,Hey there friends! Sorry I was so MIA last week. My to do list has been a mile long, and I wasn't able to get around to baking as much as I'd like so that I could share this recipe with all of you! I was finally able to get into the kitchen for a little bit yesterday and whip up these delicious cookies to share with all of you.. Before I get into the cookies though I'll do a little weekend recap like I always like to do on Mondays!

This past weekend was filled with errands and visiting good friends. We spent Saturday afternoon with a couple of really great friends of ours who we know from Utah State who are also having a baby! It's been so nice to swap stories and learn from each other. We also went to a Christmas cookie party on Saturday night with some of our closest friends and had so much fun baking and catching up. Every year they host this get together and donate the cookies to the Northshore Kellogg Cancer Center! It's such a wonderful way to spread some Christmas cheer in our area. Yesterday was pretty amazing, too, though. We tried out a new place for breakfast in our town's downtown area and it was so yummy! If you're ever in the Libertyville area, we highly recommend Town Square Restaurant for breakfast! In the afternoon, we went to see Star Wars; The Last Jedi! Oh my gosh you guys, it was better than The Force Awakens. I'll leave it at that because I would never spoil it for any of you, but seriously...GO SEE IT!

Anyways, these cookies. Snickerdoodles are my all time favorite cookies. I love making them especially around the holidays. A few Christmases ago, I received a wonderful recipe box filled with family recipes from my mother in law and this recipe was in there. She is seriously the best baker I know. I have slowly tweaked the recipe that I got from her though due to well actually making some mistakes that turned out to enhance the cookies, as well, as having to adjust things for our oven. So without further ado...here is my snickerdoodles recipe!

Cookies

• 1 cup butter (at room temperature)
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 teaspoons cream of tarter
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cinnamon Sugar

• 2 tablespoons sugar
  
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  

1. Cream butter and sugar in a mixer on medium speed with a whisk attachment
2. Add eggs and vanilla to mixer
3. In a separate medium sized bowl, combine cream of tarter, baking soda, salt, flour, and cinnamon
4. Stir in dry ingredients in to mixer with the paddle attachment
5. In a separate small bowl, combine the sugar and cinnamon to make the cinnamon sugar
6. Roll dough into balls and coat with cinnamon sugar
7. Bake cookies at 375 degrees F for 8 minutes in a convection oven or 10 minutes in a standard oven
8. Let cookies rest on cookie sheet for 2 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack

What are your favorite holiday cookies to make? Please share them with me in the comments! I hope you all have a merry week ahead!

Happy Thanksgiving week! We're less than a week away from one of my favorite days of the whole year. Not only do we love hosting Thanksgiving dinner for our family and friends, we've started doing the tradition of making a special Thanksgiving breakfast for them, too. A couple of years ago my hubby, Caleb, whipped up the most delicious pumpkin pancakes with cinnamon butter the morning of Thanksgiving. They were so good we wanted to share them with our family and friends! So last year we invited my parents and a good friend of ours over early for some pancakes, coffee, and watching the Thanksgiving parade. It has become one of those things we really look forward to doing every year now! We wanted to share this tradition with you a little early so in case you want to whip up your own, you can buy all the ingredients this weekend when you do your Thanksgiving shopping! Here is Caleb's recipe:

Pancakes

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 cup milk
• pinch of ground cloves
• 2 tablespoons melted butter + more for skillet
• 6 tablespoons pumpkin puree (we use Libby's)
• 1 egg
• Syrup (for serving)

*You can also use 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie seasoning instead of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves OR 1 teaspoon for apple pie seasoning instead of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground cloves.

Cinnamon Butter

• Butter
• Powder sugar
• Dash of cinnamon

1. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, stir together milk, pumpkin puree, melted butter, and egg.
3. Fold mixture into dry ingredients.
4. Melt some butter on a skillet over medium heat.
5. Pour 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake. Cook pancakes about 3 minutes per side.
   
6. For the butter: whip equal parts butter and powder sugar. Add a dash of cinnamon.
7. Serve pancakes with cinnamon butter and syrup!

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! We're hosting our annual Friendsgiving tomorrow night so be sure to follow us on Snapchat (dianakaravida) for a glimpse of the get together!

Hello friends! I would like to start out by thanking you for following me over to Tiny Dapper Fox. I know you might be wondering why change from This Boundless Journey? And I will definitely be addressing that as well as all the exciting things you can read about and find here on Tiny Dapper Fox. But let's start with why we're changing first...

So like I said before, this site will be a look into bits of our whole life, starting with motherhood. I want to share with all of you this magical experience I'm currently going through and offer any words of wisdom for mamas who might need it. I know at the start of this journey I was like a deer in headlights. I was so nervous and didn't know where to start. While I am NO expert and I will NEVER claim to be, I've found it's nice to hear that other mamas to be are going through the same thing I'm going through. I won't ever be offering medical advice here, for that I will always suggest you call your doctor but I do plan on writing about my pregnancy experiences/safe products I've loved using and after Nugget arrives (that's our temporary name for our baby boy) my postpartum experiences/awesome baby products I've found.

I also plan on incorporating a lot about our cozy home that we're slowly making our own. I'll be doing room tours and honestly you'll probably get multiple of one room because we're always transforming them! We have big plans for a lot of rooms throughout our house and as for the ones that are "done" we're always coming up with new ideas to make them more us and I love to decorate them differently for every season. On top of decor, I also want to bring you all some DIY posts! One of the biggest reasons I wanted to create Tiny Dapper Fox is to get my creative juices flowing again. I miss using my hands and the right side of my brain. I really love my day job but it is very structured and I really miss flexing those creative muscles on a regular basis, so I think this blog and some fun crafty projects might just be the answer to cure that! It's also no secret that Caleb and I love hosting get togethers and to be honest it really is an art to pull off some of the bigger ones like Thanksgiving or our gender reveal. I want to share with you all our tips and tricks of how we make all this happen as well as all of Caleb's yummy recipes you all ask me for all the time. I'm going to try to get over my shyness as well and share some of my baked goods recipes, too!

In the travel section all of our tips/trip stories will be available as well as our original City Guides from This Boundless Journey. We will no longer be offering trip itineraries but I will be putting together quick guides for places that we don't have city guides for but have visited and have some recommendations for. The way we establish a city guide is we need to feel that we have thoroughly explored that city and be able to give multiple recommendations. For places like Niagara Falls or the Cinque Terre that we only visited for a day or two do not warrant that, but we do have some great info to share on those places so those quick guides can be found in the general Travel section and the Stories/Tips category. On top of all that, I will be putting together our long awaited Disney series. It's no secret that we really really love Disney and having been to Walt Disney World two years in a row we have some really great tips and recommendations to share with all of you. I will be putting together multiple posts about Disney and those can all be found in their own special Disney category.

The last section will cover any fashion or beauty tips I have. I'm no fashionista or beauty expert but I do love putting together fun outfits and trying out new beauty products. Being pregnant as also presented its challenges with these two bits of life and I want to share some wisdom with all of you mamas to be that might need it!

And last but not least the last section of the site and honestly the one I'm really really excited for is our Shop page! So at the very top I mentioned Tiny Dapper Fox has been a long awaited of dream of mine but also of Caleb's. We came up with this name a really long time ago when we first started dappling in to a couple of our hobbies. Mine being stationary and Caleb's being woodworking. We've thought long and hard about how we'd like to execute these hobbies into making them a bit of a side hustle, I suppose. We've thought about Etsy and Offer Up but have always felt kind of shy about putting ourselves out there and also don't really have the time or resources to market products to the max since we have day jobs. Well when I mentioned to Caleb that I wanted to start up a little lifestyle blog for our growing family it sparked the idea of maybe putting up some of his designs on the site so that you all can see them in real life through our home tour posts. If you don't know, a lot of the furniture in our home is made by Caleb! We often get questions about where we got pieces and I always say with so much pride that my hubby made it! He has really refined his skills and is finally confident that he can create pieces that everyone would love to have in their homes, too. So as we get our stock up and put up home tours you'll be able to shop those pieces from our Shop page! As for my little creative piece in stationary, I just love all things papers. I pick up journals and cards even when I don't need them and I love snail mail. I always have an idea for cards or invitations that I'd like to send to people but a lot of times I run in to that road block of I can't find what I'm looking for or I have such a good idea for something that I should just create it myself! Well I'd like to share those ideas with all of you, too! So keep an eye on that little corner of the site as we build it up with all of our favorite little things.

And that's it for now! I don't want to confine myself to just these topics but I believe this is a good basis and what I've been itching to write about for a long time now. I hope you enjoy Tiny Dapper Fox and find some fun inspiration from it! Please leave me a comment and let me know if there are any topics that YOU would like for me to cover, too. Hope you have the happiest of days!