Cutest June Bugs

Well technically they're lady bugs, but Carolina Grace is a little June bug, and those brown things that fly into our back door are actually gross and not cute like Miss Gracie. So her party today deserved some homemade cutie pie June bug invitations, cake balls and cake. Sister and I were pretty tired after yesterdays baking, but I think it was totally worth it.

These cuties are just standard cake balls made using half milk and half dark chocolate coating. Then we used pink and black M&M's as heads. And since the proportions where a little bit off I added eyes (which at first looked like pig snouts) with milk chocolate in a piping bag. Then I whipped up some pink royal icing to make the spots. I just made pretty hefty polkies all around, and then dipped my finger in cool water to press them down and make them flat. Water is an excellent royal icing trick to get rid of the little peaks that form on your dots, just be careful that you don't use too much water or the icing will actually run. Then to top these cuties off, I used twizlers pull and peels dipped in chocolate to make the antennae. I think they were just the right final touch.

I thought the entire swarm was pretty cute, and I played around in paint.net to remove and change the background.

Also, here's the invitation Sister and I made a few weeks ago. The pink and black are both made of foam and the "info" is printed on plain card stock. The wings and "info" sheet are attached with a brad so the wings actually open and close. The spots are black rhinestones.

And to top it all off, while I made the cake balls, Sister made this awesome June Bug cake with delicious whipped cream frosting. Now, Sister and I both used boxed cake mixes for our respective projects, and I used canned buttercream for the cake balls, but Sister made the whipped cream frosting and its SOOOOO good I think I could have licked that whole lady bug clean myself. Since all I've shown here is pics... here's Sister's recipe for Whipped Cream Frosting:

1 cup cold milk

1 pkg. instant pudding (can be vanilla or chocolate or any flavor for that matter)

1 container cool whip

Mix milk and pudding mix and let sit until pudding begins to set. Then fold in cool whip until smooth. then ENJOY.

The cleanest...

Bottle of bug spray on the planet. How do I know this? Because I apparently washed it with our white laundry yesterday. Its just been one of those weeks.

I feel kind of like I am hijacking my own blog because this has nothing to do with food, but I really am able to find the humor in this crazy week and would really like to document it.

So after my edible play dough adventure on Monday I came home to a house that felt "kinda warm." And I didn't bother to go up and check the AC until it felt REALLY warm. And by 6pm I had not heard back from the AC repair people and it was 88 degrees in the house. So Sean and I went to home depot and put a window unit in our bedroom so we wouldn't die. And then it thankfully got fixed on Tuesday. Its only been in the low 100's this week in CS!

Then, of course, I washed the bug spray.

And this morning Sean started to leave for work and one of his brand new (within the last 6 months) tires was flat as a pancake. So he took my car, and I am car-less.

BUT I do have a cake cooling on the counter that's going to be turned into some of the cutest cake balls you've EVER seen :) for the little June Bug's bday party.

Play with your food!

For a few months now I've been working part time. And it only made sense to me to take Mondays off because well nobody likes Mondays particularly if you have to work! Well as summer rolled around and Sister was off on Mondays too we started making that our kid adventure day. We tossed a few ideas around for today's Monday adventure including going to Austin to the children's museum but I didn't want to leave town (I have no idea why because our AC is currently not working and I wish I was in an air conditioned car or museum right now!) ANYWAY, I suggested that we try out some edible play dough and see what the munchkins thought about that. And for a good 10 minutes I think we held Connor's attention... which is pretty good for the boy with the most energy in the ENTIRE world ;)

Now the primary ingredient in this is peanut butter so its not recommended unless you are 100% sure your kids are not allergic to nuts. Once you are over that hurdle its a great indoor, play and eat entertainment! Admittedly, I LOVE peanut butter, but I don't LOVE honey so the over all taste was just so so for me, but Carolina Grace didn't seem to have a problem with it at all.

Its simple to make:

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup honey
1 cup powdered milk (I'm not sure I bought the right thing. what i got was really grainy and i think the texture would be improved with smoother powdered milk. We also doubled the recipe and I ended up having to add about a 1/2 cup more powdered milk)

Its not a particularly firm play dough but the oil in the peanut better keeps it from sticking to your hands.
Without color its an edible light peanut butter color.

When color is added, it looks like an entirely unappetizing mardi gras theme ;)

Perfect for mooshing around, and hanging out of your mouth!

I thoroughly enjoyed playing with mine and made a lovely little fish.

Which Connor thought was prime to be smashed.

And smooshed.

AND NOW MY HANDS ARE SO GROSS I NEED TO GO WASH THEM!!! (But I can't open the door cause the peanut butter made them slippery)

FUN

No Muss, No Fuss, No Knead Bread

With the exception of the banana bread I made a few weeks ago, I've never made bread. I'm not quite sure why but I made up my mind to make some, and lets just say I got lucky for choosing this particular recipe. Its soooo good, I made it twice this weekend, and sooo easy that I got brave and changed it up a tiny bit on the second round. This is the kind of bread we get at our favorite steak house. It crackles when you squish it, and its soft and delicious on the inside. AND theres no precise timing or precise ANYthing involved. Trust me I don't really do precise.

I wont keep you waiting long... because you should go ahead and throw together (and I mean throw them together) the ingredients NOW so you can have some tomorrow!

This recipe is adapted from smittenkitchen.com (you're shocked I know), but this is exactly how I made it.

No Knead Bread
3 cups Bread Flour
1/3 tspn. Active Dry Yeast
1 1/4 tspn. Salt
1 1/2 cups tepid water (between 100 and 110 degrees) I don't have a thermometer so I just went with moderately warm but NOT hot water. I think with the extra long rise time, even if your water is a little cool it still works out.

1. Combine ingredients in a large bowl until all the water is absorbed and no dry flour remains, it will be pretty sticky.
2. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for 12 to 18 hours (mine set at least 18 hours just because of our schedule), you'll know its done when the surface is bubbly.
3. Pour dough onto well floured surface and fold it on its self a couple of times. The dough is REALLY sticky and I probably used more flour than I needed and I was a little worried but it was great.
4. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest 15 more minutes.
5. Form dough into a ball and place on a well floured/cornmealed towel, dust more flour/cornmeal over the top and cover with another towel. Lots of reviewers on other sites had trouble turning it into a ball but it baked up fine. Mine was not too difficult to ball but it might have something to do with the massive amounts of flour I used in step 3!
6. Let rise 2 more hours. The original recipe says it will double in size again, mine did not but it turned out great anyway.

7. 30 mins before you are ready to bake your bread, place a large cast iron/enamel/pyrex dish into the oven and preheat the oven and dish to 450 degrees. It made a bigger loaf than I was expecting so keep that in mind when choosing a baking dish.
8. Carefully removed the preheated dish from the oven, gently place your hand under the bottom towel and flip the dough into the preheated dish. Cover (if you baking dish has a lid that's great, if not tin foil will work) and bake covered from 30 mins.
9. Remove lid and bake an additional 15 to 30 minutes. Mine was a pretty big loaf and it was perfect after 15 minutes uncovered.

ENJOY!
Okay so as I wrote out those instructions it sounded more complicated than it really was. I promise this is super easy, and so good its totally worth it. Its one of those super crackly artisan crusts and a super soft and delicious inside. YUM.

It makes a mean grilled turkey and cheese the next day too!
Ohh yeah, here's what I did the second go round. After the 15 minute rest I used a pastry scraper to cut it into one smaller loaf (about 1/3 to 1/5 of the dough) and six smaller dinner rolls before leaving it alone for the final 2 hour rise. I coated the dinner rolls with olive oil, and the crust turned out a little softer (but still crackly) than the unoiled loaf. I baked both the rolls and the small loaf together but cut the covered baking time down to 20 mins and followed up with the 15 minutes uncovered with perfect results.

I cooked up a blog!

Well the background that is. I've been working on it for 2 days now, and totally changed the one I put up this morning... so if you still see pink and blue check back again.

I'd been considering paying someone to design me a background that integrated cookies but they can be kind of pricey! So I just "googled it" and OF COURSE there were step by step instructions online. Now, the really tricky part of the whole deal is getting used to using a graphic editing software like photoshop to actually do the designing. Fortunately, my last 2 jobs were in marketing and design so I was pretty comfortable to begin with, but if you have a couple of hours to spend playing around its definitely not too difficult to figure out.

I started out by looking through online scrap booking papers and whatnot, but couldn't find what I wanted so I literally did this one from the ground up. Like I drew every one of those circles and colored them in Print Shop and then exported everything over to Paint.net so I could make sure the dimensions were correct.

The Cutest Blog on the Block has some good instructions. They worked great for me up until I got to the HTML editing part. I couldn't get that to work, so I had to go another route...

1. Follow the directions above until your background is uploaded into photobucket.

2. Once you are uploaded in photobucket got to Customize your blog, and in the Layout click ADD A GADGET. Choose HTML/JAVA Script.

3. A dialog box like this will pop up.

Enter the following code into the box. You will want to pull the DIRECT LINK info from your photobucket page.

AND Voila! You're Done.

If you're interested in making a background for yourself and have any trouble let me know and I will certainly try to help, but I am by no means an expert!

LONG awaited FroYo post

After all my ice cream adventures a few weeks ago I decided that next time I go for a frozen delicacy I will try my hand at frozen yogurt. Yesterday was that day. After about 10 minutes of Internet research I quickly concluded that David Lebovitz's recipe from The Perfect Scoop, was widely acclaimed as the VERY best frozen yogurt recipe available.

3 cups (720g) strained yogurt (see below) or Greek-style yogurt
3/4 cup (150g) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

Mix together the yogurt, sugar, and vanilla (if using). Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Refrigerate 1 hour. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

To make 1 cup (240g) of strained yogurt, line a mesh strainer with a few layers of cheese cloth. then scrape 16 ounces or 2 cups (480g) of plain whole-milk yogurt into the cheesecloth. Gather the ends and fold them over the yogurt, then refrigerate for at least 6 hours. So, for the above recipe start with and strain 6 cups of yogurt.

The problem I was having was that the recipe calls for 3 cups of Greek Style or Strained Yogurt. I was fairly confident that I wouldn't be able to find Greek Style yogurt and making your own Strained Yogurt take SIX HOURS! So I kept looking, hoping for an indication that plain old unstrained grocery store brand yogurt would suffice. NO DICE people, it is a universal conclusion that you MUST use Greek style or strained yogurt to make your own froyo. So then I did some research to find out exactly what Greek yogurt was (its just strained yogurt) and if there was ANY chance I would find some here in College Station, TX. I found one reference to a brand name that someone mentioned had recently become available in their local grocery in NYC. I don't live in NYC, but it sparked some hope that I might Greek yogurt in our local HEB (which is generally known for having larger ethnic/organic/speciality selections than say Kroger) and satisfy my must have it now need for frozen yogurt.

I was in luck! HEB did in fact have quite a selection of Fage (Fa-yeh) Greek style yogurt. I wasn't going to have to wait 6 hours to strain my own!!!!

So I got out all the ingredients, and decided to make 2 batches: one plain vanilla and one cake batter. I just LOVE how simple this recipe is... seriously 3 ingredients in each batch. It really makes me wonder what all is in the stuff I buy elsewhere.

This is the point where both batches are ready to go into the fridge for the hour long chili down, and I go to set up my ice cream maker. This is also where I realize that I forgot to stick the canister back in the freezer after I washed it last time and there is no way I will have my FroYo in an hour and a half. This is also the moment I decide that I want this ice cream maker instead of this one.

But now its today, and my vanilla froyo is safe in the freezer, while my cake batter spins away in the kitchen as I type.

And the results: Sadly, I don't think I like the vanilla. Don't get me wrong, the texture is AWESOME and far superior to anything you can get in a shop, but its just got a little more zing than I was prepared for. I will have to go back and give it another try in a bit, but its still a little to tangy and yogurty for me. Next time, I think I will either add a little bit more sugar, or just stick to ice cream for the plain vanilla stuff. The cake batter turned out a little bit better though, I think its just sweet enough to subdue the tang and satisfy my sweet tooth.

Also, I used a combination of Fage 0% (which literally has zero fat), Fage 2%, and Fage total (which I was SHOCKED to see had 20g of fat in just 6oz.). I am not sure if I would like the flavor more if I used all Fage total, but at that point I'm thinking that plain old ice cream cant be that much worse for you.

So after all that, I'm truly undecided about my foray into the world of frozen yogurt. I'd much rather have a big Styrofoam cup of Zaks (whatever it contains).

Sharin' the love

Of all things batter with my tiny niece and namesake Carolina Grace. I admittedly haven't really been in a baking mood this week. Or cooking for that matter. The most impressive thing to come out of my kitchen this week was pizza on one of those roll out Pillsbury crusts on Friday night. But we had the D's and their kiddos over and I grabbed a box of brownies from the convenience store down the road, and that was my baking for the week. And I must admit I can certainly get behind some brownies from the box, and their batter. And so can Carolina Grace!

Check out those baby blues!!! (and if you read my blog and melissas blog, sorry ;) )