Mom's Wonton Soup

Today our air conditioning was fixed! Hurray!

Now our oven has decided to be uncooperative.

Apparently no clock display = no baking temperature display = no baking for Joyce.

Luckily, today's post did not require an oven.

Mom's Wonton Soup

Mango Dessert

For the last 8 weekends I have been taking mini vacations and traveling to near by cities. Usually I end up in Toronto, but I have gone as far as Montreal and Niagara Falls.

Montreal had some really great bagels. Montreal-style bagels. Sweet and tasty.

Niagara Falls had the Hersey Store. Limited edition chocolate. Cookies-and-cream kisses. Chocolate-and-almond kisses. Choco-mint Chipits.

With all this traveling, I haven't had time to buy flour since I ran out.

This can be a limiting factor when deciding what to make... 

In addition, the air conditioning broke down so I decided not to bake/use the oven to avoid overheating the house. Instead, I used the refrigerator for my Mango Dessert.

Mango Dessert

Take two.

It seems that I always have buttermilk on the verge of being expired and in need to be used up. 

I like to buy buttermilk because it just adds that little extra "umph" to my baking. The problem is that I never use it up in just one recipe, so I always have left over.

I usually buy more buttermilk because I don't have enough for another recipe. And of course, I end up with left over... once again.

So today was a special day.

I used up all the buttermilk, flour, vanilla extract, and eggs in ONE RECIPE. 

Great-tasting-Unintentional-Garbage muffins. 

Feel free to take two of my Berry Buttermilk Muffins.

No butter cookies.

I read online that some cookies can be made with bananas in place of butter.

It sounded too good to be true.

But I tried it anyways... I made up my own recipe. So beware.

Banana-Oatmeal-Peanut-Craisin-Almond flour-No Butter Cookies

That's a mouthful. Literally.

Boston Cream Pie... or Cake?

I've been wanting to make a Boston Cream Pie for a while so I did. Or at least I tried to. 

Yes, I am aware that I made a cake, but according to Wikipedia, Boston Cream Pie is a cake and not a pie. 

Yes, I am aware that Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, but they are just full of interesting info so I will just take my chances.

Boston Cream Pie

Starry-eyed about saving a stary pie?

A few days ago, I made some pies. A few baby pies. One was blueberry. The other five were apple. They were covered in stars. They were cute, just like most human babies.

I wanted them to be jam packed with fruit, but I didn't make enough pie filling. Oops. 

I charged on and filled the pies with what I had. I should have just made more filling.

 I baked the blueberry pie and one of the apple pies.
The rest of the pies were frozen...

but that all changed today.

Housekeeping.

This is a housekeeping post.

No. I don't plan on showing you how I wash my pots and pans. Mainly because I don't... just kidding. I do. I use lots of Palmolive too.

This post is just a clean-up, catch-all, touch-on-a few-miscellaneous-things (Awards and Brownies) blog post.

Item 1: I feel I'm still new to whole blogging world but a few days ago I received The Versatile Blogger Award from the Food Blogging Team at Just Food Snobs. WHIPPEE! I didn't even know such things existed!!

Par-ty in the par-k.

I love the park.
I love parties.
Naturally, I love parties in the park.

Leaf-Shaped Sugar Cookies seemed appropriate for this party.

When I made the cookies, I ran out of white sugar so I added about 1/4 cup of brown sugar (1:1 ratio) to supplement. I was warned that brown sugar can stay undissolved, which can cause the cookies to become crunchy and less sweet. I'm not sure how the recipe would have turned out if I only used brown sugar, but they were fine with the amount that I used.

After the cookies were made, I ran into some trouble with the icing. This is what I learned:

Tiger versus Zebra

I've always been a fan of tigers. I even dressed up as one for a party.

I like them as brownies too, so I made them. No, I did not bake tiger meat into dessert. I'm pretty sure that's illegal. WWF would be all over that.

Tiger Brownies are actually made up of a cookie bar and a brownie. They do not resemble a tiger (besides the stripes) and could probably be called Zebra Brownies. 

Tiger versus Zebra...  This is starting to sound like the lyrics to Metric's Stadium Love... Tiger versus Rat... (click here to cue the music)

Or forget about the animals, these could be called Brookies... or Crownies... or Browokies... or Cookownies...         endless possibilities.

Or I could just stick with the name Tiger Brownie.

Please pick me up.

Excuse me, would you tiramisu?

Would I what?

Tiramisu.

Oh! You mean: do I want to have some tiramisu? Because I do!

No. I want you to pick me up and carry me. I'm too tired from making the tiramisu. 

I don't understand.

Oy vey! Didn't you know that tiramisu translates to "pick me up" or "carry me up"?!

Oh. No I didn't know that, but I do now. May I have some tiramisu after I carry you?

No. It won't be ready for a few hours. The flavours need to soak in.

Oh. What about tomorrow?

Maybe... if you don't drop me.

Tiramisu

ps it's not that much work to make it.