Baby Shower for Katie

  

The first thing I thought when Katie told me she was pregnant was: 

"I want to host the baby shower!!!"  

 

Needless to say, I put a lot of research and planning into this shower.  It was a lot of fun to put together and even more fun to share with Katie and her friends.


Another friend of ours hosted the shower at her place and took care of the decorations, set-up and party music (and the cleaning! Thank God!).  I took care of the menu.  I basically took all of my favorite party dishes from my favorite blogs and tried them out.  But I can't take full credit...I had three sous chefs chopping and slicing and....cutting out little S's and carefully stringing sewing ribbon through them :)  

As one friend said sarcastically "You, ambitious?  Nothing about this is ambitious."  It was a bit much to take on...but we didn't just pull it off...we did it well! 


My favorite (hosting-related) moment was when Girl A said to Girl B (who is also pregnant) "We were going to host a shower for you, but now I don't think we can.  The bar has been set waaay too high."  :)  And that was BEFORE the cupcakes and cookies came out!

Le Theme
Of course I had to have theme...or more so a concept...for the food.  I wanted to make it all delicate and girly - kind of like a high tea party - but we aren't Brits.  All of the food was designed (thought of, made, crafted...) to be eaten in no more than three bites, able to be held with 2 or three fingers, and, if you wanted, you could put that little pinky in the air.














Le Menu
Peach & Strawberry Mimosas
Tea Sandwiches -
      Vidalia Onion (surprisingly delicious);
      Arugula and Avocado;
      Smoked Salmon on Rye; and
      Chicken Curry.
Caramelized Onion Tartlettes
Mushroom & Rosemary Galettes
Cucumber and Cream Cheese Rounds
French Bread Crudite
Strawberries, Balsamic and Powdered Sugar
Strawberries, Cream and Brown Sugar
Blueberry Scones with Lemon Curd
"S" Tea Bag Cookies
Classic Vanilla cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting (Katie's favorite)
Pineapple cupcakes with Green Tea Frosting (the experiment)
Champagne Cupcakes (the crowd favorite)

Valentine's Day Treats

This past Valentine's Day I was pretty ambitious with the treats.  And then I was pretty unambitious about posting the pictures.  Anyways - here there are:  no big stories, just the recipes and the photos.

First up - 
Strawberry Rhubarb Tart

Crust:

2.7 oz butter

5 oz all purpose flour

½ tsp salt

3+ tbsp cold water

1 egg white (used later)

Dice up the butter into cubes/pads and drop it into the food processor.  Add the flour and salt and pulse until you have small pieces (not too long or you’ll have one big blob).  Pour in the cold water, 1 tbsp at a time, pulsing in between tbsps.  Add more water until the dough is moist and sticks together.  Roll out a piece of saran wrap and place the dough in the center.  Knead the dough slightly to make sure you don’t have chunks of butter.  Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Strawberry Rhubarb Filling
1 kilo fresh strawberries
8-10 stalks fresh rhubarb
1/2 cup sugar

Dice the strawberries and rhubarb into bite-sized pieces.  Place the strawberries in the bottom of a heavy-bottomed pan.  Put the rhubarb on top of the strawberries and pour the sugar over it all.  Cover and set on medium heat for 5 minutes.  At 5 minutes, uncover and stir.  The strawberries should have produces a wonderful juice in which you'll cook the rhubarb.  Bring the whole thing to a boil and then reduce the heat, stirring frequently until the mixture thickens and coats the back of your spoon.  Let cool.

Once the strawberry rhubarb is at room temperature, roll out your dough, place it in the pan and cut off the excess.  From the excess dough cut out several small hearts.  Pour the cooled mixture into the crust and top with the cute little hearts.  Bake until the crust is golden brown.

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Frosted Heart Sugar Cookies  

These were just cute and fun to make.  I usually make them slightly thicker than they are supposed to be and cook them just a little bit less...and on a pizza stone.   I know the recipe isn't original or innovative, but it is from my grandmother's Betty Crocker Cookbook from the 1930s.  Here is the link the modern Betty Crocker recipe.

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Heart Cake
I think I need just a little more practice on the heart, but it was a cute surprise in the center of the cake.  And of course it was delicious!!!

The vanilla butter cake recipe is from Warren Brown (he is awesome!).  The heart is red velvet from Annie's Eats.  And the frosting is my own cream cheese frosting.

Here is the technique (which I've not quite mastered).   You have to make two layers of a cake.  In the bottom layer use a sharp knife to cut out a cone.  In the top layer cut out a round shape like a bowl, then use the inverted top of the cone you've cut out and place it in the middle of the bowl shape.  Crumble the red velvet and mix with red food coloring.  It needs to be a fairly dense mixture (not crumbly).  Hint - the circumferential of the two shapes you cut out has to match.

Fill the top and bottom of the cake.  Using a piping bag, pipe red frosting onto the red portion of the bottom layer, then white frosting onto the white portion of the bottom layer.  Carefully flip the top layer onto the bottom layer (somehow not breaking the cake, smearing the frosting, and making it line up perfectly).

Frost the outside of the cake as usual.  When you cut the cake, use a sharp knife and cut triangle pieces from the very center of the cake.  You should have a  half heart in every piece of cake and a full heart inside the cake.  I'm not going to lie - this one wasn't easy...nor was it the prettiest.  But you get the idea.

And there were some beautiful parrots on the balcony to kick.

Pfeffernusse

Every Christmas my grandma would send us a box full of pfeffernusse (pepper nuts) a small hard German Christmas cookie.  I'm always hesitant to tell people they are anise cookies because the general public seems to think they hate anise because of the bad rep of black licorice.  I have news for you people:  the flavor you hate in black licorice is the same flavor you love in Italian sausage!

Back to grandma's pfeffernusse.  When she died we all wanted to make sure we had this recipe which was by far her most famous.  Though I've had the recipe for 2 years, this is the first that I've attempted the cookies and the recipe was a bit of a challenge, to say the least.

Lets start out with the lard.  Obviously this is an old recipe.  Guessing by my grandma's age and the dates on the other cookbooks I have from her, I'd say the version I have is from the 1930s.  I don't have access to lard, and even if I did I'm not sure I would want to cook with it, so I used butter.  Actually, someday it would be great to try these with lard just for the heck of it.

Brown sugar or 1/2 and 1/2 white sugar...I think I know what you mean.  1 cup syrup or 1/2 cup molasses...umm...I know these are different, but wouldn't the different quantities and viscosity dramatically effect the baking times and final product?  This seems like a lot of guessing for a first attempt.

And then was the kicker..."Enough flour to roll."  Well thanks, Grandma.  I seem to have misplaced my "enough" measuring cup.  Is that closer to 1 cup or 4 cups?  And exactly how many cookies am I making?  (The answer is closer to 4 cups.)

There was also no guidance on HOW to make the cookies.  It was more of an ingredient list than a recipe. Which I get, that is how I write my favorite recipes too.  But it isn't so helpful for the first time.  So I guessed...wrong.  I started over.  I tried a first batch (which are more like cookies than pfeffernuss).  And then I think I got it down.  Tricky little devils though - they look like they aren't done, but they are hard as a rock.  And according to the internet (and I think confirmed by my memory of grandma's version) they actually soften over time.  Lets hope so!

Recipe Details
From the above recipe, use butter in place of lard and use all brown sugar.  I halved the recipe and used about 3-4 cups of flour (you should probably have a whole bag on hand).  "Enough to roll" means that you stir in enough flour to make the dough thick enough to roll out like gnocci (or play dough).  Oh, and I took sour milk to mean buttermilk.

First, beat the butter and sugar until it is soft and all of the sugar is incorporated (I just love doing this).  In a small bowl combine the buttermilk and syrup.  Add syrup/milk mixture to the butter in two or three batches, making sure it is fully combined.  In another bowl mix together the spices and the baking soda with about 3 cups of flour.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet in two or three parts.  Once the dry ingredients are fully mixed in continue to add flour 1/4 cup at a time until the dough is thick (like play dough).

On a floured surface (I love this part too!) roll out a piece of dough into a rope that is about as thick as your thumb.  Using a butter knife cut the rope into pieces about 1/2 to one inch wide.  Place the pieces on a cookie sheet and bake at 375 for 8-10 minutes. 

S'mores! MMmmmMM!

This past weekend was Lag B'Omer in Israel and despite reading the wikipedia page and asking several friends about it - I have no clue what the holiday celebrates.  All I really know is that they have bon fires and the place to be is right in front of my house.  Last year we were surprised by the wonderful our balcony provided of the festivities; so this year, we invited our friends over to "Observe" the holiday with us.

The odd thing about this Israeli holiday is that they make tepees out of their cardboard and trash and pallets, then light it all on fire, and watch for about 15 minutes as the thing flames.  They usually have a blanket or small table set up with food, and a few select (orthodox) groups will bring music.  Being American I had to put my own touch on things...so I decided we'd have S'mores!

This wouldn't seem like anything too extraordinary but there were actually two friends who had never had them before - so for them it was their best S'more ever. Well..their best 2 S'mores ever because you really honestly couldn't have eaten just one of these.

The other extraordinary thing was there are no graham crackers here!  Shocking!  They have a cookie that is close - but not good enough.  So I....look up a recipe to make graham crackers from scratch.  Didn't look too difficult but it called for brown sugar (which thank god I'd just gotten in a care package from my dad!) and honey which I didn't have - ironically.  What I did have (from the same care package) was maple syrup.  Oh my husband would kill me if he knew I used his maple syrup to make these cookies!  Final ingredient - AMERICAN marshmallows.  They are flavored here...like strawberry and some other crappy taste.  A friend tried the whole "Israeli S'mores with their pseudo graham crackers and flavored marshmallows" - you can find her picture on failblog.

Anyway, the making of the graham cracker was a bit tricky because the recipe said to cook until they were slightly brown - but they were brown to begin with because of the brown sugar and the maple syrup.  The first round (or two) came out a little crunchy.  The later ones were better.  In the end, the dark and light ones looked good together and magically, in the 4 hours between when I tried the first one and when we served them - they got better!

I'd like to tell you that I don't want to brag...but I do.  They were freakin' amazing!  One friend (a foodie!) said they were the best S'Mores he'd ever had in his life!  (No - this wasn't his first.  He is American.)  I put all of the ingredients in a cute little stand (and practiced my food photography skills).

I would have taken more photos of the roasting of the marshmallows or the finished products or friends enjoying them...but my hands were sticky!  This was the only photo I managed to take before devouring this cookie...and making another.

Personalized Fortune Cookies

“It is an Asian themed dinner.  Could you bring an appetizer or a dessert?”  I don’t do Asian food.  Not that I don’t like it, or I think I’m too good for it – quite the opposite.  I don’t know about it, where to get the ingredients or how make them into something delicious.  I couldn’t even think of an Asian dessert, so I Googled it, and the simplest, best looking dessert:  Fortune Cookies.

Not that they looked simple to make, but they didn’t involve unavailable or unknown ingredients.  I can’t say I had never thought of making them before.  I had.  And I had wondered how in the world you bake the cookies without the paper getting burned!  Well, now I know.

The dough for the fortune cookie is more like a batter.  My sponge cake skills came in useful when dealing with the egg whites and gently folding in the whole 8 tablespoons of flour.  The recipe in itself was really simple (with only the smallest amounts of the easiest ingredients) and the steps were pretty straight forward.  Until the end.

So I mixed up the batter, no biggie.  Pouring the batter onto the pan reminded me of making pancakes – not too tough.  Moving the pan in a circular motion to form circles was a little trickier.  Lucky for me, my favorite game on the Wii fit uses these same balancing board skills, only in the game you are trying to get the balls in the holes without falling off the board.  In the fortune cookie game you are trying to make identical circles on a pan. 

The recipe said you could make 4 or 5 on a pan…I was scared, so I did only two.  Why was I scared?  Because from the time you take them out of the over, you only have 20 seconds to insert the fortune and fold them into the right shape before they harden and it is too late.  The first one didn’t go so smoothly.  I am great at special reasoning, but I couldn’t fold the hot circle into a fortune cookie.  It was more like…a circle folded into fourths.  Ha ha.  The second one wasn’t much better because I had already used about 14 of my 20 seconds on the first one.  The result of my final 6 seconds…well, I didn’t take a picture of it J 

As the second tray of cookies was baking I pulled up a picture of a fortune cookie and thought it through, imagining myself folding the hot little circle in my hands.  (Closing my eyes and making the motions…that is how I roll.)  The result:  fortune cookies!

These cookies were for a farewell dinner where we were all wishing our friends luck as they head on to Afghanistan for work.  After dinner, we all opened our cookies and shared our hand written notes with the guests of honor.  Homerun!  This will now be my go-to creative impress-your-pants-off party favors.