Candy Corn Soda

My 4 year old had surgery this last week so I disappeared from the world for a little while.   I decided to clean the house like mad beforehand, make some easy meals and avoid emails, blogging, texting, etc while he was recovering.  Honestly, the last few days have been wonderful.  My mom took my littlest guy and I just got to play with Chase.  We colored dinosaur coloring pages, cut out a pumpkin patch and taped all the little pumpkins up on his bedroom wall, did Lego sticker book, watched Dinosaur Train, read books.  It was heaven.  I found myself wishing every day was like this and that laundry and dishes and errands just didn't exist, and that I could always be the nicest mom ever.  Bringer of Sprite and cookies and narcotics.

That was the plus side.

The down side was obviously the whole surgery bit.  But he took it like a champ and was so brave.  When the anesthesiologist took him I was fawning all over him telling him how brave he was and how I would see him so soon bla bla blah.

 I'm pretty sure he rolled his eyes at me.

At 4 years old he's so much braver than I am.

The weird part is he did a surgery prep class beforehand and asked lots of question so he knew exactly what was going to happen and when the time came he still strutted right into the O.R.

I'm so glad he's not like me.

 


I did a lot of baking before surgery day and I invented this Halloween-y soda for ya'll.  I really did invent it for you because I hate candy corn but I know there are so many candy corn lovers out there.  This soda is made from real candy corn so it tastes just like the real thing.   This may not be the greatest soda to accompany a burger but if you love candy corn you'll love this as a sweet Halloweeny treat.

Anybody else excited it's almost October?

Cherry Chocolate Ice Cream Pie {Cadbury Chocolate Ice Cream}

Sometimes I feel the need to put things in perspective for my husband.

Like sending him a link to this moisturizer.  And reminding him that some women buy this on a regular basis.  And then talking a lot about how lucky he is to have such a frugal wife who doesn't spend $275 on a small jar of moisturizer.

This conversation almost always happens right before he looks at our RedCard statement.  He always acts suspicious about this coincidence which completely baffles me.

Or sometimes it happens right before I tell him I want to buy $30 moisturizer.

It's kind of like when you're a teen and you call your parents and say "Hey I'm in jail, come pick me up."  And when that has sunk in, you say "Great news!  I'm not in jail.  But I did skip English today."

Perspective is a beautiful thing.

Something that needs no perspective is ice cream pie.

Ice cream.  Pie.   It just works.

I came up with a Cadbury chocolate ice cream recipe to use for this pie, but you can always sub a store-bought chocolate ice cream.  If you go with homemade ice cream, keep in mind that you'll need to make it at least 24 hours in advance because the ice cream mixture needs time to chill and develop it's flavor before putting in the ice cream maker.

 

Wanna search for unnecessary products with me and send them to our husbands?

Pina Colada Cupcakes

Here's the thing.  I keep finding pictures of treats I made this summer and forgot to post, so forgive me for going back into summer mode for a few days.

I made these for Tim's sunday school kids and you can probably guess what their favorite part was.  

Everything is better with an umbrella.

Lemon Cream Pie Cupcakes

After I made the Lemon Creme {Cheese} Cupcakes, I had some leftover lemon curd and lemon cupcakes and decided to try a cream pie variation.  I loved both variations so I decided to post them both.  Pick whichever you fancy!

These ones have a graham cracker pie crust and are topped with sweetened whipped cream.

Lemon Creme {Cheese} Cupcakes

 

These yummies have lemon filling inside and a delicious lemon cream cheese frosting on top.

Goodbye summer!!

White Chocolate Coconut Oatmeal Chews

These would be a great addition to a Christmas cookie plate. The white chocolate really makes them. They have a nice chewy texture from the coconut. Mine came out a bit flat so I upped the flour 1/4 cup in the recipe below. 

Next time I'll try adding some dried cranberry bits too.

Mmmmm.

PS- You can't really taste the coconut, so if you're looking for a coconutty cookie, this isn't it.

Mummy Oreo Pops

Want to see some of our treats from our Africa unit?  We ended up doing a lot of Egyptian stuff, because there's really only so much you can do with elephants, savannahs, and soccer.  I looked forEVER for molds I could use to make rice krispy treat pyramids and finally resorted to pressing them into a pan to make 3D triangles instead.  We sprayed them gold with Duff cake spray and placed them on a tray of crumbled graham crackers and added a couple of camels.

 

The real hit was the mummy Oreo pops. We have made these for years so they're nothing new, but so fun for Halloween.

Here are some other things we did: visited the zoo and graphed savannah animals we saw, read about mummies/preserving processes and the kids wrapped each other with toilet paper, read about savannahs and wrote about what we learned, read about pyramids and constructed our own out of marshmallows and toothpicks, made a papyrus out of a brown paper bag and glue and wrote the kids names in hieroglyphics, watched some videos of African music and dancing on YouTube, made a model of the nile and "flooded" it periodically to see how the grass seed we planted would grow even if there was no rain. We also tasted some African food and made some African jewelry to practice patterning.

Chase has started preschool back up so we're slowing down on these extraneous units but he loves them so much I'm going to try to do them when we have time.  Here is my littlest pretending to be a dead mummy for his big brother: 

It's hard to be the smallest!

Homemade Chewy Caramel Sauce

We all know that a food blog isn't really any good without pictures.  But I've made this sauce at least 4 times in the last 3 weeks and it never sticks around long enough for me to get a picture of it.  I will try to work on that this week.  In the meantime, I couldn't keep this recipe to myself.

Are you a burner of caramel? 

I have made homemade caramel sauce using the dry method and burned it every time on my electric stove.  This caramel sauce uses the wet method and I have NEVER managed to burned this.  What I'm saying is- You can do this. I promise. It only takes about 10 minutes or so to make and it tastes SO much better than store-bought sauces.  It's also so versatile.  I have used this on trifles, ice cream, cakes, cupcakes.  It's no wonder it never lasts.

This caramel is thin and pourable when warm, but turns into a soft solid in the fridge.  To return it to pouring consistency you can just pop your jar of caramel in the microwave.  This is awesome over ice cream because when the hot caramel hits the cold ice cream it turns a little chewy. 

Heaven!

Slime Rims

In case you're not in a Halloween-y mood yet, I decided to make it my personal mission to get you ready before October even rolls around. 

I mean, what's not fun about eating candy for a month, chasing your children around Target wearing assorted zombie and Voldemort masks, and decorating your porch with rotting vegetables?  

It's really okay for it to last longer than a month.

I used melon flavored Powerade for the drink above but you can use any drink you want with these fun slime rims.

During our Africa unit I made the kids some "swamp punch" (read: layered grape juice and green Powerade) complete with worms, and slime rims.  They were a hit and sufficiently creepy to convince them that swamps are gross.

Although.

Now that I think about it they may visit Africa someday and be confused when they realize real swamps are not filled with juice and gummy bugs and sugary slime.

It's so hard to be a kid.

Happy Halloween Season!

Peanut Butter Marshmallow M&M Cookies

It's finally Fall!

This is ironic since I'm not even posting a Fall recipe, but I have been doing lots of Fall baking and have some yummy recipes to share with you soon.

Last weekend I put out all the Fall Bath and Body Works soap and wallflowers, and picked a great big pumpkin from the garden to harvest.   We might've also put out every Halloween decoration we own, even though it's only September.

It finally looks and smells like Fall inside the house, and I'm nothing short of giddy about it.

Before Halloween sneaks up, I wanted to share another great recipe you can use to get rid of some of your extra Halloween candy.

Seriously when I made these I used the last 10 packages of plain M&M's we got from Mickey's Trick or Treat party last year.  Candy at the dollar store is at least 3 years old so I figured we probably wouldn't drop dead or anything.  So far, assumptions confirmed.

These cookies are soft and gooey and delicious. They are great out of the oven or even a few days later.  They will stay soft and the marshmallow won't firm up much. You can use peanut butter M&M's if you want in place of plain.

I've looked EVERYWHERE for green/purple/black Halloween peanut butter M&Ms, but no luck.  How cute would those be for October?  Eek!