Sundays with Joy/Blueberry Orange and Almond Pancakes with Orange Maple Glaze

The members of our group had been making these all week.  I had heard such good things that I thought they couldn’t live up to the hype.  Plus, the last few recipes were not just good but out of this world and I didn’t think the streak could continue.  Now you could see that as lack of faith in Joy, but everyone also said to make a double batch so I did.

So glad I did!  Everyone was right.  These are awesome!  These are in my top three of the Joy the Baker Cookbook recipes so far.  I eat blueberries but am not their biggest fan, I like almond extract but only in the “right” recipe, and I don’t tend to bake or cook with orange that often so I was skeptical.  However, I didn’t want to adapt because Joy said that it “must” be this flavor combination.  Next time I might want to switch it up with a little white whole wheat flour but that is just my preference.

If you look closely, you can see the orange zest!

Onto the glaze… One of our group members called it “liquid crack” and she couldn’t have been more right.  It is super duper sweet but at the same time TOTALLY and COMPLETELY complements the orange and the blueberry.  It makes the flavors pop SO much.  So much so that you keep adding more…and more…and just a bit more.  I even ate my sausages with it.

Now onto the kids’ verdicts.  The 9 year old loved them and ate everything I gave her.  She said that I put a few too many blueberries in it and she was right but there was only so many left in the container after I put the rest in the batter that I just ended up putting them all in.  The 3 year old didn’t eat them but I think it was just the look of cut up blueberries on his plate.  Onto the biggest critic and pickiest eater, my 5 year old, I made her one that didn’t have any blueberries in it because I knew that was an automatic no go for her.  I still wasn’t sure how she would react.  She ate it and she ate it quick.  Yay!  Now I can make these, leave out the blueberries for my crazy babies and my oldest and I can eat till our hearts’ content.

Again as always, if you want the recipe buy the Joy the Baker Cookbook and please check out our other members efforts by clicking on their links over at Bakeaholic Mama.

My GeekyLink has to do with the most awesome thing coming up next week!  We are going to land on Mars.  Hopefully… Giant rover to make ‘terrifying’ landing on Mars tells how this landing is different and more difficult and how by the time NASA gets the signal that the rover is beginning its landing the mission may already be a failure but there will be nothing they can do about it.  I hope they pull it off.

 

Our Summer Days Are Numbered

Scarlett O’Hara Pecan Bars

I baked two things earlier this week but nothing I felt was good enough to share, sorry.  So I am bringing you a few things I made for my brother-in-law’s 40th we celebrated in June and a couple things I made my dad for his birthday yesterday.  Not my recipes but some pretty pics and some things to share.  First up, my sister and brother-in-law have my firstborn and have kept her almost a week, galavanting up and down the state of California (with two days in Nevada to visit my brother) and I am deep in the throes of missing her but she doesn’t get home till late tomorrow.  My husband is worse off than I am, with her siblings barely noticing.  I completely trust them but they haven’t posted many pictures and yesterday we didn’t get any.  My husband asked me three times yesterday, “Any new pictures of Angela?”

Making Pecan Bars…

Especially for my oldest, this summer has been the greatest for us as a family so far.  We couldn’t do much in June because of all the prep work for the girls’ recital (they haven’t gone back to dance once yet, it has been a nice break for all of us).  I fit in a trip to Knott’s before recital week because I knew we would be stuck not doing anything for awhile.  Then we went camping and the week after my husband had jury duty.  It lasted about a week and a half.  We didn’t do anything then because well, it was the first time my husband had a 9-5 type schedule since, well, ever.  It was nice to have him home during the evenings plus there was always the chance he might come home early.  Once that was all over, we made it a point to do something with the kids on his days off.  We went to the mountains (to play in the streams), the beach, Knott’s Berry Farm, and planning a return trip to both the mountains and the beach for their last two weeks off (yes, two weeks!).  By ourselves, the kids and I went to a few movies and Soak City and had a few lawn sprinkler and kiddie pool days.

Birthday Desserts and my first frosting rose!

My husband thinks they are doing too much.  It doesn’t help that the girls are already planning to spend the night at my aunt’s house next week.  I feel like we need to make up for last summer where we kept saying we were going to do stuff and we just let the summer slip by (to be fair, last summer was the summer of girls down the street coming over EVERY day).  Luckily for me, I already have my girls ready for school in the clothes department.  That is what I did while the 9 year old was gone.  She is not a shopper.  I do have to make a doctor’s appointment for Bob so we can have him start preschool in the fall, Angela needs some new glasses, both girls need haircuts and other than that we are all set.  Despite the fact that we have been operating on limited funds over the summer (thanks again Sally cat!) it has been a really great summer with lots of good times with the kiddos.

Zucchini Squares

Finally, some GeekyLinks from Comic Con.  Mostly, if you wanna see some cool panels check out GeekNation.  They have videos from quite a few panels at Comic Con, including Fringe, Buffy, Doctor Who, Walking Dead and more.  Lots of new trailers also came out that week, like this one, but for the life of me I cannot find the few pieces of footage that were shown for Pacific Rim, which I heard looked fantastic!  On a sadder note, Sally Rides’s passing this last week really hit my heart.  I was the little girl that wanted to be an astronaut.  That wanted to go on Double Dare just to win it all and go to Space Camp.  I worshiped the movie SpaceCamp.  I was angry at the little kids that said they didn’t want to be astronauts after the Challenger tragedy.  I just figured that was a risk I was willing to take to get into outer space.  I grew into the woman that watched Contact and just wished Matthew McConaughey would just get off Jody Foster’s back and stop trying to deter her from going on that mission.  The woman that totally geeked out the first time she went to a NASA JPL open house.  It wasn’t only because Sally Ride was a female but more because she was just a girl from California like me.  She could do it, so I could do it.  My life went a different way and other interests took precedence but she was always someone I admired.

Making Zucchini Squares…

Sundays with Joy/Espresso Granita with Sweet Lemon Cream

Loved, loved, loved this recipe!  Mostly because it reminded me of the Coffee Vanilla Ice Cream Pie but was way easier.  Sure it would have been awesome if I had some of that crust to sprinkle on the top but that is just splitting hairs.  I used the option in the recipe to use strong coffee and still added some espresso powder to it.  I also used just a smidge more sugar than Joy did.  Hey, I know how I like my coffee.  Strong and sweet!

I whipped this up early this morning, using over half of the coffee than I would normally drink in the morning.  So it was nice, once it was finished, to be able to get my daily intake.

Lemon sugar

One of my favorite things about this recipe is that if you are busy (say editing photos for a blog post) and your granita begins to melt, you can drink up the icy goodness!  And since you made it as a granita and not coffee, you can forgive yourself for having an iced coffee with buttloads of heavy cream in it.  ”No, I didn’t put a dollop or two of lemon cream in my coffee.  I put it on top of my granita.”

This recipe was lovely to bite into and even lovelier cause you get to drink up the melty bits.  I still wish I still had some crust to sprinkle on top though.  Also, I had made something similar to this lemon cream in an earlier post.  The biggest difference that this cream is whipped into soft peaks.  Something I don’t normally do since I usually end up frosting with it, but looks so pretty.  As usual, if you would like the recipe, please buy the cookbook.  Also, if you want to see the rest of our group’s interpretations and creations please check out Indigo Scones who is hosting the links for this week.

I don’t have any traditional GeekyLinks today.  I still have some previews from Comic Con and such but mostly I want to say that if you missed it, the best way to catch up with it goes beyond blogs, and links, and previews.  I had the best time this year keeping up with Comic Con just from pictures of regular people like me posting on Twitter and Instagram.  Just using a hashtag (either #SDCC or #SDCC2012 or those along with another hashtag with something you want to see, say your favorite show #fringe) I got to see so much of what I wanted.  Pictures of things that I would have taken pictures of if I had gone.  Pictures that weren’t fed to me but were real.  Did you know that there were religious protesters all over Comic Con?  I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the pictures that I searched for on my own.  Take a look.  It was fun and enlightening.

Apple Cinnamon Cream Cheese Wontons

Pets.  What can I say?  You can’t live with ‘em and you can’t throw them out the window.  You can bring them in through the window but we’ll get to that later… We have three pets.  Sammy (our dog), Clyde (my firstborn and a cat), and Sally (our newest family member) who should be turning one around September.  Clyde and Sammy have been model pets.  Clyde took a few years to get used to the kids and will still hiss but it is because we spoiled him rotten the first year we had him before any kids came.  He had his own room and everything.  Sammy, we picked up from the shelter about two months after we got our house.  He looks raggedy but is a real sweetheart and lately my son is always saying how he wants to “go side and pay Sammy”.  The only problem we have had was when we got Sammy, Clyde scratched him in the eye and we had to have that fixed.  That was four years ago and since then, apart from your standard vaccination appointments, we haven’t had to go to the vet for either of them.

Onto Sally… My husband saw a kitten running through traffic that either he heard or felt run up in the wheel well of his truck.  So he got out and saved the kitty as opposed to running it over.  That is how we met Sally.  We took her in and made sure she was OK and got her first shots.  Things were going smooth except sometimes the younger kids would get rough with her and Clyde again had to adjust to another animal in the house.  About three months ago a fluffy grey kitten started hanging around.  About a week after that, Sally was protecting her hindquarters like a madwoman.  After a couple of days she seemed to get better but then my daughter got a good look and she said, “Mommy, Sally has a hole.”  O geez!  She had an abscess from being bitten and she needed a drain and stitches and ugh.  They also shaved her butt.  About two trips to the vet later, the grey cat was seemingly hit by a car just down the way from our house.  It is my belief, after seeing what happened to Sally that Clyde pushed the grey kitty in front of a moving car.

Pretty packages!

Then almost a month ago, Sally began to climb the roof.  One night we DID have to bring her in through our bedroom window because she found herself on our patio with no way down.  Two days later, we couldn’t find her.  My 9 year old would go outside periodically and call her and she finally got a response.  Sally had wedged herself in between some plants (to me, it seemed to stay and not be found).  We got her out and to the vet we went because she was limping badly.  She broke her leg way up on her hip and the vet wanted to put a pin in it because he didn’t think it would set with just a cast.  I saw the x-ray and had to agree.  It was so high on her hip, she really wouldn’t have been able to get around if we had amputated it.  Anyways, yesterday we got some good news.  She gets her pin out in two weeks!  It was hard getting her to rest and take her medicine but we get our kitty back.  Let’s just hope our “free” kitty stops costing us so much money from here on out!

All her hair from the abscess situation hadn’t grown back in yet before she had to have her butt shaved again.

Onto the wontons… What can I say?  I am obsessed.  I just frikin LOVE cream cheese wontons!  The other day I went to the restaurant that I got the idea from and ordered a 6 piece…and they were gross and mine were way better.  I am not lying!  It may have just been that batch (it didn’t have green onions in it and I know they are supposed to) but it made me happy.  And places like that always have dessert egg rolls and I thought why not dessert cream cheese wontons?  That is how I came up with these.  I baked them because I couldn’t bring myself to fry them but you could do either.  Serve them with a caramel sauce!  My favorite so far that I have found is from Always With Butter.

My GeekyLink for today isn’t from Comic Con.  I haven’t even gone through all my Comic Con stuff yet!  It is two of the parodies of the Call Me Maybe song that all the preteen girls are obsessed with (mine included) that make it somewhat palatable for a mom like me.  First, from Cookie Monster and second, from Star Wars.

Sundays with Joy/Zucchini and Potato Pancakes

First off, I want to say sorry that I didn’t write another post for this past week. I did make you something though. It is coming up this week and I really like it! I also think I will post another time after that this week and give you a peek into the sweets that I made for my brother-in-law’s birthday at the end of June. We are just having so much fun with our kids this summer that it is hard to find the time to make something, let alone take pretty pictures and post! My 9 year old keeps remarking that “we are doing so much in July!” I must admit though, I feel bad. We seem to be making up for last year when we really didn’t do much and before long summer was over.

Also, we didn’t really get started doing fun stuff till July because their recital took up most of June. We went camping but after that my husband had jury duty for a week and a half and since he would be home every day in the afternoon (instead of working his crazy hours), I ended up not taking the kids anywhere cause we didn’t want to miss when daddy came home. So when he got back on his schedule we started planning all the fun stuff we could do with the kids on his days off and maybe stuff daddy didn’t want to do on his work days. We are even going to the movies more often which is a plus for mommy. I am also happy to report that our local $2 show has nice new seats and overall seems to be upgrading things a bit.

Onions, potatoes, and zucchini…

Onto the pancakes…

What can I say? Freaking amazing! For me this is right up there with the Fudge Pops! I loved them! I had to make an effort to STOP eating them. 2 out of 3 kids loved them too (one I can’t get to eat anything new, so that is no biggie). My 3 year old ate just as many as I did!

Frying…

I didn’t have any sour cream or crème fraîche so I just used my non fat greek yogurt to eat it with and it worked fabulously. You don’t need anything to eat it with, though. Just ask my son who ate 3 plain, most of them with a fork. For the recipe please buy Joy’s Cookbook! Also, if you would like to check out some of the other ladies’ attempts from our group check out Bakeaholic Mama and the blog hop at the bottom of her post.

Eating…chewing…success!

My GeekyLinks for today are all Breaking Bad. Season 5 starts tonight! My dilemma…Do I wait to watch it with my husband tonight? or Do I watch it when it is on and then watch it again with my husband? Decisions, decisions… So here is ‘Breaking Bad’: Seasons 1-4 in 10 minutes and Breaking Bad Season 5 Comic-Con Trailer. Another reason I think I want to post multiple times this week is because of all the sweet stuff coming out of Comic Con. There are some pretty awesome trailers and great pics (I am totally stalking the pictures on Twitter and Instagram with the SDCC hashtag).

Sundays with Joy/Chocolate Covered Coconut Macaroon Ice Cream (in a Blizzard Maker)

Yeah, yeah, Monday again.  I am late because, well, this week turned out to be a lesson in using what you’ve got.  Last time I used my sister-in-laws ice cream maker but as of Thursday, she was out of town.  I couldn’t even go pick it up.  So Thursday and Friday were spent wondering just what I was going to do for this week’s Sundays with Joy since it was ice cream.

Then I did what any mom would do on Saturday.  I went to the mountains with my kids and spent the day.  My husband rarely has a Saturday off.  Especially one where we don’t have anything to do, so we pounced on our opportunity to spend the day together.  We got home before dark and I went out in search of my ingredients, still not knowing how I was going to make the ice cream.  I had to go to 3 stores (all my local ones, thankfully) but I found everything I needed.

Toasted Coconut

Then I decided to break out the mini guns.  Both my daughter’s received dessert treat makers for Christmas.  I decided I would try to use both.  After reading the instructions, it turned out one didn’t really “make” anything, it just kind of dispensed it.  It made its own stuff using their mix but it couldn’t to any freezing or churning.  So we were down to one.  The DQ Blizzard Maker.  And it worked!  Kind of.

Angela working as fast as she can and do I see it thickening?

Using their mix, I would imagine it would make something harder than soft serve because when I finally did it all the way right (the second batch) it went REALLY well.  Of course the downside is that you are hand cranking for twenty minutes (only 10 with their mix) and longer.  O yeah, and since it only holds as much as a Dixie cup, we had to do it THREE times!  We only did it 100% right once because we were running low on ice (that trip to the mountains the day before needed a cooler) and salt (each time takes 3/4 cup!).  I ended up freezing each batch together as we went and mixing in the coconut by hand at that point as well.  Once we were done (we still had some batter leftover but we were DONE with the hand crank) I let it set up (stirring every 30 minutes) and took my pictures before the sun went down.

Homemade Magic Shell anyone?

So I guess it worked, although it took all day.  I couldn’t have done it without my kids, which was kind of cool.  O and did I mention that the ice cream was friggin awesome?  Let’s not even talk about the homemade Magic Shell, which was frickin amazing and the easiest thing ever!  The best thing about using the Blizzard Maker and having to make small batches?  I ended up tasting it A LOT as the day went on, truly yummy!  As always, please buy her cookbook for the recipe and please check out Bakeaholic Mama’s site for all the other ladies’ attempts and adaptations!

The only picture where you can see some of the coconut in the ice cream.

My GeekyLink for today is Star Trek For Kids a list compiled by GeekMom of essential Star Trek episodes that you should watch with your kids from all the franchises.  Speaking only for the Star Trek: TNG list, I really liked it a lot and agreed with the picks (yay, The Offspring, my mom’s favorite and who doesn’t love The Measure Of A Man or Deja Q?).  However, just off the top of my head I thought of two she could add for Season 1 (since she only includes the two part pilot).  How about When The Bough Breaks, which shows that even in the future it is possible to take your kids for granted, and Hide and Q, for more fun with Q?

Cherry Cornmeal Cake with Chocolate Glaze

This recipe is from the lovely ladies of Fleur-De-Licious.  A med student/law student high school friends combo that takes turns with the blog posts.  They are awesome and make me wonder what the heck I was doing with my time in college.  (Studying daddy, I swear!)

Pitting cherries without a cherry pitter is a pain in the butt, FYI.  However, totally worth it.

These ladies made their cake with a bourbon glaze but I have three kids that are gonna want a bite.  I could’ve gone for a powdered sugar glaze but I wanted some chocolate with my cherries!  I gave my neighbor some of this cake last week along with his loaf of zucchini herb bread.  He stopped me the next day and gave this cake rave reviews from him and his wife.

Fleur-De-Licious‘ cake was a bit thicker and their cherries didn’t all fall to the bottom.  I must’ve messed up on my flour a bit but that is OK because the chocolate glaze covers my flaws.

I didn’t change the recipe enough to post it here.  I only upped the salt and vanilla to 1 teaspoon each.  However, the changes they made to the original recipe that this is based off of are phenomenal.  Brown butter and brown sugar?  Genius!  I did whip up my own glaze, however, but feel free to use your favorite.

One bite…

My GeekyLinks are all Doctor Who related.  Some old and one new as we are gearing up for the new season that is supposed to come our way soon (August? September? not sure yet).  Also, just to make me feel a bit better about not going to Comic-Con.  You know what, I was busy that last resale day but I wasn’t sure which day to get tickets for anyway.  I was thinking maybe Sunday but didn’t get any and so of course the Doctor Who panel and the Fringe panel are on Sunday and I am not going.  *hrmph*  Anyways, a few months ago Scientists invent real “Doctor Who sonic screwdriver”, someone actually put a monetary value on the TARDIS, and (spoilers) new pictures of an upcoming episode.

Two bites…

Sundays with Joy/Chocolate Raspberry Fudge Pops

I know it is Monday and again I am late with my Sundays with Joy.  It was because of a very busy family filled weekend.  My brother-in-law celebrated his 40th on Saturday.  My brother had come down to celebrate with us and we spent most of Sunday with him as well.  Then my husband and I spent Sunday afternoon buying our very first smartphones and we spent the evening playing around with those.  I figured I could get up early and get this post out less late then it is now but my kitty that had surgery had some issues that we felt we should take care of early this morning.  It turned out to be nothing but better safe than sorry (and less money spent) where our Sally is concerned.

Now onto the Pops!  Can I tell you and would you believe me that these were the best and easiest thing that we have made so far?!  As I started to eat my first (of three over the weekend), I couldn’t get over how good they were.  I was actually able to make them Saturday before the party and left them to freeze.  It took me no time at all.  I fit it in while frosting my brother-in-law’s birthday cupcakes.  I was eating my first after we got home from the party.  All my kid’s loved them too.  My daughter that doesn’t eat fruit will even lick mine until she sees the fruit, then stop.  Also, I used bananas for mine instead of raspberries mostly just because it would’ve meant an extra trip to the store.  My brother had one on Sunday, loved it, but said that he would really like to have tried one with raspberries.  He was also pretty impressed with my signed copy of the cookbook (he is a Joy the Baker Podcast listener) and is thinking of buying his own copy of her cookbook.

I also just used paper cups and (dangerous sharp point!) candy apple sticks (I thought I had popsicle sticks but I am just glad I had something).  I didn’t want to have to go out and buy anything new for the recipe.  Now that I have tried it I want to buy some popsicle molds just so I can make it again and again and again and have it look prettier.  Someone that made it earlier in the week said to use smaller chocolate pieces such as mini chocolate chips so I just ended up flaking it off and chopping it very fine.  Even in an ice cream, I prefer the chocolate flakes to chips.  Just writing this I am craving another…

My GeekyLink for today is the trailer for the new season of Breaking Bad.  It is one of a handful of shows that my husband I watch together and we both really love it.  The season premiere is just under 2 weeks away and we can both barely wait.   In the meantime, AMC is doing a good job of showing old episodes.  Catch up!  You won’t regret it.