Blondies

This past Sunday our family got together to celebrate the birth of Grammy and Auntie Shannon. Last year we went all out with this little ditty for the party:


Bright, right? This was the final cake we had to make for our cake class, and it has a lot of character, to say the least. This year we decided to stay low key with a store bought Banana Cream pie (we have yet to master pies), chocolate chip cookies and blondies. Blondie's are one of Auntie Shannon's favorite treats so I HAD to make them. I ran into a little bit of trouble with the wax paper however, the recipe called for Parchment Paper but I only had wax paper on hand. I thought I would be okay, but we ended up having to peel it off every single bar. Oops! It was fine, I just blamed it on Mike ;)



The bars were quite delicious despite the fact that I received a few complaints from the peanut gallery (cough*Emilee*coughcough!) about using semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate. I am quite partial to the semi-sweet chips, they always remind me of eating fulls (peanut butter on a spoon covered in chocolate chips) at the Lee's house when we were younger. It took me a while to figure out why they always tasted better when I ate them with Chelsea. At first, I thought it had something to do with the Jif peanut butter instead of the Skippy we had at our house. But instead I decided it was the fact that my mom always bought milk chocolate chips and Mindy always had semi-sweet. Thank you Lee Family for converting me over to the dark side :)

Lucky Ducks

You are all a bunch of lucky ducks! I put the recipe for the Special K Bars up on our ROTM page. Please enjoy. And beware, these things are deadly!

101

Our Great Grandma Hau turned 101 yesterday! Isn't that awesome! We had a birthday celebration for her on Sunday and the Duffey girls were in charge of the cake. We made a big marble sheet cake with a french silk chocolate frosting. Krista used her amazing skills and made gorgeous roses.

Here is the cake in all its glory!

101 Birthday Cake

We decided to take a different approach for the border. The cake was a little on the short side and we felt if we did a big frosting border it would make it look silly. So we opted for some chocolate jimmies. I think it turned out pretty cute.

Chocolate Jimmies

Here are some pictures of Krista's amazing work! She is the BEST at making roses.

Flowers and Fall Foliage

Close-Up

So when I arrived at the nursing home for the party I asked my favorite Auntie Shannon for assistance carrying the cake in. While she was attempting to get it out of the car I forgot to mention how heavy it was (it was on a bread board). Well throughout this whole process her hand slipped and landed in the cake! Whoops! Ohh well, nothing a couple candles cant fix!

The Accident

Here I am with the lady of honor. She is looking pretty darn good for 101! Heck she is looking better than I am. I am so happy we were able to be apart of her special day!

Happy Birthday Great Grandma Hau!

Lindsay

My good friend Lindsay is moving to Korea in October. She will be teaching English for the next year to little Korean children. Friday I had a going away lunch with her at Punch Pizza. Lindsay had yet to experience the infamous cake pop, so I whipped a few up for her with anything leftover we had! Which ended up being, white and blue candymelt, baby blue M&M's and some multi-colored sprinkles!

[The Slew]

Please ignore the blue-smurf looking cake pop in the back. That was an experiment gone horribly wrong.

Kind of ugly, but Lindsay enjoyed them! Good luck Lindsay, I will miss you a lot but Asia is going to love you!

Special K Bars

Special K Bars are our dad's all time favorite treat. Ever since going on his diet he has sworn these bad boys off. I think he is going through withdrawals. I made a batch of these for a friend's birthday and decided to post some step-by-step pictures. Just maybe it might be the ROTM in October.

This is one of my favorite things to make because its super easy and does not involve a lot of clean up.

Ingredients

Special K Cereal, Karo Syrup, Peanut Butter, Sugar, Chocolate and Butterscotch Chips

Start by boiling the syrup and the sugar.

Then add the peanut butter.

Imaginary Picture - After the syrup, sugar and peanut butter are mixed add the Special K cereal.



Pour cereal mixture into cake pan
This is my favorite part of the dessert - I could eat this all day long

Melt the chocolate and butterscotch chips in a bowl

Spread over cereal mixture

Cut and serve! Pure deliciousness

Well there you have it! I am pretty proud I only missed one picture opportunity. Now if you'll excuse me I am going to go eat the last bar before my dad has second thoughts about his diet.

Pumpkins

I tried my hand at the first pumpkin cake pops of the season. They turned out ok. My candy melt wasnt being very cooperative but I was able to get a few decent looking ones. I see a lot more of these in our future!

Pumpkins

Happy Fall

Nothing says Fall more than a Yankee Candle Autumn scent and Molasses cookies. Ok well there might be some other things like pumpkins and the leaves changing colors, but in the baking world its all about molasses cookies.

I sent Happy Fall gift packages to Ty's family that involved these goodies. I am kicking myself because I should have kept one for me =]