Hogwarts Sweets

Late as usual! For the Harry Potter premier, I used recipes from britta.com although I just came across this post on yumsugar.com with more cute ideas. I hope to try them all eventually, and I can't wait till pumpkins are in season to try juicing them.

Anyway, I'm not going to post all the recipes individually, but here's what I made (with Ellen's help):

Cauldron cakes - handles kept falling out so I glued them on with chocolate. They were good, but they smash easily.

Licorice wands - red and black with white and dark chocolate. I like the rainbow + sprinkles idea.

Cockroach clusters - I would crush up the chow mein noodles a little more next time or maybe use rice krispies or something. Oh, and I used peanut butter and chocolate chips. They were basically haystacks, but shhh!

Butterbeer - a big hit with Betsie and me, although no one else would try it. I drank all mine cold, but I can't wait till this winter when I can drink it hot and fizzy. Mmmm! Made with homemade butterscotch sauce too! Britta's recipe was really just inspiration since I can neither buy nor leave the house with butterscotch schnapps, and I don't know where to find butterscotch flavoring. Lots of other recipes mix cream soda or root beer (hmm) with butterscotch sauce, so I just did that. Some actually just mixed butterscotch and milk like hot chocolate butterscotch. That sounds good and warm, but I think I would die of sweetness.

Edit: Yesterday I mixed 12 oz of cream soda and about 1.5 oz of butterscotch sauce in a saucepan and heated it (although I couldn't find my hand mixer or egg beater to make it frothy), which was delicious. I can imagine that would be heavenly during the cold winter. Also, drinking it hot kept the butter in the butterscotch from separating like it did when it was cold. That wasn't so bad though; it would make this delicate foam on the top that just melted in your mouth. I also saw a recipe that involved mixing the butter, cream, sugar, and cream soda all together before cooking it. I wonder how that would change the taste/consistency. Whenever I use up all the butterscotch I already have, I'll give that a try.

Acid whizbees - the most interesting creation by far, which I decided must be a mix of acid pops and fizzing whizbees. I couldn't find pop rocks or sour lollipops/hard candy, so I bought shock tarts and sour nerds. I stuck 'em in a double boiler on the stove and experimented with melting- always an adventure! The nerds didn't really melt, so I just crushed them up and mixed them with the shock tarts, which mushed up beautifully. I made them into little balls (which stuck to the waxed paper, but I'll use a candy mold or something next time) and covered them in white chocolate. I thought they would end up like jawbreakers, but they were delightfully soft when I bit into one, and very sour! I mixed the remaining nerds with white and dark swirled chocolate and made little blobs with those, and then coated the rest of the shock tarts in chocolate as well. What can I say, I was getting lazy.

Edit: Betsie informed me that the swirly chocolate with nerds mixed in was the best- and that it was quite a surprise! That, of course, was the point. =) I'm thinking that chocolate with pop rocks and sour nerds, maybe molded into cuter shapes than squashed swirly things will be my best bet for fizzing whizbees. I need to just order a crate of pop rocks. I hope they never stop making them...that would be a very sad day.

I liked the way these last turned out a lot, especially the surprise of the sour center when your mouth thinks it's eating chocolate. Even the nerds aren't sour until you bite down. If I had pop rocks, I'd probably just mix them with chocolate like always and make little blobs. Actually, I would love to do the shock tart center with pop rocks around that or mixed in with the chocolate coating. That would be a surprise!

Sorry, no pictures. Britta's are all better anyway. I was hoping to get some pictures with my friends when they were eating their little goody bags that I packed for them, but no one else seemed quite as excited about them as I was. I should expect that. =p I am going to try pumpkin pasties as soon I feel up to making pie crust (Would you believe that I could not find a single can of pumpkin anywhere I looked?? Insane...) and experiment with cream soda and butterscotch. And maybe some treacle. I was so excited to find out that that's just molasses, although I'm not really sure how I feel about molasses tarts. Or fudge o.O

Thoughts on the movie here. I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers. Also soon I hope I can start on my Marauder's Map. I just need to decide on a few things...such as what I'm making a map of and what random Latin words to scribble all over it. But this isn't food! Must not...corrupt...blog... ^^

Mom's Best Butter Cookies

(courtesy of Angela's mother, one of my adopted moms)

1 1/2 cups butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
2 tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
4 cups flour

Icing:
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tsp milk (whole or half'n'half)
2 tsp light corn syrup

Preheat oven to 400°. Cream butter and sugar. Add egg, milk, vanilla, and almond extract. Beat well. Gradually add flour, mixing to make dough smooth. Roll on flour-sprinkled board, cut into fun shapes. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet for 8 to 14 minutes. Do not chill this dough. For icing, mix milk and sugar first and then add corn syrup. Add corn syrup to thin as needed. Color with paste-type food coloring if possible. Send by multiple dozens to college kids.

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These cookies came to me in a blissful dream during the Easter season (i.e., after Lent) from a rather large suitcase sent by the angel that is Angela's mother. I begged her to consider me part of the family and thus share her recipe with me. She did gladly, and I think most of Salem is better for it. =)

One tip I learned from Brookes (and forgot about until I tried to make a double batch of this stuff and nearly killed my mixer) is that when you're mixing butter, even if it's softened, it really helps to cut it and feed it to the mixer in little pats rather than throwing the whole thing in. Also, don't ever make a double batch of this unless you don't plan on icing them. It just gets to be so much work. After hours of mixing, rolling, baking, and icing, my shoulder was so sore. Plus the whole corn syrup thickening thing gets to be a real annoyance if you're already tired of the cookies.

This dough comes out really really soft, as in, I don't know how you would ever roll and cut it. My grandmother was helping me make cookies this particular Tuesday, and between the two of us we probably added another cup of flour. We also cut them rather thick, which was alright because there were still like a thousand of them. We must have baked six or seven sheets. The icing, on the other hand, was really stiff. Be nice to yourself. Add lots of corn syrup or you will go crazy trying to spread it. It will dry out, I promise. I used regular food colors with no adverse effects. It was so thick that I don't think it would have really mattered what I used. And I have no idea why you're not supposed to chill the dough. I didn't try it.

These cookies are amazing. Make them often, paint them pretty colors, and give them to lots of people. They will get smiles for their appearance and taste- a big hit all around! (They're also fun to play with, if you've been noticing the pictures...)

Moo bento

Ok guys. Prepare to be amazed.

Because I'm freaking proud of this one.



In case anyone was still wondering...THIS is a bento. Lots of food groups, lots of color, and hopefully cute enough that kids (or parents) will eat their vegetables. =)

Rice underneath as usual, the grass is made from cucumber and zucchini (is that what a julienne is?) with a tomato and carrot flower, orange pepper sun, leftover lime chicken clouds in a (colored) egg white sky and the rather large centerpiece, an egg cow. I mixed in some soy sauce and sesame oil before frying it, and it is delish!

My parents both like putting their bentos in obvious places till they get to lunchtime...I can't wait to hear what people have to say about this. =D

a week's worth

Oi, I haven't updated in almost a week! Somehow my 'not full' schedule still manages to keep me busy. Actually most of last week was leftovers thrown together in creative and not-so-creative ways. I'm trying to use up what's in our fridge and freezer, but that gets hard every time I go shopping and buy more fresh stuff. It's just so much nicer to use vegetables that haven't been frozen. Guess I'm picky.

Especially when I go pull a bag out of the freezer labeled 'really yummy chicken broth' and find out that it also has vegetables in it, most of which are mushy beyond recognition. =p But luckily we do have enough of it to reconstitute a whole chicken, so I threw it all in a pot and added some new vegetables...and eggs...I can't even remember what all I put in it. But hey, throw it all in a tupperware bowl, toss some goldfish on top (plastic wrap in between to prevent soggy expanding goldfish), and it's pretty yummy.

Next day's lunch was slightly more coherent. Salmon teriyaki is a delicious standby when you're out of ideas. I marinated the salmon overnight (using store-bought teriyaki sauce, but it actually wasn't that bad) and wrapped it up alongside snow peas and carrot slices over a bed of Koshihikari (=Kroger brand, more or less) sushi rice. Now, I've read that you need to let the rice cool before putting it in a container to carry around till lunch to keep it from getting soggy. I didn't think of that until after I put it in piping hot (thinking I'd wrap it up and it would stay hot till lunch) but it turned out ok. It wasn't the least bit warm when I finally ate it (not insulated enough I guess), but the rice was beautiful and sticky. Just perfect I think. I knew there was a reason I love short grain rice. This 'bento' got a thumbs up from both parents. I think I'll be doing a lot with salmon this summer.

Finally, for today I made more chicken salad. This batch is colorful! I used red, orange, yellow, and green peppers, red and green apples, celery, and purple grapes. Every color of the rainbow except blue. I toyed with the idea of using blueberries, but maybe I'll save that for a fruitier version. Strawberries, oranges, yellow & green apples, blueberries and grapes? That sounds amazing. Damn, that'd make a sweet fruit salad by itself. With bananas for yellow. But anyway, this week's chix salad is nice and crunchy, and very tasty on dark wheat bread.

I have a few recipes and combo ideas that I'm gonna try later this week. At some point I'll hit Capt. Paul's Seafood when it's actually open and see if I can convince them to sell me fish heads. =D More stories to come!

Orange bento

I've been dying to make color-themed lunches. Because I'm a hippie (at least a wannabe). Last night I was thinking of what was in the fridge that I could fix up without too much hassle, and I remembered that I had a cantaloupe and some ginormous oranges to use. So the color of the day is orange (which of course includes yellow and red for aesthetics and my sanity).

Today's bento consists of cantaloupe and orange fruit salad alongside rice with barely-cooked carrots, Wisconsin cheese, and eggs drizzled with honey orange sauce and accented with tomato flowers. Oh, and a layer of goldfish sandwiched between the lid and some plastic wrap for a snack.

The fruit salad is really just fresh fruit; I did try mixing it with mint and vanilla, but I don't really care for the cantaloupe that way. The orange however...to die for! Anyway, so I just cut them up nice and small and nestled them into a little bowl made of half an orange rind.

The carrots are barely-cooked because I decided I wanted to glaze them at the last minute, and didn't have time to do much except boil them for five minutes. I think that was just enough though. I made a hasty omelet last night and cut some little hearts out of it and dumped honey orange sauce on everything.

I didn't look up a recipe for that because my 7.30 deadline was fast approaching, and decided that mixing honey and orange juice tasted just fine. About.com tells me I should have used much less honey and simmered it for a while rather than sticking it into the microwave for 15 seconds, and Betty Crocker suggests cooking brown sugar, butter, and a little salt and grated orange peel and then simmering the carrots in that. I'll have to give both of those a try and see what else turns up.

Don't know what to say about the little grape tomatoes except that they were hastily made and I need a better set of knives. I'm going to walk into a kitchen store one of these days and pick someone's brain about them, since I currently know next to nothing. Maybe I should search for some little shape-cutters for carrots and stuff too. I can make shapes by hand, but they're never as good, and I tend to run out of creative ideas after stars and flowers.

Overall this was a fun bento. I'll have to do it again, maybe once for each color. Although that could get tricky for colors like blue and purple. How about black and white? Would that even be appetizing? I could make it checkered, like the bathroom set my mom crocheted when she moved out...LOL.