Martha Monday--Fourth of July desserts

Independence Day is almost here...time for grilling out, parades and fireworks!  With the heat wave here in the Midwest, I am looking forward to cool desserts to follow the bbq.  And naturally, Martha has a bunch of ideas on her site.

Since it's too hot to turn on the oven, these Firecracker Ice Pops are worth a try:

This Mixed Berry Salad with Mint also looks refreshing:

But if your dessert needs to contain chocolate, then these super-easy Pretzel Sparklers are for you:

Should you feel the need to take a more traditional route and actually bake despite the soaring temps outside, then I can heartily recommend these Fireworks Cookies:

I made them last year and they were a huge hit. 

This Summer Shortcake is also a real crowd-pleaser:

I've also made this before, and it was delicious! 

My plans for the Fourth are still up in the air, but I'm sure they will include good food, good friends and good desserts.  What are your plans for the Fourth of July?

Desserts for BUNCO

I play BUNCO once a month with a lovely, and sometimes rowdy, group of ladies. We each bring a dish and eat/gab for an hour or so before we start playing. It should come as no surprise to you that 90% of the time, I bring a dessert.

For April BUNCO, I made this amazing Cookie Dough Dip from Add a Pinch (her photo, not mine):

I don't have any photos of my version because every time I went to take a picture, I ended up eating some.  It was so rich and so, so good!  If you need a quick dessert to take to a potluck or summer outing, then this is it!  I served my cookie dip with plain animal crackers, chocolate animal crackers and graham crackers.  I liked it on graham crackers the best, but let's be clear: the cookie is just the delivery device for the dip. The dip is the star here!

Then, for May BUNCO, I made Pioneer Woman's Knock You Naked Brownies (again, her picture, not mine):

These brownies start with a boxed cake mix and turn into something so much more.  These brownies are so rich, so delicious, that they really do almost knock you naked. Even if it's because you eat so many that your clothes no longer fit and you have to run around naked and when you go to the store to buy new clothes you end up buying more ingredients to make more brownies.

In unrelated news, I'm trying to make muumuus the big fashion hit of this summer. Stay tuned. 

PW notes that this dough is really thick, and she mentions shaping a glob for the top layer of brownie with her hands.  My solution is much neater than that: flatten the glob between two sheets of waxed paper for less mess.

Finally, while PW's recipe calls for baking the bottom layer for eight minutes before adding the caramels and top brownie layer, I skipped that step and just baked the whole thing at once. It turned out just fine.

Give these two desserts a try--you'll be glad you did!

Martha Monday--St. Patrick's Day fare

St. Patrick's Day is all about the gold, the shamrocks, the leprechauns...and the corned beef and soda bread, which is what I usually focus on.  This year, I might change it up a bit and make a few other Irish-themed dishes and treats for St. Patrick's Day.  Thanks for the inspiration, Martha!

I'm liking this Irish Beef and Stout Stew:

This Cheddar-Topped Shepherd's Pie is going to be a huge hit with my family:

Irish Beef Hand Pies?  Yes, please!

After any of those hearty meals, Irish Coffee Cupcakes would be a delicious dessert:

Topped off with a Hot Nutty Irishman, of course!

What are your plans for St. Patrick's Day?  If nothing else, make sure they involve a hot, nutty Irishman. He sounds like a lot of fun!

Farm fresh desserts

After four years and approximately fourteen kids' birthday parties, I finally got around to making a fun and pretty backdrop for the dessert table.

Handy Freddy hung two dowel rods from the ceiling. One was draped in crepe paper streamers, and the other held the rooster, pig and duck face balloons.  The balloons, by the way, are just regular old latex balloons with faces drawn on them. Oriental Trading sells stickers that make the faces, but quite frankly I didn't want to spend the money. I drew the faces on with permanent marker instead.

Just like the appetizer and main course menus, I made one menu for the dessert table rather than a half-dozen individual labels. 

Here are my homestead cookies:

I coated some pretzel rods in Wilton candy melts to make "cow tails" and displayed them in Golden Harvest mason jars.

I attempted to make Bakerella's cake balls, and then attempted to make them look like eggs.  It didn't work, but it was cute and tasty, and that's really all that matters.  Cake balls baffle me. I've tried to make them twice now and I always have a problem getting the consistency just right so that they don't fall apart in the candy coating.  I'll keep trying, though!

Using the twisted krispie recipe, I tried to cut out the treats in the shape of pigs. I had a hard time getting the cutter through the mixture, though, so I abandoned that idea early on and just cut the treats into squares.  See the little pink krispie pig at the top? He's the only one that got made. Sniffle.

And then there were Martha's corn-on-the-cob cupcakes.

Tomorrow, I'll show you the cakes.  Yes, 'cakes' is plural.  Three birthday parties equals three different cakes, though that was the only part of the dessert table that changed.  All the other farm fresh treats stayed the same...newly made for each party of course, but the same in recipe and concept.

Desserts for dinosaurs

So I'm still working on the whole fancy-pants dessert table concept (see anything featured by Amy Atlas) so there's no cutesy backdrop for my sweets. 

The cake and cookies more than make up for the lack of backdrop, however:

The cake is chocolate with buttercream frosting and features a volcano.  A cookie Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops standing around the "4" candle complete the scene. 

To go along with the cake, I made chocolate-frosted pretzels covered with Dino sprinkles from Karen's Cookies Shop.

I put out a dish of M&M's flanked by dinosaurs.  I tried to use the Little Guy's dinosaurs throughout the house for decorations. 

This Spinosaurus is either really scary as he guards the cookies...or really happy to be so close to the cookies.  I'm not sure which!

Take a look at the cookies, and you can be the judge of his demeanor.

All of the dinosaur cookies were made with cutters from Karen's Cookies.  For anyone looking for specialty cutters that you just can't find in a store, I highly recommend them!  I baked all the cookies (with help from my family, of course!) and the Big Guy and Handy Freddy helped flood the cookies after I outlined them.  The frosting is Karen's meringue powder buttercream recipe, and I've been using it for years. 

The Dino footprint cookie was Handy Freddy's idea.  I had an egg cookie cutter, and I had planned to do speckled dinosaur egg cookies.  Freddy suggested cutting a "M" shape into the wide part of the egg to turn it into a footprint to match the chalk footprints outside the house.  Isn't that brilliant?

For a dramatic presentation of the cake, I put 6 trick sparkler candles into the volcano part of the cake.  Grouping them so close together gave me a huge flame rather than sparks, but since no one was burned and the house didn't catch on fire, I'm declaring it a success.

And that's how we do things for a Dino-riffic 4th birthday party!

Have a great weekend, everyone! And Happy Veterans Day!

PW's Bananas Foster

Do you read The Pioneer Woman? Why am I even asking?...nearly everyone does. If you don't, you need to know that Ree (the Pioneer Woman) is very funny and one heck of a cook.  She has an entire section of her blog dedicated to recipes, and she recently posted her version of Bananas Foster.  

I had Bananas Foster in a restaurant once, loved it, and never had the opportunity to try it again. When I found the recipe on her site, I just had to make it in my own kitchen.  With butter, brown sugar, heavy cream, pecans, cinnamon, dark rum and bananas, you really just can't go wrong!  Setting the whole thing on fire is a tad nerve-racking, but a must.  And if I can do it without burning my house down, so can you! Just be careful!

Ree's recipe makes a great deal of sauce, so much that it can easily accommodate four bananas instead of her recommended two.  And, should you have leftover sauce (minus the bananas), know that it stores really well in the fridge for several days. 

Bananas Foster is absolutely amazing over vanilla ice cream.  In fact, this is my new favorite dessert...which is REALLY BIZARRE considering that there's no chocolate to be found here. 

If you're looking for a way to expand your dessert repertoire, or maybe you just want to set something on fire, give this recipe a try.  It's delicious!

Three ingredient peach cobbler

This is a super-easy three-ingredient peach cobbler recipe of my uncle's (Hi, Uncle Rich!) that I've modified. And by modify, I mean I've included measurements. You don't necessarily need exact measurements to successfully make this easy peach cobbler, but it is helpful to have a baseline if you want to modify.

You'll need two cans of peaches, white sugar and Bisquick.  Ignore the butternut squash peeking out from behind the peach cobbler ingredients.  Butternut squash is a show-stealing prima donna, and has problems letting go of the spotlight.

Dump the peaches into a shallow greased baking dish, and reserve the liquid.

To the liquid, add 1/2 cup sugar and 1 1/2 cups Bisquick. Mix it up.

Pour the Bisquick mixture over the peaches.

Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes. It's done when the top is golden and the sides are bubbly. 

This easy peach cobbler is great on its own and SUPER with ice cream. It keeps well in the fridge and reheats nicely.  Enjoy!

Martha Monday--pastry puffs

In the December issue of Everyday Food, there's a step-by-step tutorial for making pastry puffs along with several ideas for embellishment (chocolate-glazed raspberry cream puffs, for example).  With only five ingredients and several pictures of the puff-making process, I decided to tackle this recipe and make the puff and eclair versions.   

While the recipe warned that it would make a lot of puffs, I really didn't comprehend just how many.  I had puffs up to my ears!  The recipe also urged me to tap down the stiff peaks of the dough on the small puffs, but I was in a hurry and ignored this advice.  Shame on me.  Instead of having nice round puffs, my small puffs resembled Hershey's kisses.  Which is fine, but just not the look I was going for. 

The recipe did not warn me that baking pastry puffs stinks.  Literally.  My kitchen was filled with that "cooking eggs" smell.  Now, if you like eggs, then this won't bother you in the least.  But if you only eat eggs once or twice a year and believe that their main reason for being is to contribute to cakes, cookies, muffins, etc.  then this might bother you a bit.  Guess which category I belong to? 

To put a TMI twist on Everyday Food's pastry puffs, I filled them with peppermint buttercream.  To do this, just poke holes in the eclairs first, then squeeze in the frosting (or whatever filling you prefer) into the puff with a regular frosting bag fitted with a small tip.  I used size 4.

Note: the Everyday Food instructions call for making the holes on the bottom of the puff/eclair, but since I wanted the holes to be fully hidden, I made them on top.  After filling the puffs, I dipped the tops in melted Wilton candy melts. 

Then I rolled the tops in crushed candy canes.  To crush the candy canes, place them in a sturdy ziploc bag and hand them to your brother.  He'll take them to the basement, crush them with a hammer, and bring them up to you in the kitchen for use.  Isn't that easy? 

Here's my finished product:

The pastry puffs turned out great and the peppermint flavor really worked well with such a delicate shell.  I like the step-by-step tutorial in the magazine--the pictures and corresponding instructions were a huge help.  If I can learn to ignore the egg smell while they're cooking, then this might become a solid recipe for my dessert repertoire.  Maybe.