It’s really hard to resist a polite “would you like one?” from a little kid with puppy dog eyes and a big grin. I do have to admit their follow up statement of “NO FREE HUGS!” got a few grins (and one aghast look that I knew of). Faith of a child, yes? So awesome to see it happen!

It didn’t take long for us to find out that the church across from where we were standing was offering free snow cones. Our boys really wanted them badly, but of course the syrup is loaded with food coloring. They took the plain ice snow cones without too much fuss, though. It was hot so we were thirsty!

To make up for their not being able to have any of the snow cones from last night, this morning we made syrup so we could have our own at home. Here’s what we made…

Cherry Vanilla Syrup
Based on this recipe

1 bag frozen cherries, 16 oz.
1/2 cup water
2 cups granulated sugar
2 tsp. vanilla

Pulse the frozen cherries and any bits of frozen juice from the bag in a food processor until the pieces are a consistent, fine size.

Place the cherries in a saucepan with the water and sugar and bring to a boil.  Boil for 5 minutes or until it’s slightly syrupy. If it’s too thick, it might be hard to use for snow cones. Pour through a fine-mesh sieve, pushing the syrup out of the solids.  Allow to cool, then mix in vanilla.

Store in the fridge in an airtight container for later use.

Lemon Syrup
Based on this recipe

1 cup of lemon juice (we used 9 lemons)
Finely grated rind of 5 lemons
2 cups sugar

Put the sugar, lemon rind and lemon juice in a nonreactive saucepan. Stirring frequently, cook the mixture over medium-high heat. As soon as the sugar has dissolved completely and the mixture has come to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer briskly, stirring occasionally, until the mixture has thickened to a syrupy but still pourable consistency.

Pour through a fine-meshed sieve into a glass jar. Allow to cool. Store in the fridge. Makes about 2 cups.

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How sweet are Your words to my taste, Sweeter than honey to my mouth! – Psa 119:103

You can not say something Spanish like that without a hearty !

Ingredients

1 cup All-purpose Flour
1-1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
generous pinch or two of freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
5 whole Eggs
1 cup Sugar, Divided
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1/3 cups Milk
1 can Evaporated Milk
1 can Sweetened, Condensed Milk
1/4 cup milk

ICING:
1 pint whipping cream
3 Tablespoons Sugar
Zest of 1 orange

Mix icing ingredients in a mixing bowl and allow to chill together.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Liberally grease a 9 x 13 inch pan. Make it one with tall-ish sides.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon in a large bowl. Separate eggs.

Beat egg yolks with 3/4 cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.

Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.

Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared pan and spread to even out the surface.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool. You can put it on a serving platter at this point if you like.

Combine condensed milk, evaporated milk, and 1/4 c. milk in a small pitcher. When cake is cool, pierce the surface with a fork several times. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the cake and try to get as much around the edges as you can.

Allow the cake to absorb the milk mixture for 30 minutes. To ice the cake, whip 1 pint heavy cream with 3 tablespoons of sugar and orange zest until thick and spreadable.

Spread over the surface of the cake. Chill until you know you’ll explode if you wait anymore. Serve. If you left it in the pan like I do, there’s no real way to make it pretty when you serve it, sorry. Fortunately, it doesn’t really affect how it tastes.

If you have an aversion to orange zest texture, you might be able to get away with leaving the cream and orange zest together in the fridge for a few hours then strain before whipping.

Painfully easy!

Simple syrup, even amounts of sugar and water, boiled until sugar dissolves.

While that is boiling, take a small bag of frozen berries and pulse them in a food processor until they are very fine bits.

Add frozen fruit crumbs to the boiling sugar. Bring back to a boil, lower the temp just a bit and then let it go for 5-8 minutes.

Cool. You can strain out any seeds if you are picky about that.

Do not ask why the puff pancake did not puff. I have no idea.

This is for Karen, who has the same exact bowl as I do but has prettier strawberries. That, and more light.

Tools

Silicone muffin pan with room for 6 muffins

Ingredients

In each muffin cup, put:

4 squares of chocolate per s’more from a chocolate bar
6 mini marshmallows
4 Teddy Grams, broken into bits

What to do

First, put 2 squares of chocolate in the bottom of each muffin cup.

Next, put 3 marshmallows on the chocolate.

Then, put 2 pieces of broken up Teddy Grams.

Then put 2 chocolate squares on top.

Next, put three marshmallows on top of the chocolate squares.

Heat up a convection oven to 350F. Put the muffin tray in the oven. Then you watch until the marshmallows get brown and puff up. They should look like little snowmen with two balls on top of each other. Then set it to 150F. Wait until the chocolate melts completely. Take it out  and put two crumbled up Teddy Grams on top and press down into the chocolate. Wait for it to cool down. Stick it in the freezer for 9-10 minutes until solid.

Note from mom:

This are the marshmallows we used. NM wanted me to make sure that you knew they were mini marshmallows in the recipe. I’m sure it would make a huge difference if you accidentally used the regular ones! I had to share the packaging because it’s so cute. The brand is Elyon and they’re fine to eat on stage 1 of the Feingold diet. They’re very cute and unfortunately (?) for them, not so cute we won’t eat them.

Didn’t think so.

French Toast Part

1 loaf of challah, sliced into 1/2″-3/4″ slices
3/4 -1 c. milk, enough to make the eggs runny so the bread can absorb lots
8 eggs (I know, I know, but even this wasn’t enough!)
Generous 1 tsp. of vanilla (this means I dumped and didn’t measure)
Gobs of cinnamon

Whisk the eggs with the milk in a big, shallow bowl.

Heat up your cast iron skillet and make sure you melt some butter in it.

Do what you would do to make french toast: dunk the bread slices in the egg/milk mixture long enough to ensure that the bread is saturated and heat it on the skillet until it’s golden brown. Lather, rinse, repeat. You might have to add more cinnamon to the egg/milk mixture part way.

The Stuffing Part

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/2 c. or so of jelly (we used blackberry)
3 tbs. sugar (or not…depends on your jelly)

Whip all together with an electric mixer until fluffy. Shmear a generous amount in between two slices of french toast and pour on a tablespoon of real maple syrup. A little of that stuff goes a very long way.

And voila!

Yes, it’s blurry. But I have an excuse: I tasted the stuffing part before I took this picture and knew what I was looking forward to.

Woohoo!

Ok, is it sad that I didn’t realize his 6th birthday party was on the 6th? Because it didn’t connect for me until just now.

But enough of the sadness! Because the party was all about gladness.

Back up a little to the day before: the boys and I had fun prepping the house. I baked the cake part of the cake. Thank you very much, Trader Joe’s, for the exceptionally good vanilla cake with vanilla bean bits and lots of yum. Two boxes: four layers. Yumx4.

Then, we started blowing up the balloons. In our home, we have at least two working ball pumps. They should work, right? It took me five minutes to inflate a balloon to a diameter of three inches. In less than two minutes, J manages to inflate one to capacity. Believe it or not, between us, the boys inflated about half the bag of balloons and it contained 72 12-inch balloons. With our own lungs. If you wondered about how much hot air I have in me, wonder no more!

We finished blowing them up on Saturday morning. You know what? 72 balloons didn’t cover our entire living room floor. But 72 balloons was just the right amount for fun.

Later that night, around when I should have been going to bed, I made some chocolate mousse. I’m not sure if I did it correctly because I managed to taste bits of gelatin in the piece of cake I had so it’s safe to say I could have left it out. I’ll show you what happened with that cake in a bit.

FF>> the day of the party. We had fun! J was very happy to see his friends and get to hang out with them. NM was bored but he played tennis outside and his friend R came over so they got to hang out. The kids all played hard and enjoyed the balloons while the adults hung around the food. I mean hung around each other but with food.

And there was cake, of course. Here it is:

Now let me try to remember how the mousse happened, because it was easy and it wasn’t bad, though I was concerned for a bit.

Chocolate Mousse
1 pint of whipped cream
1 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1/2 c. cocoa (instead of melted chocolate, hence easy)
2 tsp-ish of vanilla
1/2 tsp. kosher salt

Run the cream of tartar, sugar and cocoa through a sifter to remove lumps. Add salt, mix all thoroughly. Whip cream and cream of tartar until you get stiff peaks. Fold in sugar/cocoa mixture along with vanilla. I read you can put all the ingredients together and chill before you whip it so I might do that next time to avoid having to fold it all together.

I did have some Knox gelatin in there somewhere, but I wouldn’t bother.

So I eyed the mousse and figured out how to divide it three ways for each layer. Viola!

The frosting? That was a mish mash, also. That’s what happens after reading too many recipes.

Whipped Cream Frosting
1 pint of whipping cream
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/2 can of condensed milk
2 tsp. vanilla
pinch of salt

Whip the cream cheese. Add everyone else and whip them, too. To be honest, I think there was a bit too much cream but everyone seems to have liked it. It wasn’t too sweet at all, either. Hubby liked it and he isn’t a cake person.

J’s expression isn’t from the cake, it’s because the candles’ flames have colors to match the wax:

He was a little concerned about the wax melting onto the icing. Reasonable thing to worry about but we didn’t let that happen. He enjoyed it. And the lettering? Let me just share a tip: don’t put melted chocolate in a baggie and cut a teeeeeeny hole and try to pipe it unless you’re absolutely sure there’re no unmelted bits too big to go through said hole and insist on making them go through the hole only to cause the bag to sprew gobs of chocolate and eventually break open. The plus side is your mess is entirely edible should that happen.

Note to self: learn how to use flash with the camera.

The celebrant enjoyed his day. I had fun watching him open his gifts. I heard myself automatically say “Now say thank you, J, to the person who gave you your gift” when I realized that he had been SO polite and loudly said thank you for such-and-such gift to each person who gave it. No prompts needed. Such a thankful heart!

Afterwards, the kids went upstairs to watch a 3-2-1 Penguins DVD. J had been asking for one and I was so happy that he enjoyed it.

When all was said and done, I asked him if he had fun and without hesitation he said “yes” and “I’m so happy, I got everything I wanted!” It was a blessing to watch him enjoy the day and to see him express such a thankful attitude. God has certainly been working in his spirit.

Gal 5:22-23 NKJV – But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Finely chop half of the mushrooms and slice the rest. This is so little ones with mushroom apprehension disorder can still enjoy them and can’t pick them out.

Melt butter over medium high heat and add flour. Whisk until they’re blended together. Slowly add your broth while whisking to avoid lumps. Add the mushrooms and boil for a little bit.

Put everything but the parsley in the crockpot and set to cook for 6 or 8 hours.

When it’s nearly done, check to see if you need salt or pepper. Add in the parsley and stir. Serve over hot egg noodles.

Note: I think this was a little runny and needs to be thickened. Maybe adding more flour and butter will help with that because a tbs. of cornstarch so far isn’t helping. This recipe was based on one in a book called Beyond Macaroni and Cheese which called for canned mushroom soup and sherry so I made quite a few substitutions for those and added the bay and parsley leaves.

From the way-back machine’s entry dated Jan 23, 2008

I don’t have exact measurements so I hope you’ll forgive me. But this was pretty good, if I do say so myself. Err…make that God needs the credit because He created garlic.

2 small heads broccoli, cut into bite sized pieces
1 medium red bell pepper, cut into strips
3 heaping tbs. (tablespoons!) of garlic, finely minced (maybe 4)
1 tbs. oil
enough beef for 4 people to each have a portion the size of a deck of cards
1/2 tsp. powdered ginger (I didn’t have fresh)
1 heaping tsp. corn starch
3 plus 1 tbs. soy sauce
salt (i think) and pepper

Blanche the broccoli and peppers for 2 minutes max. Don’t throw the water away. Saute garlic over medium heat until your house smells Italian (that is an oh-so-good thing). Saute the meat until you no longer see pink. Dissolve the corn starch in 1 tbs. of soy sauce. Put the rest of the soy sauce in the pan onto the meat and garlic. Add about 1/2 c. of water from blanching the veggies. Add cornstarch/soy sauce and cook until the sauce becomes clear, about two minutes. Add veggies and toss to coat with sauce. You can add more veggie water if the sauce is too thick for you.

The garlic is king in this dish at least for us since we aren’t allowed oyster sauce in our diet.

Bringing back the past from Jan. 4, 2008

This is a something we make for breakfast each Christmas morning for the last few years. Because we love them so much, we make them other times of the year, too, particularly when strawberries are in season. They’re not the usual blintzes, though. I once mis-read the recipe and put in an entire brick of cream cheese. The dominant taste is supposed to be the cottage cheese, but the cream cheese was too good so we continue to make that “mistake” with this dish. Also, nobody seems to notice when I use fat-free cheese. They are still very rich!

16 oz. cottage cheese dry (I’ve used normal)
3 oz. cream cheese (I use a full brick, sometimes Neufchatel, sometimes fat-free cream cheese)
1 egg yolk (I omit bec. It’s raw and I see no difference)
2 tbs. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

For the crepes: any crepe recipe will do. This is the one on the card, but it takes longer than a normal crepe recipe:

2 eggs
2 tbs. salad oil
1 c. milk
3/4 sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 c. butter or margarine
1 c. sour cream
powdered sugar
1 pkg. (10oz) frozen strawberries, thawed or use fresh or use jam of any kind you like but omit powdered sugar

Make filling: put all ingredients in food processor and process until completely combined and smooth. Normal blintzes have texture though, so the way we make it is not traditional. Nor is it traditional to use so much cream cheese. Cover and refrigerate.

Make blintzes: beat eggs, oil and milk until blended. Add flour and salt; beat until smooth (there may be a few lumps). Refrigerate, covered for 30 min. and it should end up the consistency of heavy cream (it never is for me though).

Melt 1/4 tsp. butter in a skillet. Pout in 1 1/2 tbs. batter, make it cover bottom of the pan until roughly a round shape. Lightly brown and remove from pan, browned side up. Keep making until all done. For this step I use Pam and a non-stick pan.

Place about a tbs. of filling in one crepe, wrap like a burrito. Normally, you melt more butter and cook the filled crepes but we never have the patience to. Instead, we put some jam, some cheese filling, wrap and eat. Too much cheese and you have a mess but that’s ok because they end up messy anyway. You can top with sliced strawberries and some powdered sugar.

Post from old blog entry dated Feb. 25, 2007