Channeling Hugh Hefner

Embracing the Luxury Pajama Trend in Full Force
September 23, 2017
Story By: Mandy Kellogg Rye
Filed Under > #OOTD (Outfit of the Day)

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If we’re being frank here, my favorite thing to wear is pajamas.  So getting behind the pajamas-in-public trend has not been hard for me.  I’m just glad that it’s been around for more than a season or two.  Silky sets, trench dresses that look like robes and all of the beautiful, details that come with them are not going anywhere for me.

J.Crew originally showed this beauty as a blue silk trench dress and/or a duster.  It honestly reminds me more of Hugh Hefner’s silk robes…ha!  So that sparked my pajama love and had me pressing “buy” before I knew it.  I love this silk trench dress!

I wore it here with fun accessories like these Sibilia earrings from the Shoppe, my favorite ballerina-esq body suit, everyday grey jeans and my new gold loafers. Before I talk about the loafers—don’t worry, I’m going to talk about the loafers—I must say that this silk robe trench “dress” is incredibly versatile.  It has me thinking about eventually taking the dress route and wearing it with black tights, black high heeled, high fashion ankle booties and the bodysuit beneath.  The bodysuit will be a must though, otherwise I think I’ll feel a little too naked.

Anyway, okay, but now the gold flats.  How fabulous are they?!  A splurge, for sure, but one that I’m SO pleased about.  I cannot express to you just how comfortable they are too.  I’m convinced it’s because of that fine Italian Valentino leather enveloping my feet.  I could LIVE in these things.  And these will definitely be a pair of shoes that get better the more aged and worn they become.  I also linked to a similar option for gold loafers below and here.  

Lastly, I’ve got to mention how obsessed I am with the mini bag trend. They’re SO stinking cute!  And this beautiful mini by ZAC Zac Posen is also available in the exact style in a larger, regular size, too.  

So tell me friends, are you pro or con the pajama trend? Truly, MKR

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Photography, Kathryn McCrary for Waiting on Martha

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Citrus Olive Oil Bundt Cake with A Fresh Citrus Glaze

A light, moist cake with a balance of refreshing flavors
September 21, 2017
Story By: Mandy Kellogg Rye
Filed Under > Desserts

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Olive oil bundt cake with citrus glaze
Olive Oil Bundt Cake recipe on Waiting on Martha

Olive oil bundt cake on Waiting on Martha

Out of all the ingredients I use when cooking I would say olive oil is my number one go-to.  I literally put it on, and in everything.  Vegetables, pasta, salads, marinades, and of course combined with a little balsamic for dipping fresh bread!  But for some reason, I hadn’t ventured into baking with olive oil until recently and now the only question I have is why did I wait so long?!  

Not only is olive oil good for you, high quality olive oil also has different flavor notes that can work perfectly with certain recipes.  Take my latest creation for example: Olive Oil Bundt Cake with a Fresh Citrus Glaze.

For this specific recipe I used Carapelli® Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil.  With olives from the 2016/2017 harvest, Carapelli® Extra Virgin Olive Oil is fresh, earthy, and a little sweet with a fruity yet balanced taste.  It not only added that extra flavor note to my bundt cake, but it made it incredibly moist.  Plus I was thrilled to find Carapelli® Extra Virgin Olive Oil at my local Publix (in the cooking/spice aisle in case you’re wondering).  It’s always a win win when I can get everything I need in one place.

But back to the cake.  To add citrus to the cake itself I used a few drops of lemon, lime, and orange essential oil.  I’ve tried using actual citrus or citrus zest to the sponge, but I’ve found you can’t control the acid which can often make the cake collapse.  And we can’t have a collapsed cake can we?!

The frosting is your classic vanilla glaze kicked up a notch with loads of fresh lemon, lime and orange zest.  I prefer not to cover the entire bundt cake in glaze as I don’t want to overwhelm the fresh citrus with too much sugary sweet.  

All in all, I could not be happier with how everything turned out.  The Carapelli® Extra Virgin Olive Oil brought out the citrus to create the most perfect balance, and quite possibly my favorite cake ever.

Looking to pick up some Carapelli® at your local Publix? Use this Ibotta coupon offer and save on your purchase through November 3rd!  Learn more about Carapelli® on their Facebook or Instagram pages.  Truly, MKR

Olive Oil Bundt Cake with Fresh Citrus Glaze
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Prep Time
15 min
Cook Time
1 hr
Total Time
1 hr 30 min
Prep Time
15 min
Cook Time
1 hr
Total Time
1 hr 30 min
Ingredients
  1. 5 large eggs, room temperature
  2. 2 cups sifted all purpose flour
  3. 1 1/4 cup organic sugar
  4. 1 cup high quality olive oil, I used Carapelli Unfiltered Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  5. 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  6. 1 pinch of baking soda
  7. 1 teaspoon salt
  8. 2 drops lemon essential oil
  9. 2 drops lime essential oil
  10. For the glaze
  11. 4 teaspoons whole milk
  12. 1 1/2 cup confectioners sugar, sifted to remove lumps
  13. 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  14. 1/2 cup citrus zest (can be any kind of citrus)
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees and heavily grease your bundt pan and set aside.
  2. In a bowl whisk the sifted flour with the baking powder, baking salt, and salt. Set aside.
  3. In a bowl using an electric mixer beat the eggs with the sugar and citrus essential oils on medium/high speed until smooth. This will take a few minutes.
  4. Slowly beat in the olive oil until creamy, about 3 minutes.
  5. Add the dry ingredients the wet mixture in batches of 3 beating on medium speed until well mixed.
  6. Pour the batter into your bundt can and bake in the center of the oven for about 45-60 minutes or until a toothpick is inserted into the cake and it comes off clean.
  7. While the bundt cake is in the oven make your glaze. Place the sugar in a medium/large mixing bowl and slowly stir in the milk and vanilla a little at a time until through thouroughly mixing the glaze is smooth and not lumpy. Add 1/2 of your zest and reserve the rest for garnishing your cake.
  8. Remove from oven and let cool in the pan on a cooling rack. Cool for 15-20 minutes **this is KEY** then slightly tap the sides before flipping over to reveal your cake.
  9. Let the cake cool completely then ice with citrus glaze and garnish with fresh citrus zest.
Welcome by Waiting on Martha https://waitingonmartha.com/

Photography, Rustic White for Waiting on Martha | This post is in collaboration with Carapelli, a brand we love and adore.  All opinions are 100% our own. 

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The Tech & Tools We Use As a Team Every Day

Your Team Needs to be Using These Small Business Project Management Tools
September 19, 2017
Story By: Mandy Kellogg Rye
Filed Under > Everyday

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Small business project management tools, Waiting on Martha

If you’ve ever worked on a team, then you’ll know that it really does take a village to get the good work done.  And no matter the size of your team, the tools and processes you use to stay on track can be complete game-changers when tackling the never ending to-do lists.  Fortunately, we’re at a very exciting time for dashboards, apps and programs that promise higher productivity and increased efficiency, with convenience and organization at their core. 

At Waiting on Martha, Inc., we’re always trying to work smarter with small business project management tools, and when we find some that work—like, really work—for us, we want to shout their names from the rooftops.  With 12 employees and various bodies of work—the shoppe, the blog, The Well Code and more—it’s become vital to lean on technology to ensure that everything is getting done in the best way possible. 

Our discovery and implementation of Asana a little over a month ago has completely blown us away.  This dashboard allows for us to keep track of all work, separated in different teams and appropriate projects, and keep the back-and-forth out of the email inbox. Our organization, accountability and overall work flow has dramatically increased since devoting time to using it as a team, even, and maybe especially, for those of us on the team that are working remotely from Atlanta. 

In addition to Asana, I’m including a few other essential tools that the team uses on an everyday basis below.  Some you may have heard of, others that you have yet to use on your own team. It’s especially important to note as you’re looking at them that all of these tools are continually improving and evolving.  It might be worth your while to revisit the unpaid and paid offerings of ones you had ruled out before. 

I’d love to know what small business project management tools that you use everyday, and if there are any we should add to the list.  I’m a nerd with this kind of stuff, and I always like to find ways to do my job better!  Cheers, Kat

P.S. Do all of these tools get you in GSD mode?!  Dress your desk for the part with our top desk essentials HERE. xo 

SHOP THE STORY  / CLICK LEFT & RIGHT ARROWS TO EXPLORE


  

Asana

A project management dashboard that has changed our lives

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Oh my gosh.  Asana has absolutely changes our lives at Waiting on Martha, Inc.  I honestly don’t know how we functioned without this project management tool.  If you’re part of a small business, no matter if you’re a 2-person team or crew of 10+ people, you need to be using Asana.

First, this project management dashboard lets users keep track of work on separate teams.  We separate our teams based on different arenas. Since we have the shoppe, the blog, The Well Code and more pillars of work, we keep those projects visible to only those who they pertain to. 

We then create projects within each team, with corresponding tasks within each project.  Projects and tasks can be visible to only me, or I can assign others on the team to “follow” their progress and updates too. It’s all highly customizable, and it’s actually all a bit FUN to create and structure!  To-do list lovers, this is your tool. 

Maybe my favorite features about Asana is the actionable conversations within each task.  Sometimes I need to ping MKR with a quick question or request before completing something on my plate.  I’m able to keep this in a conversation within the task, with necessary files and attachments included too.  Game-changer.

We can also keep track of our results and progress a lot easier in Asana. This is especially important for us in quarterly initiatives, blog partnership ROI reporting, etc. and eliminates our inbox overflow tenfold. #thankgoodness

P.S. Asana has a GREAT app for work on-the-go, too. 

Google Calendar

Our standard color-coded team calendars

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Google Calendar is a free online calendar that is the easiest way for us to keep track of our editorial content for the blog, upcoming in-store events and promotions for the shoppe, any team members’ appointments, brand partnership calls, etc.

We have 3 different calendars (Editorial for the Blog, Shoppe work schedule for employees, and WOM All for meetings, appointments, events, birthdays, etc.) that different team members have access to.  And each separate calendar is color-coded up the wazoo, and we use this simple everyday tool in tandem with Asana.  We’ve realized how visually based we are as a team, and we appreciate the ease of access of Google Calendar for all of our scheduling needs. 

Planoly

A visual planner for Instagram

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Planoly is incredibly helpful for visually planning Instagram content.  We love this tool since we take our Instagram “grids” and the flow of images very seriously. Since Instagram can really become a time-suck, it’s nice to upload pre-planned content ahead of time to allow for more time in the present.

Planoly also works for Instagram Stories, a somewhat recent update that proves my point that you should revisit apps you may or may not have used in the past.  Anyway, if you have the “Swipe Up” option on your Instagram business account for Instagram Stories, you’ll know that it also is time-consuming to upload links with images on the go.  Planoly cuts down on the time it takes to get these posts up by allowing you to add the hyperlink with the image in the dashboard.  

Ahalogy

An integrative tool for amplifying our Pinterest strategy

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Ahalogy maximizes our Pinterest strategy, which is incredibly important to us as Pinterest continues to be our #1 traffic referrer to the blog.  We’re able to schedule pins for optimal posting times through the dashboard, using helpful “lift” words in our captions that Ahalogy recommends to boost our searchable content.  We can pin directly from the dashboard, and we can use a convenient bookmark widget to pull images from specific posts. 

This tool has proven to be a promising way to tackle ongoing Pinterest initiatives without taking up too much valuable time. 

Being an approved content publisher in Ahalogy has been a fruitful component of our editorial strategy, too.  We can partner with brands on sponsored content and use Ahalogy’s impressive content analysis and data tracking to make it a successful, mutually beneficial collaboration. 

CoSchedule

Our #1 editorial marketing calendar tool

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We’ve used this editorial marketing calendar for years now.  It’s linked directly to our blog via WordPress, and it allows for us to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts at triple or quadruple the speed than we could manually on each platform.  We’re able to promote current content as well as archive old content very efficiently.  

It’s also a great at-a-glance tool for us to keep track of editorial content that’s coming down the pipeline. And lastly, we’re able to see helpful insights and analytics about social shares from our original blog content (including Pinterest, too).

This tool works really well for small businesses like ours; we have several logins that let a few of us work in it simultaneously.  There are also great plans designed for professional marketing teams and agencies.  Beyond our standard editorial calendar and social sharing, there are many, many more features available at different price levels, including a social automation tool that uses data-driven intelligence to reshare your best messages to every major social network, workflow management that could be used in place of another dashboard, integrations with Evernote, Google Docs, Google Analytics and more.

Seriously, this tool is a game-changer!

Shopify

An easy-to-use ecommerce platform

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Shopify is an ecommerce platform that’s perfect for your business, whether you sell online, through social media, in-store or even out of the trunk of your car.  It features an incredibly easy platform to navigate, and it allows many of our team members to access our shoppe products, revenue insights and point-of-sale technology in an instant at our new brick & mortar store. The integration is one less thing we have to worry about, which is great. 

Shopify Support and the Shopify blog are also amazing.  The Shopify blog also offers countless resources that help us evolve our business strategy and grow every day.  I highly recommend checking it out! 

MailChimp

Our email marketing automation

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MailChimp is the world’s largest marketing automation platform, and for good reason.  It’s very, very simple to navigate, and it offers everyone from small ecommerce shops to big online retailers a chance to reach their customers and grow their business.  

MailChimp utilizes an easy “drag-and-drop” functionality that allows us to upload .jpg or .gif files and a hyperlink for direct traffic referrals back to the blog, shoppe and links around the web.  

And with the paid feature, you can automate optimal sending times, which is nice if you’re every wondering what time is really the best for open and click through rates. There are also many opportunities to segment your lists and strategically send customized messages. 

Featured image, Rustic White for Waiting on Martha

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