Lemony Sweetness

My aunt is a gourmet confectioner. Her hand-dipped almond-rocha-style toffee is stuff of legend! But one of our favorite treats that she makes are called Cake-Mix Cookies, and they are no fail. (if you're following our blog, you know that I can't make a decent cookie to save my life, so when I say they're no fail, they're no fail.) The recipe is a piece of cake, literally:

1 cake mix of your choice
1/3 cups water
1/3 cups oil
2 eggs
candy chips of you choice

Combine all ingredients. Spoon onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake on 350 for 8-10 minutes. Add time as needed. (It gets a little goopy, trying to spoon it out, so I treat it more like a brownie and pour it into an ungreased 13x9 pan and bake it for 18-20 minutes instead.)

You can use any combination of cake mix and chips. I really like Spice Cake mix with chocolate chips, but the all time favorite is Lemon Cake with lemon chips. It makes the most perfect lemon bars, delicious, delectable, divine! The ScentSationals fragrance Lemon Chiffon, only available online, perfectly captures the scent of lemon bars cooking in the oven and when I melt it in my warmer, my mouth starts watering in anticipation of lemony sweetness!

On The Go

On our facebook page yesterday, one fan asked, "Does ScentSationals have car fresheners, too?" This reminded me of a story my coworker was telling me. While he was out delivering to a particular Walmart, he met a man at our endcap, who had taken an entire sleeve of the scent Vanilla Bean (there are 14 scents in every sleeve). When my coworker asked if there was a birthday or if the man was merely stocking up for Christmas, the man laughed.

"No, no," he explained. "I'm a truck driver, and I just love Vanilla Bean. As a matter of fact, I've velcroed a ScentSationals warming tray to the dashboard of my truck, and I let the sun melt the wax and keep my truck's cabin smelling great!" We thought that was awesome! Here's a man who loves our scented wax so much that he's willing to go out of his way and make an improvised warmer so he can smell it all the time!

And for those of you who are wondering, "Does Scentsationals have car fresheners?" the answer is not yet, but we have considered car fresheners and may come out with a line in the future!

Sun and Rain and an Apple Seed

First grade was a long time ago in some respects, but in other ways, it seems like yesterday. When I put ScentSationals Crispy Apples scented wax into my warmer this morning, I was instantly drawn back to one particular first grade field trip, when we went to an apple orchard in honor of Johnny Appleseed.

I distinctly remember the sweet smell of apple blossoms that filtered down between the branches along with beams of sunlight. In my young girls mind, it didn't seem fitting that I was in such a scene in just my jeans, t-shirt and ponytail. It was the kind of place for princesses in flowing gowns, the blossoms catching in their silky hair, the sunlight dancing off their tiaras.

As a class, we were led into the General Store, where all the different apples sat in labeled bins. As our tour guide led us around, she cut up enough apples for everyone to have a slice: Granny Smith, tart and sour; Pink Lady, smooth and sweet; Red Delicious, crisp and juicy. The tour guide then cut an apple in half, and displayed the core in its dissected view: a perfect star lay in the center of the apple. She gave us each a dissected apple and led us to a table where we dipped the apples in paint and made stamps out of them.

With patterns covering the paper rolled out on the table, the song from Disney Melody Times' Johnny Appleseed Short came to mind, "There's apple pie and apple pastry, tangy apply cider in a glass! Stew 'em. Boil 'em. Fry 'em. Bake 'em. Apple pie and apple cake 'em. You can eat them any way!" And you can smell them, too, with the ScentSationals fragrance Crispy Apples!

My Cookie Catastrophe

Throughout my life, I've come to the conclusion that mothers make the best cookies. It's true.When I was little, I always loved it when my mother would pull out our cookie pans. Battered from years of loving use, just the sight of the cookie pans meant one thing: oatmeal cookies!

The oven would beep when it was hot enough. We'd mix the dough, me keeping tabs of the ingredients on my sticky fingers: right thumb-sugars, forefinger-butters, middle finger-eggs (I'd get to crack one, and that was always exciting), ringfinger-vanilla (lessoned learned there, smells so good, but don't tase it!), pinky-dry ingredients including oatmeal. Cook. Eat. Yum. In that order.

Now that I'm old enough to bake my own cookies, I'm always disappointed one way or another. My dough's too dry, so you bite into a cookie and it turns into dust; or my dough's too moist and, no matter how long you leave them in the oven, they don't cook. I got to the point where I gave up cookies and became a Professional Cookie Taste Tester.

Boy, did that backfire. Now I'm getting married and I can't cook cookies? What is this world coming to? I'm gonna be a mom and I can't cook a decent cookie. That's against the Unwritten Mother's Code of Motherhood, I'm pretty sure. But I have a solution to my problem. ScentSationals has a scented wax conveniently named Oatmeal Cookie (can you see where this is going...).

So here's the plan: Oatmeal Cookie smells so yummy, that I'll put it in my warmer right before my hubby gets home from work. I'll let the fragrance, strong and sweet, fill the whole apartment while I run to the grocery store and buy a box of oatmeal cookies. When my hubby comes home, he'll walk through the door, smell the Oatmeal Cookie fragrance, I'll conveniently be pulling a tray of seemingly homemade oatmeal cookies (but really just the store-bought ones on a tray) out of the oven, and no one will know the difference! ... at least, not for a while... hopefully...

And a One and a Two and a Cha Cha Cha!

This past semester at school, I took a social dance class. I learned how to follow (and the guys learned how to lead) as we danced to all sorts of songs: the Foxtrot, stately and pristine; the Walz, smooth and flowing; but if you asked the class which dance was the favorite, across the board, the answer would be Cha-Cha.

Something about Latin Dancing brings out the risque side of even the shyest person. With my hips twirling, my skirts making that swooshing noise as they spin around my legs, and the beat of the music pounding in my ears, it was very hard to hold back a loud, "Olay!"

The Salsa Warmer here at ScentSationals gives off that same Latin vibe, with it's bright red color and yellow tinting. Unique with it's pegged wax tray that makes cleaning a cinch, the Salsa spices things up and makes me want to go south of the border, as Frank Sinatra would say! When I look at the Salsa, I can almost feel the Cha-Cha beat again: and-a-one-and-a-two-and-a-Cha-Cha-Cha!

Facebook Frenzy

Yesterday, as part of my job, I posted on facebook the scent of the day. (One of our new seven fragrances, Sea Salt. It made me want to wade knee deep in the ocean, sand squelching between my toes, the water bright and calm.)

And yesterday, almost as soon as I had posted the new scent on facebook, I received this email:

I follow you on facebook. I was looking for your new scent Sea Salt online and cannot find it. Where is it? Thanks.

I was beaming after that and kindly explained that our seven new fragrances are in stores in Utah and Idaho, but haven't been added to our website yet. She was very appreciative and responded graciously by saying she'd keep checking our website (http://www.scentsationals.com/) until the new scents arrive.

The Scent at Sam's

The other day, during my lunch break, a woman from Sam's Club was at the office in the Break Room, available for anyone who might be interested in a Sam's club membership. My fiance and I were very interested, so during lunch, I stopped by.

I found Mindy sitting at a round table, a box of cookies and brochures arranged just so on the tabletop. She was talking on the phone to someone. When she saw me, she promised to call back, and turned her attention to me as I took my seat.

Polite chit-chat began, as I filled out paper-work and munched on a cookie (or two).

"I didn't even know ScentSationals was back here," Mindy said. "I walked in and it smelled so good!" She went on to explain that she knew all about us and that she loves our scented waxes!