Cool Lemonade

                                                           

Ah! It’s been two weeks again. I think the heat has gotten to me. We have had some very hot days and then it’s been busy with back to work as well. It’s important to be drinking lots of water in such heat but it is also nice to have a cool sweet drink every once in awhile as well. I’ve been loving Gerolsteiner. It’s not a sweet drink but a sparkling mineral water that has lots of magnesium in it for my sore and aching body at the end of the day. Plain, it’s kind of boring and like any bubbly water but if you add it to some juice it’s very refreshing on a hot Summer day. Try some of the combinations that I did and relax with the feet up.

I love lemonade on a hot day but it can be a little too sweet so I like to dilute it with the Gerolsteiner. If I don’t make my own I like the Simply Lemonade. I like to add different things to it. Try lemon, lime, or orange slices, sliced strawberries, and frozen or fresh mixed berries.  

I also love the Simple Raspberry Lemonade and adding Gerolsteiner to that is a delicious combination.

Try out this fresh lemonade recipe if you prefer to make your own. Adjust the sweetness accordingly.

                                                         

1 cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice

8-10 cups of water

½ cups of sugar

In a large pot, combine the water and sugar. Stir and heat until the sugar just melts.

Remove from the heat and add the lemon juice.

Mix well and then chill.

You can serve this with lemon, lime, or orange slices as a garnish.

Mimosa Sunrise

A few weeks back we glass etched some champagne glasses and this week we are going to make something that can go in them...Mimosas. Our colour is called “Mimosa Sunrise” and it’s in one of the Fenty palettes and is described as a “tangerine metallic.”

Mimosas are great for so many occasions. You don’t just have to have them for breakfast! Plus there are so many varieties so you can experiment and try something a little different from your typical orange juice and champagne mix, you can add some other additions too.

Original Mimosa – Basically you need two ingredients...orange juice and champagne. Fill half your glasses with orange juice and the other half with champagne and you’re set! Here's ours in our etched glasses.

Pomegranate Mimosas – Fill your champagne flute ¼ of the way full of pomegranate juice and top it off with champagne. Then add some pomegranate seeds for a garnish on top.

Pineapple Mimosa Slushies – This one serves four but you can add more if you have more people to serve. In a blender, add 3 cups of Prosecco, 1 cup of frozen mango, 1 cup of pineapple, juice of half of a lemon, and 2 cups of ice. Then blend it all together. Fill your flutes and garnish with fresh pineapple.

Strawberry Mango Mimosa – You’ll need 1 diced mango, 1 cup of diced strawberries, 1 cup of orange juice, and 1 bottle of champagne. Blend the fruit together then add the fruit mix to each flute, fill them half way. Then add in the champagne and enjoy.

Sparkling Raspberry Lemon Mimosa – Pour chilled champagne into your flute (2/3s full is good). Then add some raspberry lemonade in so that it’s filled to the top. Top with fresh raspberries.

Cinnamon Pear Mimosa – Heat 2 cups of pear juice up on the stove. Add in 2 cinnamon sticks after the juice has boiled and cover with the heat turned off.  Let it steep in the pan for 30 minutes first then put into a sealed container and refrigerate overnight. Fill your flute half full of the pear juice and fill up the rest with champagne and top it off with a slice of fresh pear.

Sherbet Mimosa – Add four small scoops of your favourite sherbet to a champagne glass. Add a tablespoon of clementine vodka and top with champagne. Add some fresh fruit on top if you like.

Love Potion and Pudding

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! And today we are making some super sweet treats that are very pink and quite festive.

We decided to try a drink called “Love Potion” and a pretty simple pink pudding with cookie dough brittle. This is kid friendly so you can get the kids to help out and make it as a treat for them or you can serve it for your sweetie and even make the drink a little more adultish (is that a word? Haha) if you want to.

How to make Love Potion

This drink was very yummy. I’ll admit, I drank mine right down when we tried making it.

Ok, so for this we just roughed it. You can look at the link below to see the actual recipe but we partly just winged a lot of it as we went along. The actual recipe makes six servings but we made four instead.

We used regular short glasses but you can use champagne flutes or wine glasses if you want a fancier drink.

In a bowl we measured a half cup of fresh raspberries along with a tablespoon each of lemon juice and granulated sugar and then we mashed it together with a fork. 

Place a spoonful of this mixture on the bottoms of the glasses. Then on top of that, place a nice heaping scoop of raspberry sorbet. 

We used this Chapman’s rainbow fruit swirl because it’s a Peanut and Nut Free brand, and just scooped around the other two flavours; that's why you see some green in the raspberry sorbet scoop.  Feel free to find a plain raspberry sorbet to use instead or you can even make one if you have an ice cream maker. 

Then the actual recipe says to fill the glass to the brim with sparkling raspberry lemonade. So that’s not a very easy thing to find at all so we used this raspberry lemonade and then mixed in some Club Soda to make it bubbly. It tasted really good, so it’s a fine option to go with if you can’t find the sparling raspberry lemonade like us. 

We just filled half the glass with the raspberry lemonade and the other half with Club Soda.  

This is what the drinks looks like all put together. Very yummy and refreshing. 

https://www.sugarhero.com/love-potion-number-9/

Vanilla Pudding with Cookie Dough Brittle

Let’s just say I have mixed feeling about this one. I’ll explain myself at the end of the recipe.

You’ll want to make the cookie dough brittle first as it needs time to set.

For the brittle you will need:

¼ cup of sugar

¼ cup of butter

2 tbsp. light corn syrup

1/3 cup of flour

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 tbsp. of mini semi-sweet chocolate chips or chopped up semi-sweet bits (it was hard for us to find mini chocolate chips)

Line a cookie sheet with tin foil and lightly grease it.

In a small saucepan, stir together and heat the sugar, butter, and syrup. 

Remove it from the heat and stir in the flour until mixed thoroughly and then stir in the vanilla. 

Spread the mixture you just made on the cookie sheet evenly, not too thick, but not too thin. Don’t worry, it won’t fill the entire sheet. We were kinda worried about that.

 

Bake the brittle in a 350 degrees oven for about 12 minutes. If you see it turning too dark of a brown, then you can remove it early. Once you take it out, let it sit for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with the chocolate chips. Let it cool on the sheet and then place in the fridge to firm everything up. We left it in there for a few hours.

When you feel the brittle is hardened enough, you can take it out of the fridge and break it up into various sized pieces. Put it all aside in a sealed container in the fridge until ready to eat.

For the pudding you will need:

2/3 cup sugar

3 tbsp. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

3 cups of milk

1 beaten egg

3 beaten egg yolks

3 tbsp. butter

1 tbsp. vanilla

In a large saucepan mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt together. Whisk in the milk. 

Cook and stir constantly over medium high heat until it’s thickened and bubbly. Once it get to this point, cook and stir for 2 minutes more. 

Then remove from the heat and stir in half of the thickened milk mixture into your whisked egg and yolks and then pour that into the pan with the other half of the milk mixture. Bring to a gentle boil (this is where we might have gone wrong because we may have heated it too much leading to the mixture getting lumpy), reduce the heat and cook for 2 more minutes.

Stir in the butter and vanilla until all mixed and melted and then if you want to make it festive, this is when you’ll add the red food colouring to make it pinkish. 

Pour it all into a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Make sure to cover the surface of the pudding with the plastic wrap, don’t just let it cover the top of the bowl. 

Chill and then serve with the brittle on top. You can use regular bowls to serve in or fancy glasses or ramekins work too if you’re trying to spruce it up a bit.

Overall, the brittle was really good, but the pudding was a bit lumpy and the pinkness just kinda threw me off a bit, but maybe if it wasn’t lumpy or pink, I might have enjoyed this better. Probably chilling it overnight might be better as well. It was still a tad warm when we ate it.

 

http://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/vanilla-pudding-with-chocolate-chip-cookie-brittle/