Cream puffs for Mother's Day!

A treat for Mom on Mother’s Day

Mom came for dinner tonight - nothing special, just burgers & brats.  The sun is finally shining, and the screens are up on the door, so it MUST be time to grill. Granted, D is a year-round griller, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, I asked Mom what she’d like for dessert, and she requested... cream puffs.

Delightful!  They are so easy, and can be customized in any number of ways, although we tend to stick to the tried and true.  If you like them but have never made them, you’ll love this simple treat!

Simple Cream Puff Shells

1 cup water

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1 cup flour

4 eggs

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Heat water and butter to a boil;

stir in flour.  Stir over low heat for 1 minute or until mixture forms a ball.  Remove from heat and stir in eggs one at a time until mixture is smooth.  Spray cookie sheet with baking spray, and drop large tablespoons of mixture onto sheet.  

Bake for 35-37 minutes.  This batch makes 12-15 puffs.

Cool for about 30 minutes, then cut off top third of each puff and pull out any strands of soft dough.  

Fill with your choice of sweet treat, ex pudding, whipped cream, fruit pie filling, etc.  You can garnish the top with a myriad of things, too, although I almost always go with frosting  :)

My family usually chooses to fill the shells with vanilla pudding (Jello makes a really yummy sugar/fat free version).  I personally always like the texture of a cook & serve vs. instant.

There are a ton of options for what you can create.  Lemon cream pairs well with a dusting of powdered sugar or a thin vanilla glaze.  

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Peppermint flavored whipped cream would be amazing with a dark chocolate ganache.

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Using your own imagination as your guide, you can customize a cream puff into almost anything.  Try some soon, and let me know what you did to make them your own!

xoxo,

Tami

ps... all those egg shells that you toss away every week?  Coffee grounds? 

They're the bomb for your garden.  Bell peppers especially benefit from the shells, as they're almost entirely calcium and can all but eliminate blossom drop.  Coffee grounds are great in clay like soil to lighten it up, and the residual caffeine is a growth stimulator.  Hey, recycling is cool!

Also... If you like what you're seeing and you read *still crazy* anyway, please jump on the bandwagon and become a follower!  I love knowing that there are folks out there actually reading what I'm putting out there.  :)


Linking to:

Sugar and Dots

Somewhat Simple

House of Hepworths

Miz Helen's Country Cottage

Fireflies and Jellybeans

Something Swanky

Decor Chick

Fish eyes and little boys

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Fish-Eye Pudding!

Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son Jon...  often feels outnumbered here at home when D is away.  Since our oldest, Kyle, moved to Indiana, there is a marked disparity in the estrogen/testosterone balance of power, so today I made something just for m’boy.


  

Have you ever tried Fish-Eye Pudding?  It’s so  wonderfully repulsive, it had to have been created by a boy.

It’s actually just large pearl tapioca pudding, and it’s delicious.  Making it in the Crockpot takes away the hassle of overnight soaking, and it’s ready to serve straight from the pot.  The recipe is disturbingly simple...

Fish-Eye Pudding

4 cups milk

2/3 cup brown or white sugar

12/cup large pearl tapioca

2 beaten eggs

2 tsp real vanilla

2 tsp amaretto (optional)

Mix together by hand the milk, sugar, tapioca and eggs in your Crockpot (or whatever type of slow cooker you prefer).  If your cooker has a medium setting, cook for 3 hours, stirring well at least once an hour.  On low heat, cook for 6 hours.  

*If, like me, you don’t have a medium and were too dumb to start 6 hours before you need to serve, high heat for 2 hours and low for 3 seems to work well :)

About 15 minutes before serving, turn off the heat and stir in vanilla and amaretto, if using.

Let cool from scalding, but serve warm.  Delicioso!

The key to this pudding is the quality of the flavorings.  I’ve become really spoiled by my Honey, who shops the Duty-Free for me when he has trips to Mexico...

There is a huge difference in the flavor and intensity of this vanilla vs. what you get in the supermarket.  I’ll admit that I was skeptical, but then I grew up using imitation vanilla (the horror!).  Once I tried it, however, I was an instant convert.  For a cheapster like me, I’m developing some pretty refined tastes - I won’t even go into the request list D gets when he stays next to the flagship Whole Foods in Austin!  Suffice it to say that he has asked permission for an extra carry-on on those trips!  :)

The amaretto adds a subtle richness that kids probably won’t notice or appreciate, but it does elevate the flavor above the pudding cups they’re used to.  

The alcohol cooks away, so don’t worry about that.  If I were serving to adults, I might upgrade to a better booze, but rail brand works great for at home.

• The batch you’re seeing here is 1.5 the normal recipe.  My Crock is so large that the normal batch looked really insignificant (and I was cooking on an empty stomach!).  It translates beautifully into larger amounts, so you could make this for a whole crew.

What do you think?  Will your little men (and big ones) like this?  Give it a try and let me know!  BTW, my girls like it, too!

xoxo,

Tami

Linking to:

Word Association - Bananas! Nuts!

Word Association

Wanna try some word association?  I’ll show you a picture, and you can tell me what you think of.  Ok, here’s one...

So, what was the first word that popped into your mind?  I bet it was “grandma” - right???  

No?

Well, then you clearly never met MY Grandma Dahl.  Actually, both of my grams were pretty amazing, but Grandma Dahl made absolutely phenomenal banana bread; hence the association with overripe bananas!  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Today’s fabric shopping did not go too well, and I came home empty handed, again.  I found some patterns that would have been just adorable for N’s room, but none was wide enough to accommodate the big panels in there, and I am just stubborn enough that I’d rather keep looking than break down and create seams where I want a nice smooth surface.

Here are a few I liked {do we see a trend?} 

Groovy Peace Floral White DU-324

Fabric.com

Feeling Groovy Peace White DV-760

Kaufman Minky Cuddle Peace Flower Pink

Fabric.com

The corner that this will fill is opposite the bed with it’s bright stripes, with only solids in between.  They’re busy, but maybe that would inject some life?  The point is moot with these, anyway, because of the width issue.

Back to bananas...

I had several seriously aged bananas in the freezer, and a couple more on their way out of this life.  My hubby has a serious aversion to “dead fruit”, and I promised that I would turn them into bread before he returned form his latest trip (Bahamas.  I know.  AND he gets paid for it!).  Since he comes home tonight, it might be for the best that I had some down time this afternoon.  :)

I always imagine that anyone taking the time to read my musings must be family, or at least you FEEL like family, so I can share with you my gram’s recipe.  First, as she created it, and then as I’ve altered it...

GRANDMA DAHL’S BANANA BREAD

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1 cup sugar 

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup sour milk

2 ripe bananas

1/2 cup walnuts (if desired)

Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in separate bowl.  Cream butter, add sugar and mix ‘til smooth, then mix in eggs.  Fold in about half of the flour mixture, then mix thoroughly.  Alternate adding milk and the flour mixture until all has been included.  When all prior ingredients are well mixed, mix in bananas.  Add nuts (if using) last, and stir them in by hand. 

Batter is pretty thick, no?

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Pour batter into 2 well greased loaf pans, and bake for 45 minutes or until there are no visible “wet” spots in the cracked surface of the loaf.

Well, that’s the original.  I tinker with it, and change a few things here and there, but it’s always “Grandma bread”.  When I make it, I almost always double it, because there is always someone who needs a loaf of homemade yummy.  

I have found that you can do up to double the amount of bananas (so, 4 for a regular batch) before you have to alter anything else.  More fruit = more yum, so whatever you have on hand, chuck ‘em in there.  I usually substitute whole wheat flour for a portion of the regular flour - 2 out of 5 cups in the doubled recipe.  It’s a painless substitution, but if you haven’t added extra fruit, you’ll want to increase your milk, say, by about 1/8 cup per batch.  Finally, the nuts.  Truly, most of my baking philosophy can be summed up as “If it tasted good before, it would be even better with nuts!”  I don’t believe I have ever added so little as 1/2 a cup per batch; I deliberately don’t measure so I don’t have to feel guilty for taking so many, but my usual HAS to be around a cup per batch.  Nuts! (You are what you eat, you know...)

Does anyone else have one of these?

D’s folks brought it back from a trip to Alaska, and it is the BOMB for chopping nuts.  This poor thing has been through hell and back, but we won’t part with it. It’s been broken, disassembled, reassembled and anything else you can think of, but what else would we use to chop our nuts?!?

The final results, anyway...

SO worth the effort!  LOVE YOU, GRANDMA!

Everyone have an awesome weekend, and stay safe!

xoxo,

Tami