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.

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/

Mother's Day Sweet Treat

Last week we talked about ways to pamper mom in the comfort of your own home. We also mentioned a sweet treat that you could make for mom for the day of rest and relaxation and today we have a tutorial with lots of pictures to show you how to make that sweet treat.

I love cheesecake, but sometimes it can be so time consuming to make and since cheesecake is quite rich, having a big one can last a long time and it may get stale and go to waste. So we found a good and easy recipe for mini chocolate cheesecakes which are so delicious. We have made them twice now because they are soooooo yummy! I was really surprised at how quick and easy it was to make these little cakes. I used to make big cheesecakes before and it just seemed to take a long time and I was always worried about cracking it or screwing up the spring form pan. So take a look below and see how we created a perfect treat for mom.

Mini Chocolate Cheesecakes (makes 12)

*We adapted the recipe that we found at the Garnish and Glaze blog (http://www.garnishandglaze.com/2015/02/02/mini-triple-chocolate-cheesecakes/)

You will need...

A muffin pan with room for 12 muffins (if you have a couple smaller pans, they will work fine) and 12 cupcake liners.

12 Oreos and 2 tbsp. of melted butter for the crust.

12 ounces of cream cheese (1 and ½ blocks)

1 cup of semi-sweet melted chocolate chips

2/3 c of sweetened condensed milk

1 tsp. vanilla

2 eggs

For the Ganache and topping you will need...

1/3 c semi-sweet chocolate chips

1/4c hot whipping cream

Fresh berries (we’ve used both strawberries and raspberries)

Whipped Cream

How to:

First of all preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Then line your muffin pan.

Food process the Oreo’s along with the melted butter. Press firmly into each liner.

Next you’re going to cream up the cream cheese until it’s all smooth because you don’t want chunks of cream cheese in the batter later on. Make sure you scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times.

After that, mix in the milk, chocolate, vanilla and beat that until it is smooth. Again, I kept scraping down the sides of the bowl so that there were no leftover cream cheese chunks.

Next beat in the eggs one at a time.

Give it a good stir after all your ingredients have been mixed together and then evenly distribute the batter into the pan. Since it won’t rise in the oven, you can fill them up quite high.

Bake for 15-18 minutes. Both times we made them we put them in for the full amount of time, even a few extra minutes. You want to make sure they don’t jiggle in the pan.

Let them cool in the pans for 15 minutes and then place them on a cooling rack for 15 minutes more. After that, put them in the fridge for about an hour to completely cool. To be quite honest, when we made them the second time around, we just let them cool for a bit in the pans and then transferred them straight to the fridge and skipped the second part of cooling and they worked out fine!

Once they have been cooling for about an hour, you can prepare the ganache.

For the ganache you will need to measure the chocolate chips into a heat proof bowl. Then you can warm up the cream to the point of boiling and then pour over top of the chocolate chips. Give it a good stir and then let it sit, while you whip up the whipped cream, so that it gets a bit thicker. I found that using it right away allowed for it to run down the sides of the cakes and it made a mess, so while it thickens, whip of the rest of the cream and wash and dry your berries.

When you’re all set, you can decorate. Take one of the cakes and spread the ganache over top so that it just reaches the edge of the cake. Do this to all of them. You can let them set and harden in the fridge if you want to and don’t plan on eating them right away. Then you can put a dollop of whipped cream in the centre along with a berry or two and serve. Like I said, I found it easiest to decorate the ones that you want to eat right away and decorate the rest as you eat them because they can get a bit messy just hanging around the fridge with their toppings.
 

Another quick and easy treat to make is Chocolate Dipped Strawberries!

First, wash and dry your strawberries, you can also remove the green tops if you want to.

Next melt some chocolate, and dip the strawberries, we did some in white chocolate, and some with semi-sweet chocolate chips.

Drizzle with the other kind of chocolate (omit this step if you're only using one kind of chocolate).

Voila! Yummy Chocolate Strawberries!