From now until Christmas, The Cackleberries Team will be offering a brand new Christmas Recipe feature every Monday.  Over the next four weeks, we will highlight some of our favourite seasonal snacks and festive foods.  so without further ado, we present to you part 1of our 4 part Christmas recipe series.

for part 1 of our 4 part Christmas Recipes series, we feature…..

Christmas Ginger Cookies

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp cloves
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 egg

Directions

1. Sift together dry ingredients
2. Cream butter and sugar, add molasses and the egg
3. Add dry ingredients to creamy mixture and mix
4. Shape into 1 inch balls and roll in white sugar
5. Place balls 2 inches apart on baking sheet
6. Bake at 375 for 8-10mins
7. Cool before removing
8. Serve and Enjoy!

We hope you enjoyed this Christmas Recipes Feature! 

With our latest Blogging initiative, The Cackleberries Team will be focusing on other companies, people, products, organizations or basically anything that we feel complements our core values and business mission.  Whether it is small community groups making a big impact or large corporations making a difference in forgotten places of the world, The Cackleberries Club will attempt to bring these stories to you.

As we commence our newest blogging initiative, we’d love to have your input so  if you have any suggestions or would like to offer a person, story, product, business, or other organization that you think would be suitable for this new feature, please let us know at info@cackleberries.com

EthicalBabe.com – Organic & Fairtrade Children’s Products

In our pursuit to bring you interesting and ethical child related stories, today, we highlight a company that has recently come to our attention.  Ethicalbabe.com proclaims itself as a “company that is committed to bringing the very best in Fair Trade and organic products for children, which are eco-friendly for you and your family.”

Ethical Babe is a  relatively new company founded by two women from the UK.  They have a wide variety of products in their online store ranging from natural children’s clothing and toys to women’s toiletries.  All of the products Ethical Babe sells are hand picked, used by the founders, and are recommend to their friends.  It is this community foundation that is the key to their business philosophy and is what The Cackleberries Team finds so appealing.

Items such as the Wooden bikes and  other wooden toys are not only highly favourable for the environment but also very very cool for little children.  These fully functional and highly attractive items are a fantastic choice for environmentally conscious parents looking for alternative items to buy their children.

Other great items that all households could use, regardless of whether they have children or not are the eco-friendly cleaning supplies that the company sells.  From mirror and window cleaner and dishwashing and laundry detergent to all purpose polish and biodegradable garbage bags, there is something for all you ethically inclined consumers out there.

With international shipping available, this company is able to provide its products across the world and make a difference one customer at a time.  We think they’re doing a great thing and encourage you to check them out.  You’ll have to act fast if you’re looking for Christmas gifts!  Good for you Ethicalbabe!

 Scouring the Internet for your enjoyment, Cackleberries has located some of the most popular video doing the rounds on the World Wide Web.

Today we offer a variety of videos.  From the hilarious to the fascinating, these 3 videos are all uniquely entertaining.  Enjoy.

 Video # 1

The Muppets Sing Queen

Video # 2

Funny German TV Ad

Video # 3

Very Innovative Car Ad

* UPDATE – Video # 4

The making of the Honda Car Ad.  Very Cool

Hope you liked these classic YouTube Videos.  See you all tomorrow!

With our regular Wednesday feature, Cackleberries.com has another expert article to help parents solve those tough child rearing dilemmas.  The Cackleberries How-to feature provides great parenting tips, tricks, and techniques to help you deal with any sort of situation that may arise throughout the process of parenthood.  You can view all of our expert articles on the right side of the page under the “Expert Articles” category.  If you have a topic you’d like us to cover, feel free to let us know at  info@cackleberries.com

With American Thanksgiving now upon us closing in, we have a mini 2 part feature to make sure you have the most successful thanksgiving dinner ever!  If you missed Part 1 of our Thanksgiving Dinner Tips, be sure to check it out.  For the conclusion of our 2 part series, Read on……

How to Host a Successful Thanksgiving Dinner – Part 2 of 2

Cackleberries has compiled an 8-step guide to pulling off a highly successful Thanksgiving Dinner. Last Wednesday, we shared with you the first half.  Today, we will share with you, the second half…..

5 – Always prepare a little more food than you think you need

More often than not, the amount of food you think you’ll need will be enough. However, when a niece unexpectedly invites the new boyfriend, your brother’s family is able to attend last minute, or uncle Joe heads back for third helpings, you’ll be glad that you prepared for the unexpected. The one thing you never want to do on Thanksgiving is run out of food.  Besides, the worst-case scenario is that you’re left with tasty leftovers for the rest of the week. Not such a bad predicament.

6 – Whenever you’re planning on eating dinner, tell your guests it’s an hour earlier

While most guests will arrive early for all the planned festivities, there will undoubtedly be the guests who arrive just in time for dinner.  For example, If your planning to eat dinner at six, tell your guests you’ll be eating at five.  No one wants to be left waiting for the lasts guests to arrive before dinner can be served. In order to avoid this unpleasant circumstance, you may want to spread a little white lie about when you expect dinner to be ready.

7 – Make sure you have adequate amounts of cooking, serving and dinnerware

This is an often overlooked element of hosting any large get-together. Most people simply don’t have that many glasses, plates, serving utensils, or any other items you’ll need in bulk. No need to worry though, simply make sure you take stock of what you have, and come up with solutions for what you don’t. Plastic cups, borrowing items from friends, or even renting dinnerware are all options. Just determine what you’ll be needing and how you want to go about getting it.

8 – Prepare For The Unexpected

Your niece’s new boyfriend prefers non-alcoholic beer, your aunt has one to many drinks and needs a place to sleep for the night, your barbeque runs out of propane while cooking some appetizers. Basically, anything can creep up on you that you didn’t account for. In order to pull off a problem free day, you need to do your best and plan for the unexpected. Without going overboard, try and have contingency plans in place to deal with potential problems. Obviously you can only do so much in preparation but by checking in to things beforehand, you’ll save a lot of hassle. For example, pick up a variety of drinks for different tastes and designated drivers. Check your propane tank or have a spare cylinder to be on the safe side. Make up the guest bedroom or have an inflatable mattress on the ready just in case. The more time you take to prepare, the less time you’ll stress the day of.

Sounds easy enough right? Well with these tips, you should be able to have a fantastic and highly successful Thanksgiving Dinner! Good luck and have fun!

If your interested, make sure to check out Part 1 of our Thanksgiving Dinner Tips.

Welcome back to the ‘Drawing Lessons & Drawing for Kids‘ Series from Cackleberries.com.  Each and every week, we present a brand new drawing lesson for your enjoyment.  These videos from our head artist are a great resource for you and your kids as you learn to draw together.  If you want to review past instalments, you can access all of our drawing tutorials on the right side of the page under the”drawing lessons” category.  These art lessons are produced specifically to make drawing for kids more fun and exciting!  Stay tuned every week as we  progress with our drawing knowledge and learn new skills together.

The Cackleberries Club will be offering a new 3 part series where we showcase some classic thanksgiving drawing features.  For part 1 of our series, we showed you how to draw a Thanksgiving Turkey,  and In our second week, we showcased how to draw a Thanksgiving Pilgrim Man.

And now, with Thanksgiving almost upon us for our neighbours to the south, we’ll be wrapping up our latest themed drawing lessons feature today. For the final instalment of our thanksgiving drawing series, we present to you, how to draw a…….

Thanksgiving Pilgrim Girl -A Cackleberries Drawing Lesson

Hope you enjoyed today’s Drawing Lesson Feature! 

Stay tuned for our Christmas series coming soon!