I love my blog. I find that it both entertains me and relaxes me, which is why I have been perturbed by the fact that I have not been blogging all too often lately. But I think I've finally figured it out. 

See, Josh and I have recently joined the 21st century and got ourselves a couple of smartphones. Josh has been lusting after one for a quite a while now and I have been dragging my feet for many reasons, including the cost factor (these new phones add another 50% to our bill each month) and the connection factor (I don't like being accessible to everyone, all the time. I like to know that Josh can reach me and the kids' school can reach me, but other than that, eh. I don't need the constant checking of email and facebook and um, what else is there?)

But lo and behold, my old faithful cell phone died on me. The battery would not hold a charge any longer and I had the phone plugged in more often than I had it in my bag, which kind of makes it worse than a cordless phone and super-pointless. 

Anyway, to make a very long story only slightly long, we had no choice but to get new phones and to upgrade. So we did and now we're here and now that we have these new phones, I find that I no longer sit down at the computer that often - and there ya go, the reason I have not been blogging. No computer, no bloggy. Simple. 

I see that I have to make an effort to sit down and write, which is okay because nothing good comes without effort and I really do enjoy the fact that this blog will be something for my kids to look back on to jog their memories of a (hopefully) fun childhood. 

So where am I going with this? 
Shavuot begins tomorrow night and contrary to what Josh likes to make believe*, there really is a custom to eat dairy on Shavuot. Since I got totally lucky and got invited out for both Shavuot lunches, I kind of felt like I wasn't going to cook or bake that much for the two night meals - except my eldest came home from school, having learned about cheesecake. As far as I can tell, that was the big theme of the day - not the giving of the Torah, not the culmination of counting 49 days of the omer, just cheesecake. Not that I'm saying that the teacher is not doing a wonderful job, because she is and I am sure she hit on the all salient points of Shavuot, but all my kid heard was CHEESECAKE. 

So here we are, needing a cheesecake. 
And here I am, with one in the oven. And I have to tell you, (and I know this because I have made this cheesecake countless times), this is best dang cheesecake out there. No, really, it is. And if I ate dairy, I would keep it all for myself. But I don't, so I will let my kids have it. I know, I'm such a good mommy. 

Here's my version of a Chocolate Chip Cheesecake - adapted from the very excellent baking cookbook called The Whimsical Bakehouse. 

Grease the bottom of an 8" round pan. The pan should be fairly deep, so try for an 8"x3" round pan. Once the pan is greased, cut out a circle of parchment paper and lay it on the bottom of the pan. 

Crust: 
2 cups of chocolate graham cracker crumbs (just fill a ziploc with graham crackers and have at it). 
3/4 stick of melted butter

Mix the two together and press the mixture into the bottom of the pan, using any extra to build the crust up the sides of the pan. 

Right about now would be a good time to preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 

Filling: 
3 bars of cream cheese - use the full fat kind, Shavuot only comes around once a year. 
1 cup sugar 
1/3 cup heavy cream or Rich's Whip
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 egg white
1 cup mini chocolate chips

Mix the first four ingredients together in a standing mixer, until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, until they are fully mixed in. Pour the batter into the crust and sprinkle the chocolate chips on top. 

Now here comes the tricky part. I mean, not that tricky, but man, I hate a water bath. I usually use an aluminum disposable roasting pan for this part because it's big enough and because I can throw it out afterwards. If you're using a real roasting pan, please make sure it's not one that you have used for meat because you know, that would be bad. Dairy or pareve pans only please!

Put the cheesecake pan inside the roasting pan and fill the roasting pan halfway with hot water (not boiling, just hot). Be sure to pour the water into the pan with a cup, it's not a good idea to hold the cheesecake filled roasting pan under the faucet; there's absolutely nothing good that can come from that. 

Bake for 45-50 minutes or until the center of the cake appears firm. Some say that there's nothing worse than an undercooked cheesecake, but keeping in mind that I would eat the raw batter, happily, I'd say to err on the side of caution and take the cake out too soon rather than too late. 

Now here's the annoying part - let the cheesecake cool on the counter for two hours. Two hours?! I know. So don't do what I just did and put it in the oven at 9pm because really, we're going to be sitting here all night. I feel like I might as well make challah now - except for the fact that there's a cheescake in the oven. Darn. 

Oh well, maybe I'll just catch up on the many many weeks of missed The Good Wife episodes. 

Oh, and once the cake is cool, run a knife around the edges and using a parchment covered plate, place it over the cheesecake, invert the cheesecake so its upside down and let the cheesecake come out of the pan onto the plate. Peel off the parchment paper that was inside the cake pan and is now stuck to the bottom of the cheesecake and immediately place another plate, preferably the serving plate over the bottom of the cheesecake and flip in again so that it is now right side up. Make sense? Good. 

Look at your cheesecake and be proud, but don't eat it yet. Not cause it's not Shavuot but because by the time this process is done, it'll be one o'clock in the morning and there's that whole eating-in-the-middle-of-the-night-heartburn-thing. You can have some for breakfast instead. 

Chag Samayach! 

*All fleishigs, all the time. It's a like a motto.  

We have been having breakfast issues lately, specifically with the what to have part of breakfast.

My kids are partial to cream cheese and saltines, an unfortunate combination that has become the go-to breakfast in the house for a while now. I have been trying to counter that by offering scrambled eggs, but really, who wants to get up early to scramble eggs every morning? I know. Me either.

So I made these muffins (from 100daysofrealfood.com) last night, in the hopes that they'd eat these for breakfast - and three out of four kids ate them happily, and in my book, that's a win.

The 100daysofrealfood mom says to put whatever you like into the muffin batter so I tripled the recipe and then added three different kinds of add-ins: chocolate chips, walnuts and coconuts. But now I think about it, I'm pretty sure she meant nice things like fruit, not questionable breakfast items like chocolate chips. What can I say? Baby steps.

The muffins are delicious and a triple recipe yielded 36 muffins, so enough for many many breakfasts and a few lunchbox treats. Like I said to Josh - one recipe makes 12 muffins. That's so cute. What would I do with 12? After everyone tastes, I'll be left with almost none. Nope, in our house, we triple a recipe or we go home. Or however that saying goes. 

Pesach. It's coming. You can run and you can hide, although I don't recommend hiding because you will most likely end up in a closet or under a bed and then you will find dust. And Pesach has nothing to do with dust, only crumbs.

Say it with me: Now is not the time to start Spring cleaning!  
Pesach is so early this year, it's not even Spring yet, so let it go, let the dust bunnies be and we'll all be much happier.

Too many people (women) make Pesach into a huge deal, and it's really not.

Do you eat on top of your ceiling fans? No? We don't either, and that's what ours will not be cleaned before Pesach.

Do you eat under the bed? I hope not. Although I will be giving my kids' underbeds (is that even a word?) a quick once over with a flashlight, just to make sure. But the eating upstairs ended the after Purim. I know, no one should ever eat upstairs and we really don't - except I recently learned that my children hoard candy they get in school (lovely, right?) in their dresser drawers. The day after Purim, Josh marched them around their bedrooms, they pointed out all the hiding places and all the candy was dumped into a Shoprite bag that now lives in the pantry.

By now you are surely asking yourself what my point is.
I'll explain.
Way more important than cleaning things that don't need to be cleaned right now and organizing things that can be organized after Pesach - or never - is deciding what you will be eating on Pesach, desserts obviously being the most important. And the most Pesach-y dessert I could think of? Macaroons.

I'm reading an awesome book now called A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. I have been very into food memoirs lately and hers in the latest in a string and possibly the best I have read so far.

One of the recipes she shares is for Chocolate Covered Coconut Macaroons and I tried them last night - with some changes. I did not have vanilla so I left that out and I also did not make the chocolate ganache as she did because I was not sure that there was any heavy cream with a kosher for pesach certification - and even though my kitchen is far from being ready for Pesach, I did want to try out the recipe as if it was already Pesach. I only used ingredients that I had on hand that are also sold with a KP.

This recipe made 24 nice sized macaroons. Molly's recipe indicated 14-18 macaroons so I can only imagine how large and yummy hers are.

Start by pouring 3 cups of unsweetened* shredded coconut into a pan.
Add 3/4 cup sugar.
Add 5 egg whites.

Mix all very well and heat over a low heat for 10 minutes, mixing almost the entire time. I stopped mixing here and there but I did wind up with some brown coconut and I think that was not supposed to happen, so just keep mixing. Your sculpted arms will thank you later.

After mixing for ten minutes, pour the coconut mixture into a 9x13 pan and spread it out over the bottom of the whole pan. It doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to cool off, so stick that pan in the fridge and let it do it's thing - mine took about twenty minutes, the perfect amount of time to do homework with a first grader.

Once the coconut has cooled, preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper (not wax paper - bad things happen when you bake wax paper) or foil. Roll the coconut mixture into small balls and place them on the baking sheet. My coconut balls were probably about an inch big, maybe the size of a walnut.

I was able to squeeze all 24 onto one baking sheet but had I known that I was going to get 24 coconut balls out of the recipe, I probably would have sucked it up, let them breathe a little and just used another piece of parchment paper on a second pan.

Bake for about 25 minutes or until they are a golden brown color. Mine did not take a full 25 minutes, but my oven runs hot. Keep checking them, you'll know when they're ready.

Let the coconut balls - we can now call them macaroons - cool.

I melted a handful of chocolate chips, dipped the macaroons halfway into the chocolate and then let them set up on a cooling rack.

I found the best part of this recipe to be the simplicity - no preservatives, no unhealthy fat from bad Pesach oils, like cottonseed and the like. I may not love the amount of sugar in these little guys, but at least I know what's in them. 

Josh (and the kids who like coconut) found them to be quite tasty, straight from the oven last night and were equally pleased with them this morning. The other kids and me? Not so much. But it's a coconut thing in general, not a commentary on this recipe.

But here is a commentary on these macaroons: If you look carefully at the chocolate covered ones above, it kind of looks like they are wearing chocolate toupees on their heads. 

Do you see it? I had to hold myself back from using the rest of the chocolate and a toothpick to create faces on each one, like a bunch of old guys on a bench.

*The original recipe called for sweetened but that, combined with the sugar seemed over the top to me.

And this, my friends, is why I am not a cookie decorator.

There was a point when I thought it might be fun to go to baking (cooking? pastry? chef?) school and learn to be a professional pastry chef, but I think I am over that.
Because I have say, my wrists are just killing me from all the piping.

I guess that's another career that's ended before it even began. Oh well.

So in case you can't tell (and one of my kids couldn't), these are Haman cookies. Eventually, when they dry, they will be attached to sticks so they will be Haman-on-a-stick cookies. Kind of like Haman hanging from a tree, but not, because I am not making tree cookies. I think I might have mentioned that my wrists are killing me.

You know how sometimes you have a great idea in your head but it just doesn't translate well into real life? I feel like that is what this year's mishloach manot is turning into.

Phase one were these cookies. They looked completely different in my head, but when looked at all together on the cooling rack, they look kind of cute. I hope they look as cute on their own because each mishloach manot is only getting one cookie! 

In case you too want to make these cookies, I'll show you the how-to: 

Step 1: Bake a truckload of round sugar cookies. 

Step 2: Buy some fondant, some brown and purple gel colors and get to work coloring that fondant by working a few drops of gel coloring into the fondant at a time.  It's a process - and be sure to keep any fondant not currently being used in a sealed plastic bag or else it will dry out very quickly. 

Step 3: Using three different sized mini triangle cookie cutters (I didn't have these at home either, I had to order them) cut out the makings of a hamentaschen hat and Haman's beard. 

The largest cookie cutter was used to cut out the brown hamentaschen hats. The smallest cookie cutter was used to cut tiny purple triangles from the fondant to make the filling for the hamentaschen and the medium sized cookie cutter was used to cut out Haman's bead. 

Step 4: Use a clean, or better yet, a new paintbrush and very carefully, dab the hamentaschen fondant pieces with a small amount of water and "glue" on the purple filling. Then let all the fondant pieces air-dry overnight. It's time for bed. 

Step 5: It's a new day, you're rested and hopefully, your back has stopped hurting from all the baking and fondant cutting from the day before. 

Start by melting some chocolate in the microwave - the chocolate will today's "glue." Use the melted chocolate and yesterday's handy paintbrush to glue the fondant pieces to the cookies, giving each cookie a hamentasch hat and a beard. These should dry pretty quickly - by the time I reached the end of the pan, the first half were dry and I was then able to stack them to make room for more cookies. 

Step 6: Using some black gel icing (I bought mine at AC Moore, it's the Wilton brand), pipe an evil mustache onto each evil Haman cookies. I'll be honest, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be and no two mustaches came out the same. And again, the whole wrist cramping thing from all the piping. 

Step 7: I also bought the same gel icing in blue and I used that to pipe on Haman's eyes. Why blue? Honestly, that's what there was in the baking aisle at AC Moore. I really could have gone with any color and in retrospect, I think I might have gone with black for the eyes as well because I feel like my Hamans look just a little too friendly with those nice blue eyes. My Hamans almost look a little remorseful for all the trouble they caused in the megillah. 

Once you're done, let them dry in a safe place in the house. Mine are still sitting on the kitchen counter - and that is most certainly not a safe place. I'm still debating where my safe cookie place is. 

Step 8: Go lay down on the couch and watch Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood with the little kids. Have you seen this show? If you grew up watching Mister Roger's Neighborhood, you must check it out. It's a great show, totally relevant to the three-year-old set and has songs that you'll be humming all day. You deserve a little rest before heading out to Shoprite and making dinner. 

Where do you run when the dryer full of the hubby's cotton button down shirts and the oven timer both ding at the same time?

Normally, those shirts would take precedence over pretty much everything - I'd do almost anything not to have to iron - but today the oven came first.

Round one of this year's hamentaschen were baking and the little one was so excited to see  what we made that she was unable to stand still, dancing all around the kitchen, shaking her container of sprinkles.

We have been using this recipe for hamentaschen for a couple of years and they always come out very yummy and very pretty, which is more than I can say for the many many hamentaschen that I baked in the years pre-recipe. My hamentaschen would open, all the filling spilling out and making a huge mess everywhere. But once my good friend Alissa shared her mom's recipe, we were good to go.

This should be your go-to too.

If you have been following along for a while, you might remember that I have one child who refuses to eat a hamentaschen with fruit as a filling. So the past couple of years found me attempting Hershey kiss filled hamentaschen, hamentaschen made from chocolate dough and chocolate chip hamentaschen. All of them were okay but never got a better comment then eh, it's okay. And eh is code for I feel bad for you, so I'll eat this, but you know, eh.

I don't like that.

So this year, enter the brownie hamentasch.

I had seen a picture of brownie hamentaschen on pinterest but whoever pinned it did not include the link (very bad pinterest etiquette right there, my friends) and so there was no recipe.

What to do?

Experiment. And lucky for me that it all turned out well on the first try because I only had one box of Duncan Hines brownies in the house - which is what you need to get right now if you want to make these. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

I mean, I guess you can use a homemade brownie recipe, but really, why? Josh won't even taste a brownie made from scratch. His motto: why mess with perfection?

To start, make a batch of the hamentaschen dough and while it is chilling in the fridge, follow the directions on the back of the Duncan Hines box for the fudgy brownies, not the cake brownies. Mix it all together and bake it in a 9x13" pan for 15 minutes or so. The point is that the brownies should not be baked all the way, they should still be kind of soupy.
Take the brownies out of the oven and stir the batter a little, just to break it up - I needed to do that because the edges of my brownies had started to set. Let the brownies cool and as they cool, they will thicken.

Once everything had chilled and cooled off, roll out the dough and cut out the circles with a cookie cutter or a cup (I used the colored plastic kiddie cups from Ikea). Using a small spoon (the kind your kids would use to eat cereal - I call that a teaspoon), drop the brownie batter on to the circles. If I was using a real measuring spoon, it would most likely be 1/2 teaspoon.

To learn how to shape the hamentaschen, click here and scroll down to the middle. 

Once the hamentaschen are shaped, you can either bake them or add the sprinkles.
To add the sprinkles, pour some colored sprinkles onto a plate. Then fill a small cup with water and using a pastry brush or whatever brush you would use to eggwash your challah, brush some water over each hamentasch. Very carefully, pick up each hamentasch and dip each of the three sides into the sprinkles and then bake.

Be sure to place no more than a dozen hamentaschen on one tray because they spread and you will wind up with a hamentaschen cake instead of cookies. It happened to me. It's not a bad little cake, just not what we're looking for today.

***

Josh really likes samoas so I figured if I was already making brownie hamentaschen, why not add shredded coconut to some of them too? I know samoas also have caramel in them too but I didn't have any caramel in the house. Can you make your own caramel? I don't know. But that sounds like a lot of work. So we're just going to make pretend that samoas are coconut and chocolate and leave it at that.

Anywho, I added a little coconut underneath the brownie batter in about twelve of the hamentaschen - and those are gone. Two of the kids and Josh liked those the best. One kid only hears the siren call of sprinkles so she went for those and my picky, chocolate loving child went straight for the plain brownie, no sprinkles, no coconut hamentaschen.

And me? I'm eating one now, but I'm also ironing a dryer full of shirts. Oh well.

ps Just to recap, three ways to make these:
1. Plain with brownies in the center.
2. Brownies in the center with sprinkles.
3. Plain with brownies and shredded coconut in the center.
Happy Baking!

My youngest, my little one is turning three in a week or so and this Sunday, we are throwing her a birthday party. She is beyond excited and asks every single morning if her party is today. It's not, but she shrugs it off and goes about her day. She's that kind of kid.

I asked her who she wanted to invite to her party - and after she listed every single family member that she knows and loves, she said she wanted to invite her friends. I was kind of surprised, because as she's not in school yet, she doesn't really have a posse with whom she plays on a regular basis. So we talked:
Me: Who are your friends?
Her: Um, people. I don't know their names.

It was kind of sad and kind of very very funny at the same time. Then we talked about going to nursery in the fall and how she would meet all her friends there and then invite them all to her birthday party then. And she was okay with that so, you know, phew.

****

We've been getting ready for this party for what feels like ages. We took a trip to the party store where she picked out Strawberry Shortcake paper goods, even though she has never heard of Strawberry Shortcake before. And the butterfly pinata she picked out in Target has been hanging in the living room for a good week already. And today is party baking day.

We are serving brunch food at the party and so this morning, we made cranberry-orange muffins and coffee cake muffins, both of which made the house smell amazing.

And now the little one has decided that the time has come to bring the Birthday Chair* up from the basement.

Birthday Chair?  Yeah, years ago I made a birthday chair out of one of the un-needed kitchen chairs from my grandmother's apartment. And it was that chair that started this blog. It was the subject of my first post ever and was quite terrible.

I had still not gotten the hang of my camera at that point and I had no clue as to what was appropriate blog material and what was not. You can look back at that Birthday Chair post and laugh at me. I just did.

***

Anyway, here is the recipe for these very delicious cranberry-orange muffins. The coffee cake muffins are as yet untasted so I can't share those yet. I mean, you know, they might be gross. But the orange ones are delish, I make them all the time.

2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1.5 cup craisins
1 egg
3/4 cup orange juice
1/2 cup oil

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients and then add in the craisins. Stir the craisins into the flour mixture. The reason you do this, as opposed to adding the craisins at the end like you would add chocolate chips to cookie dough, is because the flour coating keeps the craisins from falling to the bottom of the muffins while they are baking. See? You learned something today.

Next, add the egg, orange juice and oil and mix with a spoon, just until it's all combined. But really, please, mix until just just combined. Don't keep mixing or you will wind up with hard muffins and you don't want that. You want light and fluffy muffins.

Next, spoon the muffin batter into a paper lined 12 cup muffin pan, dividing the batter evenly between all the muffin paper liners. Bake for 15 minutes and then check to see if they are done with a toothpick. Mine needed another minute or two, but be careful not to overbake them.

Remove the muffins from the pan and let them cool completely. You can eat them right away or store them in a ziploc bag until you need them. They also freeze very well.

*The Birthday Chair - used only on birthdays, not half-birthdays, even though my children have tried to persuade me otherwise - was spray painted blue and decorated with rhinestones and painted letters spelling the words, Happy Birthday. The thing is, it's been through quite a number of birthdays so far and so now the chair reads: AP Y BIRTHDAY. So if it's your birthday, then AP Y BIRTHDAY to you! And if it's not, then hurry and go make a birthday chair before the next family birthday rolls around!

I know, Purim is coming so really, we should be all-Purim-all-the-time here, but I have to say, my kids have been on a huge banana bread kick lately and I am having trouble keeping up.

Not so much with the baking part, it's more the keeping up with the brown bananas part. My kids go through a lot of bananas and sofor the most part, the bananas on the counter never even have a chance of turning brown - they're gone before they go bad, which normally would be a good thing. Except when you want to bake banana bread. 

So what to do? The logical answer is to just buy more bananas. And I did. But the bananas were just not turning brown. 

The next logical answer? You got it - google! And you know what I learned? Apparently, if you place a tray of yellow - they must be yellow and not green - bananas in a 300 degree oven for 30 minutes, you will  take out a tray of not brown, but black bananas. But on the inside, they will look just like brown bananas. I didn't really read through all the science behind it, but it's something like the heat causes the sugars in the bananas to be released and blah blah blah. I don't reallly care. All I know is that I can bake banana bread and everyone will be happy come breakfast tomorrow morning.

It's the little things in life.

Something kind of weird is going on with Josh's ties. Over the past week, several of them have gotten dirty, which is strange because in almost ten years of marriage, I can't recall that ever happening before; taking a tie to the cleaners feels like something I have never done before.

Having just reread those two sentence, I can be fairly certain that one of two things have just happened - either you've clicked away because why in the world is she talking about ties or you're still here because you're my mom or your name is Alissa.

Anywho, Josh needed a specific tie (aka - his one really nice one) for this weekend but the dry cleaners could not have it ready in time. In a panic, I asked my mom if she could drop a couple of ties at our house on her way to work; my dad has, estimated conservatively, about a thousand ties, all of them really nice because my mom purchased every last one of them. Me, I wouldn't know a nice tie if a whole rack of them fell on my head*.

Last night, I mentioned to Josh that my mom was coming in the morning with a selection of ties for him.
And he said, (so happily) really? Your mom's coming with pies!?
And then I had to say, no, not pies, ties.
And he wasn't so happy anymore. He was actually kind of sad.

Don't get me wrong, he appreciated the ties, but for that one brief shining moment he was envisioning my mom walking through the door carrying four or five bakery boxes filled with an assortment of pies for him to sample. Just the idea of it made him so happy - and until that moment, I had no idea that this was a dream of his. See, who says you can't learn new things about your spouse?

So yeah, I kinda sorta had to bake a pie today. Just one, not an assortment, let's not get crazy. But we are going to make a crust. Don't worry. And just so we're clear, I made this recipe up. My kids think it came out great, but just in case your kids don't, I just wanted to put that out there. 

Anyway, I googled and googled and could not find what I was looking for. So I took a little from there and a little from here, and came up with the following:

For the crust - 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Gather together: 
1 cup graham cracker crumbs (I used chocolate graham crackers)
1/2 cup melted margarine or oil

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and pour into a greased pie plate, pressing the crumbs down the bottom and up the sides, as far as it will go.
Bake for 8-10 minutes

While the pie crust is baking, gather together:
2 cans of unsweetened and full fat coconut milk
2 boxes chocolate pudding/pie mix

Pour the coconut milk  and pudding mix into a pot. Bring it to a boil, whisking it the whole time. It will start to thicken as it nears boiling point - it's kind of like making pudding in a pot. 

Remove the pot from the heat and allow the filling to cool sightly and pour it into the baked crust. Refrigerate for an hour until the filling is somewhat solid.

Now it's time to add the topping.
For the topping, gather together:
1 4 oz. container of Rich's Whip
1/4 cup confectioner's sugar

Using a hand mixer, whip together the whip and the sugar until stiff peaks form. Spread the topping onto the pie. Refrigerate for a couple of hours and serve cold, straight from the fridge.

I was very nervous about this pie, for several reasons. To start, I've never made a cream pie before. And second, I had never before cooked or baked or even opened a can of unsweetened coconut milk. But much to my delight, this was, in the words of a six year old who should not be speaking like this, freaky good. We might need to have a conversation about language later tonight, but for now, even I can attest to the fact that it was freakin good (at least that's what I think he was trying to say) - yeah, I know, the Whole30 round two. I cheated. It was my first cheat since this whole Whole30 thing started. It was a choice, I made a choice to taste my pie and it was totally worth it. I had one spoonful and I walked away. Having said that, the rest of the pie has now been packed away, awaiting Josh's return from work.

And also, I locked the baby gate to the kitchen. I know that I know how to open the gate, but it is a mental deterrent for me. I'm good.

*Wouldn't you know, something just like happened to me once, courtesy of one of my kids at age two. The combination of me kneeling down next to a tie display in Kohl's to pick up a sippy cup and a toddler's outstretched hand was, shall we say, not good.

It's absolutely freezing outside today and I so thought these snowman cookies
would be appropriate right about now. 

The little one and I had the pleasure of visiting my four-year-old's
kindergarten classroom last week to bake cookies. The class has been learning
about the brachot or blessings on food and last week was mezonot* week.
 
We arrived at school at 9am and left three hours later after a visit that
was messy, exhausting and a lot of fun. The kids and I made sugar cookie dough**
together; they each got two turns to pour in the ingredients and hold the mixer and
then all of a sudden, it was snack time! I love snack time!
 
After the snacks were cleared away, hands were washed and the tables wiped
down (so much cleaning in preschool - I've either forgotten about that part of teaching
or I wasn't such a tidy teacher), it was time to roll out the dough. But alas, there
was no rolling pin. So we just kind of smashed the dough down and everyone had their
turn to use the snowman cookie cutter to cut out their cookies.
 
Once the cookies were baked, the real fun began. 

To make these snowman cookies at home, just gather together the following:

1 lb. confectioner's sugar
6 tbsps water
6 tbsps light corn syrup
Oreo cookies, scored and halved for hats
jelly beans for a nose
mini chocolate chips for the eyes and mouth
mini dot candies for buttons
either Pull 'n Peel licorice or Sour Sticks for the scarves
some popsicle sticks
a big mixing bowl and a spoon
 
I know, it seems like a lot, but it all came together pretty quickly. 

The teacher (Morah Sarah - love her! So far all of my school-age kids have had the
amazing experience of spending a year in Morah Sarah's kindergarten!) divided
the kids up into three groups because cookie decorating with 16 kids at once,
plus an extra two-year-old, can get crazy pretty quickly.
 
One by one, the groups came to the table and spread the white "snow" icing
on their cookies. 

To make the icing, pour the confectioner's sugar into your mixing bowl. Add
the 6 tbsps of water and mix until all the sugar is diluted. It's fine to add
more water if needed, but don't let the icing get too thin because then it will
run right off the cookies and the snowman will looked all melty.  Once the
sugar is diluted, add the corn syrup and mix well.
 
Using a spoon, drop a small amount of icing on each cookie and let the kids
use (clean!) popsicle sticks to spread the icing. The icing also acts as the
glue for all the candies and cookies.

I had made one cookie ahead of time and left it on the table for the kids
to look at, but they were free to decorate any way they wanted.
 
The cookies ended up being absolutely adorable and were even cuter
looking once they were all lined up on the table together. Sadly, I was so
focused on the decorating, I forgot to take too many pictures.
 
On the way home, I realized that I had hardly taken any pictures at all but I
remembered that Morah Sarah had said she was going to send home a cookie with each
student. I figured I'd just take a picture of the one my daughter was going to
bring home, but sadly (or maybe not sadly, maybe they were just that yummy),
hers was eaten before it was my turn to pull to the front of the pick-up line
after school.
 
Oh well, at least my little one took a very long nap that afternoon. School is tiring! 
  
*Mezonot? Mezonot is the Hebrew word for the category of food that includes
cookies, cakes, donuts, muffins, really anything you'd find in a bakery,
except for bread, which has its own bracha.
 
** It was awesome because I found a recipe that did not need to be
chilled for 30 minutes, like so many sugar cookie recipes require. Instead, we
went from measuring to mixing to rolling out the dough in less than 45 minutes,
which, when baking with 16 four-year-olds, is really the equivalent of two
minutes. Maybe three.

Oh, December 11th, how I've been waiting for you.
Tonight marks the end of day #30 of this Whole30 experiment.

I have been surrounded by chocolate Chanukah gelt, jelly donuts and many many homemade treats this week, but you know what? I was really okay with my clementines. Shockingly, a clementine provided enough sweetness so that my brain was able to decipher the "end of meal" message. Tomorrow morning, I weigh in. I'm, at the same time, both terrified and super excited. 
 
Tonight also marks the fourth night of Chanukah. And in case you ever wondered what a living room looks like when four kids receive lego at the same time, well, wonder no more.

***

Not to change the subject or anything, but what comes to mind when you hear the word Chanukah?
I mean besides for presents.
Yes, very good, latkes and other assorted items that require frying. And grating. I hate grating vegetables. But as we were having dinner company tonight, I kinda sorta had to fry something, so like the good wife that I try to be, I made potato latkes (from a box and no one said a word - ha!) and I made corn latkes, a special request from the husband.

Josh has also dropped many hints this week regarding sufganiyot, also known as Chanukah jelly donuts. There's no where around here to get real sufganiyot (and jelly donuts from Dunkin Donuts are not the same thing) and I think Josh thought that I might make some. From scratch. Are you laughing? Cause I am. I mean, it a calm world where all I had to do was make dessert, I would absolutely try and make donuts. But see, here's the thing. The amount of frying that went on here today between the regular and corn latkes was, in my opinion, obscene. But I did want the hubby to have sufganiyot. So I found a recipe for Jelly Donut Muffins.

I only made one switch in the recipe and that was to swap almond milk mixed with
a tablespoon of vinegar for the buttermilk because I wanted to keep the muffins
pareve. Otherwise, I stuck with the recipe as is - and they were great, or so
said the people who actually like jelly donuts. Everyone else ate leftover sugar
cookies.

Happy fourth night!