Tag: father’s day

baking

Because “Dadsicles” doesn’t sound right…

wittychild

…although it does sound just a bit cannibalistic, doesn’t it? (And yet: “Steak Diane” doesn’t bother me in the slightest.)

All right: long-time readers know the drill. No matter how many new and exciting recipes I try – which admittedly hasn’t been very many in recent years – I keep returning to the tried-and-true ones because those are the ones that everyone seems to like the most. This is how, for Father’s Day, I wound up baking dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. It’s a classic for a reason.

While cruising Pinterest one morning shortly before baking, I saw a fun decorating idea that shouldn’t have been too difficult to replicate. (Ironic foreshadowing alert!) The creator used Mike and Ike candies skewered on toothpicks that had been cut to size to create mini popsicles. Summery and fun, sure, but also, pop-sicles? How dad-joke appropriate!

While my cupcakes were baking, I grabbed my candies and a couple of toothpicks to experiment with length. Cutting the toothpicks right in half made them too long, and wildly disproportionate. On my second attempt, I managed to get the right length on one (unequal) half of my toothpick, and, satisfied, lined up the pointy ends to trim the other (unequal) half to match…

…and sliced those kitchen scissors right into the knuckle of my left index finger. This thing immediately bled like a stuck pig and required a hasty retreat to the bathroom to wash it out and bandage it. Nearly four weeks later, I still have a mark. Sheesh.

Efficient use of toothpicks be darned, I eventually shoved a single pick into each candy, and my backup baking buddy trimmed them to size once they were already in. I’m delighted to report that mine was the only injury suffered in this whole process.

I added a few multicoloured sprinkles to keep the rest of the top from looking too stark.

For all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making these, they turned out exactly as planned, and were a hit with the man of the hour.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

What’s more portable than a peanut butter and jam sandwich?

wittychild

When I asked my dad what kind of dessert he wanted for Father’s Day, he replied, “Cookies.”

Of course.

He didn’t care what kind, as long as they were cookies. That kind of carte blanche is a little overwhelming – the least he could have done is given me some ideas for flavour profiles, key ingredients, that kind of thing.

After leafing through my extensive cookbook collection, I happened upon the Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies from The Vegan Table by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I had made them once, years ago, and remembered them being good. I also really liked that they weren’t just peanut-butter, but also didn’t involve chocolate. It’s been done.

The dough came together wonderfully! The one thing I did differently from the recipe was to use plain all-purpose flour rather than the pastry flour called for, and frankly, I don’t know how much of a difference it makes. These weren’t heavy or tough in any way.

One other elevation these got from the last time I made them was that I used my homemade strawberry jam to fill them. Perfect, local strawberries with no preservatives? Yum!

These ones bake at 375 degrees (and not 350 like, oh, every other cookie out there), which freaked me out a bit, but…10 minutes per batch at 375, and these looked absolutely perfect. The bottoms were browned but not overdone, and the moisture was baked out of the jam and left a dense, fruity gem in its wake.

Fun fact time! If, when you’re attempting to transfer freshly-baked jam-filled cookies from the cookie sheet to cool, you drop one of them face-down (of course) on the table, the second-worst thing you can do is try to pick up the jammy blob with your bare fingers. The worst thing you can do is then try to lick your fingers to get the hot jam off them.

Despite this hot, sticky contretemps, these turned out beautifully! They’re tiny and tender, and wouldn’t be out-of-place at a tea party. The man of the hour was suitably impressed, so this was a win for everybody.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

I “Hab” nothing else to say/Je n’ai rien d’autre à dire

wittychild

Note pour mes amis francophonies: Le <<bon mot>> par-dessus ne traduit pas à la français avec des bons résultats.  Mais cliquez-ici pour quelque chose bien amusant.

I’d like to point out right now that I don’t follow hockey, although I am certainly not above yanking on my dad’s Jean Beliveau jersey and snapping a picture to taunt one of my friends who’s a die-hard Boston fan.  (Although I suppose he had the last laugh this year.)  Truthfully, the only time I pay any attention is when Chicago is playing at home, but that’s only because I enjoy hearing Jim Cornelison sing the American national anthem.

But…oh…the things we do for love – and Father’s Day!

The cake was my mother’s idea.  “Hey, what if you did the cake to look like a hockey rink, with the Canadiens logo at centre ice?”  Right.  Because I can totally draw the Habs’ logo, and I totally know what a regulation hockey rink looks like.  Thank heavens for Google.  In the end, I came up with this:

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The nets were part of a soccer-themed cake-topper set, and are slightly disproportionate for a 9″ x 13″ rink, but I take what I can get.  I used a toothpick to trace the shape of the “C” in before filling it in with red icing, then adding the blue outline.

But wait!  There’s more!  Once I had decided how I was going to decorate it, I wanted something a little different for the cake part.  Don’t get me wrong – we all like chocolate, but it’s been done.

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I used a cherry chip cake mix, made with a can of ginger ale instead of the standard water/oil/eggs to keep things vegan, and then stirred in a few Wilton baking bits in blue.  Without the icing job, it would make a nifty 4th of July cake, but here it carries the theme through.

Rather than try to cover and hide it in the already-crowded fridge until today, we cut into it last night – my dad was absolutely tickled with his special dessert.

Happy Father’s Day!

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

What’s shakin’, Daddyo?

wittychild

So here’s the problem with parents: you stitch a card for one, and then the other one starts clamouring for one.  Okay, so not really – but I couldn’t not make a homemade card for my dad for Father’s Day.  I found a motif in an old issue of Cross Stitch Crazy that bore a vague resemblance to our youngest cat, Skeeter, and then changed the markings just a bit to make it look more like her.

That mocha-y colour around her face is the result of tweeding, my friends.  Oh, and the ball has blending filament in it for a little added sparkle.

She seems to approve:

(And so did he, for what it’s worth.)  Also under the Homemade Goodness category, I made the No-Bake Black-Bottom Peanut Butter Silk Pie from Vegan With a Vengeance. It didn’t turn out quite as it should have, I suspect – agar tends to behave unpredictably for me, and this time, although it firmed up somewhat, there was no way it would hold its shape once cut – but I calmly stuck the whole thing in the freezer and turned it into a really delicious dairy-free ice-cream-type dessert.  I miss ice cream cake sometimes, but this was definitely a worthy substitute.  How worthy?  It got devoured, and I didn’t get a picture.