Our home featured on Retro Renovation blog today

In case some of you are stopping by for the first time, due to a mention in today's Retro Renovation post titled Design Ideas From 7 Mid Century Living Rooms, I wanted to share a little bit about the Hibbard House with you.

We purchased our home in May of 2005, and it had the word 'renovation' all over it. This wasn't our first home (we still own our 1st home, a 1959 traditional ranch home), 

but this was our first attempt at renovation.

The home was sold to us by the original owner, who bought it in 1963. Our home was built by Allied Construction and the architect was Charles Schreiber. 

The home was fairly original inside, but the home was in very rough shape. Before the house could even be appraised, we had to paint walls, install temporary flooring and clean up the landscaping. Check out our Flickr album with BEFORE photos.

The home was barely habitable during renovation, but we managed to live in the home through it all (and not kill each other).

We did a lot of work to the house over the last 5 years, including new plumbing, new electrical, new roof, new kitchen, new bathrooms, new landscaping, new paint, new flooring, new windows, new doors, new gates, new garage, new additions and a new pool house/casita. We tried to preserve what we could, and if we couldn't, we renovated with 'retro' in mind. We have over 1,200 before, during and after photos of our home on our Hibbard House Collection on Flickr. We restored the exterior color of the home, by taking a paint chip to Home Depot. We used birch plywood to create the new kitchen, matching the same material originally used for the cabinets (My husband, Matt Hibbard, of Hibbard Custom built the kitchen with raw lumber). We took out popcorn ceilings and installed v-grooved birch plywood ceilings. We created a 35' wall of glass, where there used to be block. We did a lot of fun stuff to jazz up the house and keep it retro, but modern.

Mr. Hibbard got real dirty during our renovation

Here is are some before and after shots:

We finally finished the pool house/casita

We decorated the family room

 We built a patio cover

 Here is the patio cover at night

 Finished pool house at night

We've been honored to share our home with Sunset Magazine in the July 2010 issue.

We also opened our home for the Modern Phoenix annual home tour in 2008.

Glad you stopped by to check out HibbardKitchen!

Vegan buckeyes

These puppies are awesome. Super simple, quick to make and definite crowd-pleaser. I made 36 of these for a party last night and every single one of them disappeared. There are variations of this recipe that have rice crispies in them, but I opted for a smooth peanut butter center vs. crunchy.

I modified this well-reviewed recipe to make it vegan. The only non-vegan ingredient was butter, so I replaced butter with Earth Balance.

Vegan Buckeyes
Makes 36 small buckeyes or about 24 large buckeyes

3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
1/2 cup Earth Balance, softened (about 15 seconds in the microwave with soften a stick perfectly)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioner's sugar
8 oz of bakers semi-sweet chocolate squares

1. In a large bowl, mix together the peanut butter, Earth Balance, vanilla and confectioners' sugar. The dough will look dry. Roll into 1 inch balls and place on a waxed paper-lined cookie sheet or large plate.
2. Chill balls in the freezer until firm, about 30 minutes (or less, check on them). 
3. Melt baker's chocolate in the microwave in a microwave-safe bowl for about 1 min 30 sec (check on it every 10 secs)
4. Let the chocolate cool for about 1-2 minutes. Dip frozen peanut butter balls into the chocolate. I like to completely cover the buckeye, but you can make them look traditional by only dipping a portion of them in the chocolate. Put the chocolate-coated buckeyes back on a wax-paper lined cookie sheet or large plate and refrigerate until serving.

5 ingredients

 What the dough will look like before you form into 1 inch balls

  Buckeyes ready for the freezer

 Buckeyes ready for the freezer

 Chocolate-covered buckeyes

 Finished buckeyes

I made the creamiest, yummiest vegan cake batter ice cream!

I am on an ice cream kick lately (well, always...who am I kidding). My favorite ice cream of all time is cake batter from Coldstone Creamery, which I haven't had in over a year. I thought I would google cake batter ice cream recipes and found a few to choose from. Some called for eggs (weird) and I found 1 vegan recipe that called for arrowroot, as a thickener and required stovetop preparation. I decided to see if I could get away without warming the ingredients on the stovetop...I was successful at removing that step for this recipe. I came up with my very own Hibbard Kitchen original cake batter ice cream recipe. I died when I tried this. Matt died, too. It's pretty much the most awesome thing I've ever created. This would be exceptionally tasty with strawberries and graham cracker crumbs (That's how I used to order it at Coldstone Creamery)

Hibbard Kitchen Original Vegan Cake Batter Ice Cream
1 cup Silk organic vanilla soy milk (any vanilla flavored non-dairy milk should work)
3/4 cup sugar (I used organic and it dissolved just fine)
2 cups unsweetened MimicCreme
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup vegan yellow cake mix (Dunkin Hines yellow cake mix is vegan and many store-brands are vegan...check the label)
Optional sprinkles

Directions
1. In a large bowl with a whisk, combine the soy milk and sugar, until the sugar is dissolved.
2. Mix in the Mimiccreme and vanilla.
3. Sift in cake batter about 1/4 cup at a time. You'll likely need to whisk for a little while after all the cake mix has been added to remove lumps.
4. Pour mixture into your ice cream machine and follow the machine's instructions. My ice cream began to get thick and get creamy around the 30 minute mark.
5. Eat immediately (I like instant gratification) or put in your freezer for a few hours before eating (I doubt you'll be able to wait that long to eat it).

5 ingredients

 Whisking all ingredients

 Ice cream churning

 After the ice cream is finished in the machine

 We couldn't wait to eat it...straight out of the ice cream machine

Here is the ice cream after freezing.

Mandatory sprinkles on top

Enjoy!

Christmas Nails...Minx are hard to catch!

I am amazed that after a couple weeks of asking friends, asking people on twitter (including minx), and calling salons about Santa Minx, that I am still bear-nailed. I found the santa face minx nails I want on ebay, but the seller never responded to my e-mails, so I wasn't about to buy them from her. Salons didn't call back, even ones direct from the minx website and personal recommendations from friends. I was willing to pay top dollar with several friends to have christmas minx. Oh well.

 These are all I wanted for the last 2 weeks...

I did a candy cane nail a week ago

I might print out santa faces and do a gel for Christmas.

Or do something like this:

Can't have Christmas without festive nails!

Vegan 'homemade' pizza on the easy

I call Fresh and Easy Effin' Easy. I love it. I had a hankering for pizza after my nightly run (I like to think I counteract my naughty food with exercise). I ran over to Effin' Easy and got a pre-made pizza dough and pizza sauce. I had some Diaya mozzarella in the fridge and basil in the kitchen garden.

This is totally yum...11 minutes in the oven at 450 (dough package says 8-10 minutes, but I got the perfect golden crust at 11 minutes). Heaven.

All loaded up for the oven

 Close-up

 All done!

 All yum!

Vegan coffee ice cream

A couple nights ago, as we were getting ready for bed, Matt told me he wanted coffee ice cream. I got out of bed, put the ice cream bowl in the freezer and started looking up vegan coffee ice cream recipes. From my 1st ice cream adventure, I learned that the ice cream machine bowl needs to be chilled for 24 hours (instead of the 10 hrs I tried with my peppermint ice cream).
I found a recipe from A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise blog. I made some modifications and am very pleased with the results. My Cuisinart ice cream machine says that most recipes take 25-35 minutes. My recipes seem to get to the proper thickness after about 40 minutes. It doesn't get incredibly thick in the machine, but it does get to about frozen yogurt consistency. Then, the freezer takes it to the next level. I think that is something people with ice cream machines don't tell you...you should freeze the ice cream after it's done in the machine.

Vegan Coffee Ice Cream

2 c. unsweetened Mimic Creme
1 ¼ c. soy milk (or any non-dairy milk)
¾ c. fresh, strong coffee or espresso (After my ice cream mixture was made, I stirred in about 4 T. of instant espresso mixed with a splash of water because my ice cream didn't taste 'coffeey' (I made up the word) enough.
¾ c. sugar
2 T. arrowroot
1 t. vanilla

Directions:

Mix ¼ cup of soy milk with the 2 tablespoons of arrowroot and set aside.

Mix the Mimic Creme, 1 c. soy milk, coffee, and sugar together in a saucepan. When the mixture has just started to boil, take off the heat and stir in the arrowroot slurry. This should immediately cause the liquid to thicken (not a lot, but a noticeable amount; it will be thicker when it cools).

Stir in vanilla extract. Taste your ice cream batter to see if it needs more coffee....I learned there is no such thing as too much coffee flavor in coffee ice cream.

 Put the ice cream mixture in a bowl in the refrigerator to cool for at least 2 hours (or put your bowl of ice cream in a bigger ice bath, in the refrigerator). Freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions.

6 Ingredients

Mixing on the stovetop

 I had guests coming over, so I did a quick ice bath chill to speed up the cool-down

I had to add instant espresso while mixing because it was not 'coffeey' enough

 I think my rush to get it done resulted in softer ice cream out of the machine

After frozen, the consistency is better

 Yummy.

We had friends stop by and bring us Treehouse Bakery vegan cupcakes, which we mixed into our bowls...mmmmm

 Mint chocolate cupcake by Treehouse bakery

 What is better than ice cream and cupcakes?!

 Matt approved!