Pancakes Personally, I think my funny napkin is the icing on the (pan)cake. It's Sunday morning and you're planning to do all the things today - scrub those grody baseboards, polish your quartz countertop that was supposed to be low maintenance but actually isn't at all, sort through the disaster that is the freezer. While on your superhuman kick, you think I'm going to make my family pancakes for breakfast. Not just any pancakes - the best pancakes ever. I may even serve them as breakfast in bed! You pu

Chemical Peel Before & After

This article has been updated! My new chemical peel post, which includes pricing, Jessner peel before and after photos, product recommendations, and a helpful timeline for scheduling your treatments, is at the bottom. My original Jessner peel post (one of the most popular on my site of all time) is at the beginning. Original Chemical Peel Article Considering a chemical peel? I recently underwent my first Jessner peel and thought I'd share my results, post a Jessner peel review, and answer some frequently asked chemical peel questions. (I'm guessing that "Does a chemical peel hurt?" is a biggie!) I'd been planning to order an over-the-counter peel when we were in Iceland , but my computer led me a different direction. I decided to do this on a whim after Groupon greeted me one morning with a great $40 chemical peel deal. Now, I can read your mind. You just gasped in horror and thought You trusted your face to a discount chemical peel?! You're wondering w

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Hello, my bloggy friends. I have a HelloFresh complaint and believe they are pulling a scam. Yours truly came *this close* to falling for it. Maybe scam is too harsh of a word. Sneaky? You can decide for yourself. The fact that there are so many Hello Fresh complaints online does seem suspicious. My main complaint about Hello Fresh has to do with their promotional rate, which seems like it is set up to be intentionally misleading (more on this below). Despite so many people complaining about being charged more than they thought they'd agreed to, Hello Fresh maintains this as part of their business model and continues to mislead. So it's intentional, right? I do not recommend Hello Fresh. For starters, the service is just ingredients-by-mail with recipes, not meals. You can buy your own ingredients for much less, especially now that most grocery stores conveniently offer pickup and delivery. Excellent recipes are easy to find. Click here for a list of top-rated, reader-favorit

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You're in for a treat. Today I'm sharing my best canned cinnamon roll hacks and improvements for turning store-bought cinnamon rolls, like the Pillsbury Grands ones or even the store brand, into something special. Dry cinnamon rolls? No thank you. They need to be OOEY and GOOEY. That's just Cinnamon Roll 101. All of these ideas keep Pillsbury canned cinnamon rolls soft, company-worthy, and delicious. These are also great for taking homemade cinnamon rolls up a notch, but what a pain that is. With these better-than-homemade canned cinnamon roll hacks, you'll never bother to bake them from scratch again. Test out some of these ideas tomorrow. Won't it be nice to dig into a mouthwatering cinnamon roll for breakfast? You can't get a better start to your day than that. Canned Cinnamon Roll Hacks Actually, make that 11 easy ways to improve store-bought cinnamon rolls: you can top them with homemade coffee whipped cream . Yum! Nope, make that 12 canned cinnam

Window Seat Idea - Dream Home Inspiration of the Day

See it? Waaay at the back of the photo? I like how the window seat extends past the window all the way to the wall. How about you? If that's not your style, how about one of these lovely window seats? I'll seat you, my pretty, and your little dog too. How perfect would this be in a home office? I'd swap out that wimpy rug with a larger one.

3 Minute Toaster/Convection Oven Smores

These are perfect when you're craving a quick, sugary treat. They work equally well in a toaster oven and a convection oven. Best of all, compared to eating an entire bag of Oreos (something I have never done), they're quite healthy. What's that, you say? You already know how to make s'mores in the toaster oven? Well then, sit back and enjoy the ooey-gooey marshmallowy photos. (And if you're someone who works with me, please keep the "I've seen her polish off an entire bag of Oreo cookies" nonsense to yourself.) Step 1: Put desired amount of graham crackers on a toaster oven/convection oven-safe pan. Looks like it's time to clean this pan, Sexy Nerd Optional 1st step, which is Sexy Nerd's favorite: Spread peanut butter on each graham cracker (I'm not much of a peanut butter fan - WHAT?!? - so I skip this step.) Cover with yummy marshmallows. Top with chocolate chips. Place in the toaster o

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I could totally see Sexy Nerd doing this if we had a baby. Honestly though, I would probably be cheering him on. Also, I've read online that some folks are outraged by this photo, thinking the baby is being abused. To me though, the baby looks well supported, as if it is in a bouncy chair, and none of the duct tape is touching bare skin. I honestly think this was just intended to be a funny photo. It's not like the parents taped their baby to the wall so they could go out drinking and partying in a cocaine-fueled hysteria. I doubt anyone on cocaine could even achieve this. This photo is from 2010, maybe earlier. Wouldn't it be great to interview this older child one day? It's time to get on that, People Magazine. The internet wants to know what happened to the duct tape baby! Baby Taped to Wall Poor ducky. Enjoy this post? Please be sure to check out my Amerisleep Mattress Reviews page as well, which is my most popular blog post of all time.

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Like many new Instant Pot owners, I've wondered, How many Instant Pots have exploded? (Eeek!) I'm happy to report that my research on Snopes and other sites has shown that these do not explode, at least not when used properly. There is a lawsuit between a woman in Texas and the Instant Pot manufacturer, but she admits she had thrown a towel over the steam vent. Do NOT do this. Still concerned? Consider that on Prime Day of 2018, Amazon sold more than 300,000 Instant Pots. That's more than a quarter of a million sales in only 1 day! If these things were not safe, you would see news stories every day about someone being injured. Still, things can go wrong. We love our Instant Pot, the digital pressure cooker that seems to suddenly be in every home. You can't mess up - just throw in random ingredients and you'll get something yummy every time. It's foolproof. At least, that's how I used to feel about our Instant Pot, until the explosion... Inst

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Although SN and I started out in a long-distance relationship, with me in New Mexico and him in Michigan, drinking that famous Flint water, we haven't spent much time apart since before our wedding 6 years ago, when I took a family reunion trip to the Seychelles and Paris without him. (He "had to work", but I think the idea of 3 weeks nonstop with my mom terrified him. To be fair, it was pretty scary!) Now, he has been gone on a business trip for nearly 2 weeks and I'm kinda starting to miss him. He says he misses me too. So, I decided to have some fun and send him the following email: Subject: Here are some NAKED photos for you Message: Be sure to delete these after you look at them. The photos, one titled "hubba hubba" and the other "you know you love it": "I ain't afraid to show it, show it, show it, show it." "I'm sexy and I know it." Yep, that is a 100% collar-free, naked Pica . Sexy Nerd&#

Kitty Deschanel

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