dallin May 10th, 2011

For the last three months, Luke and I have been working on a new project. It’s called SchoolBuy. The concept is simple. Schools need more funds. People want to help, but don’t have time, money or motivation. SchoolBuy allows you to help, without any of the hassle. How? Through online shopping.

We’ve partnered with hundreds of online stores, each of which will make a contribution to your school with each purchase. These are products, brands and stores that you would be using anyway, at the prices you would normally pay. Places like Apple, Dell, Optus, Virgin, Vodafone and lots more! It doesn’t make any difference to you, but it adds up to a big difference for your school!

The process is simple

1. Visit SchoolBuy
2. Search for the school you want to support
3. Find a partner merchant and go shopping!

If you use Firefox, it can be even easier. Just download our Firefox Plugin, found at the top of the page where you select a merchant. Then you can just go about your business shopping online and any purchases from SchoolBuy partners will automatically make a contribution for you school! We’re working on similar plugins for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari (and maybe even Opera), so check back for updates on that (or sign up for our e-mail newsletter…)

So why are you still reading this? Shouldn’t you be shopping by now?

There is more that you can do, though! We’re working hard to get schools involved with this so they can promote within their community, but it’s often hard to reach the right person at a school who can do something about it. Feel free to pass this on to any teachers, principals, Parents & Friends committee members or anyone else you know who is involved in a school community. You can also give them my e-mail address (dallin@schoolbuy.com.au), and I’d love to hear from them. We expect people to have questions, and we’re here to answer them!

If you have a blog or a website, we’d also be very appreciative of you linking to us. We’ve created a set of ‘badges’ with cut and paste html code for you to add to your site, on our marketing page. I put one on my blog, so you can too! If you’re a graphic designer, feel free to make a better one, too! You can also link directly to your school’s page on SchoolBuy – click the marketing link at the bottom of your school’s page, and then the code for the badges will automatically link directly to your school. Magic!

Finally, you can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. We’d also love for you to sign up for our e-mail newsletter (promise not to spam you!) – there are forms for that at various places on the site.

This site has the potential to do amazing things. We’d love for you to help us on the way there!

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Kathryn May 8th, 2011

I am a mother, and as such, I am a home maker and a wife. I am a sister, a daughter and daughter in-law, an aunt, a teacher, a carer, an example and a friend. This is my work. It’s what I love and it’s who I am. I try to take pride and care in each of these things.

Dallin and I were having a discussion recently about how we define our self, and our self worth. During our discussion we discussed that what is most important is defining ourselves by things that are eternal and unchanging. Not all women in the world can define themselves as mothers, but they can define themselves as women. We have a divine nature to love, care for and nurture others…not just our children. That is eternal and it is unchanging.

I am grateful that I have the divine nature and call that is womanhood. I am blessed to know that I can bless and enrich the lives of those around me. I can constantly strive to be better and hopefully also help others to be better. I am grateful to know I can do and be all of those things independent of anyone or anything else.

It is true that there is no calling in this world that will ever be equal to motherhood in ANY way. There is nothing that ever will be as fun, painful, rewarding, challenging, tiring, enlightening, empowering, terrifying, precious, heartbreaking, joyful or all-encompassing as motherhood. My heart breaks to think of those who would be truly amazing mothers but have not been blessed at this time to be so. My heart breaks even more for those who have somewhere lost their divine desire to want to be mothers… it’s a true tragedy to see those women living below their privilege….

I have had many women in my life who I will be forever grateful for. Their examples have taught me all I want to be as a woman and a mother, whether they themselves are mothers or not. Thank you to my mother, mother in-law, my ‘other’ mum, my grandmothers, aunts, my precious sisters and my dear friends for being those examples. I would love to share with you what they have taught me, but that would have to be a topic for another day.

Womanhood is an honor and a privilege.

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Kathryn May 4th, 2011

Thanks to Cooking.com for featuring our photo of this in a photo gallery in May 2012.

So it was Dallin’s birthday this week. He’s not a man for ‘hoo haa’ – he didn’t want a special dinner, he didn’t want friends over, he didn’t want to have take away – so we went about our day as usual, he got home and we had chicken rolls for dinner because that’s what was on the menu plan (yeah, I know… exciting right!?) and then he looked after the boy while I taught a half hour lesson. Very understated!
There was only 1 request Dallin had for his birthday. When I asked him what type of cake he wanted he said ‘Cake!? No…. or, maybe a 7 layer jelly cake’ (Jello-o for any Americans reading this) – Well, when it’s the only request he has what else am I meant to do but research, and make a jelly cake!?

The Rainbow Jelly cake

Now, I know that I would never make a hand model, but my hands aside the picture looks pretty good, and I’ll admit that the cake looked pretty good too! So Dallin took this photo and posted it on his Flickr account and has had atleast 1 or 2 people ask how I made it!? Although it took me 2 days to make, it’s really quite easy.

You need as many packets of Jelly as you want layers, sweetened condensed milk… again this will depend on how many layers you want. You also need Gelatin, lemon juice and a whole lot of boiled water. For this one I used 4 different jellys and 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk.

Milk Layer
3/4 cup boiled water
2 dessert spoons of Gelatin
juice of 1 lemon (I used bottled of lemon juice and just guessed how much)
1 can sweetened condensed milk

Jelly Layer
1 pack of jelly
1 1/2 cups boiled water.
Dissolve jelly in boiling water and allow to sit (in the bench) for a minimum 30 mins until mixture is warm to cool, but still liquid. I left one for atleast a couple of hours and it was fine.

I started with a milk layer and poured about half of the mixture into a 9″ cake tin. Once it was set I poured the jelly layer on top – repeat until complete, making sure each layer is set before pouring on the next one! Because the milk mixture is much more than you need for 1 layer you can either adjust the quantities to only make as much as you need at 1 time OR you can leave the milk sitting in HOT water until you need it again, so that it stays liquid OR (and I haven’t tried this) I heard that it doesn’t take very long to ‘melt’ in the microwave if it’s set.

The 4 jelly, 4 milk layers, completely filled my 9 inch spring form cake tin, to the very top – so you may want to take that into account when planning how many layers! I had thought about decorating the top with a small amount of cream (just a border)- but I ran out of time, and Dallin likes jelly – just jelly – cream or ice cream or any other garnishing or decoration is not required! Having said that, I did have left overs tonight with cream and some crumbled chocolate and I thought it was great!

Now, having done this once I have just a few things I would do differently.

*On a side note, my husband lived in Switzerland and Germany for 2 years and he tells me that the word for jelly in German means ‘Food of the Gods’*

First, I would endeavour to make the milk layer as thin as possible. Mine got thinner as I went along but I would have like them even thinner….

Second, I used a spring form pan and lined it with glad wrap….That was painful…. I’m sure some bakers out there would be horrified to know that I only own either spring form or silicone bakeware. Next time I would use either a silicone or a standard cake tin. This would be in the hopes that I could invert the silicone dish and it would come straight out or, I could put the cake tin in boiling water for a minute before inverting it straight on to a dish.

Third, I would have started a day earlier so that I wasn’t pouring the last layer of jelly on at 4.30pm the night of his birthday…..

Fourth, When pouring the last layer on I would leave the tin in the fridge and bring the jelly to the cake instead of the other way round…. I’m sure my sticky jelly floor agrees with me

I did play with the idea of giving the cake a thin biscuit base, for 2 reasons, the first is completely selfish – I love biscuit bases – I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure it’s genetic (well that’s my excuse). The second reason is that I thought it would just give a bit of foundation and stability to the cake. If I was doing a biscuit base then I would go back to the spring form pan, but I wouldn’t necessarily line it, just to keep the outside as smooth as possible.

If you do a google image search for jello layer cake you will see a few different ones which look infinitely better than mine but I’m pretty sure the recipes are all very similar.

But after all of that the most important things are that 1. Dallin loved it, and 2. I had fun and was pretty happy with the end result.
Make sure you let me know if any of you try it, I would love to see and hear about it

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