Poptarts Redux

When I first made these homemade poptarts back in Utah, I knew they would be good if not for my baking faux pas.

This time, though, they exceeded expectations and were delicious! Some were filled with raspberry jam, some with semisweet chocolate chips, and some with passionfruit jelly that I bought last time I visited Robert is Here. This fabulous exotic tropical fruit stand makes my bimonthly trips north worth the long drive!

I found the recipe via SmittenKitchen (of course…that’s my favorite food blog!).

Birthday Dishes and Linens

My birthday was last weekend and I invited some friends over for a grownup dinner party. Really, I wanted the excuse to show off the dishes I bought and the napkins I made to go with them.

Miss P brought citronella candles and I set out the bug spray and I didn’t even get bitten (a nice b-day gift of itself). I made pototo lima bean soup and whole wheat rolls. C&D brought a quiche and P&T brought grilled veggies. Everything was so good, and I counted myself really lucky to have such great friends!

I made the birthday cake, just my usual chocolate cake from a mix, but I used some cake-decorating resources to frost it nicely (turquoise with white polka dots). It was my 36th birthday, and I didn’t have enough candles, so I made an 8-bit binary code. I also served soan papdi, a box of which I have been saving since my trip to Salt Lake. Soan Papdi is so sweet that you have to wash it down with birthday cake.

I had spent the week leading up to my birthday sewing napkins. It was surprising how many turquoise/orange/red fabrics I had, and I bought some others at the shop on my street corner (yes, I live practically next door to a quilt shop!).

Plus my old napkin rings went fabulously:

In uploading these photos, I was reminded of another dinner party almost exactly two years ago, where I also showed off new dishes, and where I OUTDID myself on food. See Indian Feast.

 

 

Baking Experiments

Yesterday I made homemade crackers from this recipe. These are far better than storebought and easy too!

I made 9 of these long crackers, and seasoned each batch differently! Then put them in baggies and froze a bunch of dough for later.

Then I made a nectarine galette, roughly following this recipe, but using honey instead of sugar. It was perfect for me… I love crust and this was one of my flakiest ever. But Zach prefers filling and found this tart to be too dry. I didn’t do a jam glaze, and probably should have.

A tart that pretty was clearly made for showing off, so we took it to our friends’ house and served it with ice cream while the fellas drank short glasses of bourbon, or whiskey, and expounded upon the differences thereof.

Sunberry Frozen Yogurt

Here is a rather terrible photo of a delicious dessert I had this weekend.

Sunberry frozen yogurt garnished with ground cherries (all berries home grown)and black sesame seeds.  Without the benefit of an ice-cream maker, this was made using the tried-and-true method of a baggie full of yogurt inside a big bag of ice and salt. We loved this all-natural purple color… but the flash turned the ground cherries yellow gold, and they were really the best shade of chartreuse!!

A friend made this for me on Saturday night after a delicious meal of homemade Som Tam with roasted peanuts (my friends used green tomatoes instead of papaya, since we’re in a temperate zone!), peanut-oil-fried tofu with sea salt, and coconut rice.