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Monday, April 25, 2011

My First Easter Dinner!

This is completely un-cookie related, but I thought I'd share that yesterday I cooked my first Easter dinner!  Normally we go to my in-laws with the whole extended family for a potluck-style dinner, but this year my husband and I decided to just do Easter dinner with our own little family. 

For appetizers, I tried a new recipe for deviled eggs from Cook's Country magazine,

and The Pioneer Woman's Avocado Crab Dip.  Avocados, cream cheese, crab, how could it go wrong?
And then there was dinner.  I made spiral glazed ham with maple-orange glaze (from America's Test Kitchen), cheesy potatoes, green beans with creamy mushrooms and shallots (from Martha Stewart Living), and soft and chewy rolls (from Cook's Country). 

I know the potatoes look like weird scrambled eggs in the picture, but they were delicious.  I don't usually cook with processed foods, but this casserole has cream of mushroom soup and velveeta "cheese", and it's so good!  This was my first every try at ham, and it turned out perfectly.  Of course, with just my husband, toddler, and I, we now have ham coming out of our ears!

For dessert I made butterbeer cake from Sugarcrafter, which was also very yummy.  Sorry, I didn't get a picture of that one. 

It was obviously much more work than the usual potluck dinner, but it was so much fun getting to create a menu full of our favorite foods!

And here are a couple of pictures from an Easter egg hunt at our church on Saturday.


I hope everyone had a happy Easter!

Monday, April 18, 2011

Easter Cookies (Again)

One of the moms at my son's preschool program ordered these cookies for Easter. 



Saturday, April 16, 2011

Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award

Jill from Dulce Dough has awarded me with the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award!  Thank you so much, Jill!  The achiever in me was so excited to get an award!   When I originally started this blog, I wasn't so sure that anybody would actually be reading it, except maybe my husband.  And I currently have 17 people following my little blog, which is about 16 more than I expected.  And now I have an award!  Thanks, Jill!

And I'll be working on an Easter order over the next couple of days, so I'll post pictures soon!

Monday, April 11, 2011

Welcome Cookies

This weekend I had an order for a welcome basket for a new tenant in an office building.  So I made a basket with half of the cookies as keys and half as a simplified version of the company's logo.

I didn't take a picture of the basket because I'm truly awful at wrapping things, which is definitely something I need to work on since it's nice to wrap cookies all prettily.  I'm told they liked it though.

(Can you guess the logo?)

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Macarons with Espresso Ganache and Raspberry Cream Cheese Filling (Sanity Sunday)

This was my second try at macarons, and it went so much more smoothly!  I chose to make the basic macaron again, and I made two fillings, espresso ganache and raspberry cream cheese.  This ganache recipe made a much thicker, more substantial filling, so I didn't have the problem I had last time.  And the new food processor made grinding the almonds so much easier!  (On a side note, I LOVE my new food processor!  It works a thousand times better than my old one.  I need to find more things I can process now...)    Anyway, the macarons turned out exactly as I'd hoped.  None of them cracked (I had a few do that last time), and they all formed perfect and even little feet.  And they're so pretty! 




Perfect, right?  I'm so proud of myself!  (FYI, there are dark specks on the macarons because I used some almond meal I bought before I got the new food processor, and they apparently leave the skins on the almonds before they grind them.)