I know some people prefer a crunch with their cookies, and occasionally I’ll make a really crunchy cookie for the kids when they request it, but generally they love their cookies ultra soft. Ginger cookies, chocolate cookies, peanut butter cookies and yes, the beloved chocolate chip cookie are all served up really soft and moist around here (I love the wee bite marks the two littlest ones leave in them when they put them down for a drink). So I’ve been baking up different versions of all kinds of cookies for years to find exactly the right combination to get the right texture. I have succeeded with these babies right here. Normally, I like to know where a recipe came from before I post it on the blog, but in this case I think it was my granny. I found this recipe written on an index card in my kitchen when we unpacked a few months ago, which is really weird because I had to itemize every little thing we brought with us for the border patrol. So I thought I knew everything that was in the bins we brought over. Clearly then, this was the work of kitchen fairies. Let’s not question the kitchen fairies.

2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
2 cups chocolate chips

In typical cookie fashion, sift together the flour, baking soda and salt in one bowl and cream together the butter and sugars in another.
I cream the butter and sugars in the Kitchen Aid and them slowly pour the flour mixture into the butter mixture with the machine on low. Then I take the bowl off the stand and stir the chocolate chips in with a wooden spoon. The wooden spoon makes me feel old school and justifies my ridiculous (and by ridiculous I mean fabulous) apron. Then bake 375 for 9 minutes. The timing is the key to the softness of these guys. They’ll seem borderline mushy, don’t fret. Let them cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes before you move them to a rack (or a plate) to cool off completely so they don’t stick together in the cookie jar!

I know Menu Monday is a concept meant to make dinners in busy households a little smoother, if only because you’re aware of what you’re doing before you open the pantry at 5 o’clock and I love that, I really do. I love only having to think about what I’m cooking once a week when I write the list and even then I just put together ideas and requests I’ve jotted down. While I do love serving something everyone loves (that hopefully looks pretty snazzy as well) to my fam every night, breakfast is my favorite meal to prepare for the Wee Ones.

I’m always up looong before them (occasionally, Wee One #3 will surprise all of us and get up when our alarms go off around 5am) so I have way more solo time to prep and set the table than I do in the evenings. Generally, they all wake up hungry. If they didn’t, they tend to develop an appetite when they smell whatever is going on that day.

To me, there are two important things about any meal but I try to be especially mindful of them at breakfast. It has to be packed with as many nutrients as possible and it has to be appealing enough for them to actually eat it. I mean, a bowl of Red River cereal is crazy good for you, it’s about as enticing to most people as a bowl of birdseed (my Daddy and one of my besties, Gill, however will happily sit down to a bowl of birdseed and go ‘mmmm, birdseed’). So, with that in mind, I set the table as pretty as I can with our hilarious extended vacation mismatched silverware and plates and fill their plates with fuel for the day. Kids need energy to squabble over board game rules and cover themselves head to toe in sidewalk chalk, dontchaknow!

As you know from last year, I’ve gotten sneaky with a lot of my cooking and baking so there are untraditional ingredients in a lot of their muffins and breads, but they all work in their favor and the kids either don’t know or don’t care so I keep at it. I generally serve it buffet-style. So I set out plates full of food and then each kid gets their own plate to pick and choose what they want. One of my kids will eat and eat and eat at each meal AND snack all day – my other two have supermodel appetites so they wont each as much at a meal, but they’ll come back half an hour later and ask for a snack so I just offer them breakfast again and again till lunch!

Breakfast this Week (July 16 – 22)

Sunday – Berry Smoothie (with spinach and parsley), Cinnamon Buns, Monkey Bread and maybe Apple Fritter Muffins

This is another recipe brought to you via my girl Sammie. She posted about it here, in the same post that she talked about her Cheddar Baked Chicken (a recipe that I totally copied here), so here I am again, biting her style. That’s ok, we’re kitchen besties. <3 I mentioned in the Cheddar Chicken post that her family generally has the same likes and dislikes at the table as my family so if something was a hit at her house it's generally also a hit at mine. That absolutely applied here. I are a few more of these than I care to admit myself. The kids saved me from the rest of them, thankfully. I've made them maybe three or four times since. They've totally become a staple!

Brown Sugar Muffins – via The Happy Housewife

1 3/4 cups flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup canola oil
brown sugar
cinnamon

Mix the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder and salt. Then add the egg, milk and oil. Fill the muffin cups 1/4 full with the batter.
Mix some cinnamon and brown sugar and sprinkle that over each muffin cup of batter and then top with the rest of the batter (evenly distributed over the rest of the muffin cups) and then top with more cinnamon and brown sugar. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Try not to eat them all at once.

Today, I’m linking up with The How To Mommy and Organizing Junkie

Last week, we decided that Canadians living stateside should really do it up for Canada Day. I also promise to do something fun on the 4th!

Traditionally, when making poutine, you’d use cheese curds but guess what? There is only one shop in all of Los Angeles that sells cheese curds aaaand it’s not even really in LA, it’s in Long Beach. Also? I only discovered there was a shop in Long Beach that sold cheese curds immediately after I got back to LA from Long Beach. Insert dramatic sigh. The extremely informative dude at Whole Foods that laid all this out for me explained that cheese curds have to be super fresh and there’s not a lot of demand for them down here. Then he laughed and said ‘yeah, cheese curds aren’t big in Southern California’. Then I told him why I wanted them so he didn’t think I was crazy and since everyone seems to love Canadians down here, he suggested several different kinds of cheese to use in place of the curds and I settled on Doux de Montagne. Best decision I could have made. The cheese was really, really soft and it melted perfectly. However, since my husband is not a big fan of ‘unusual cheeses’, I made three versions of poutine. Soft Mozzarella, Monterey Jack and my amazing new love, Doux de Montagne!

Recipe after this week’s menu (well, if you can even call it a recipe)!

This week’s menu is super simple, there’s a lot of exploring and adventuring to do this week. This is our first week of summer vacation from homeschooling and we’re all pretty hyped about it. I’m insisting we continue with math and of course we will all keep reading, but generally they’re free to play at the beach and have picnics at the park and spend too long in the pool so we all get pruney and play board games into the night and whatever else their little hearts fancy (within reason). Hopefully we’ll have photies up on Sunday of these adventures.

This Week’s Menu

Sunday – Breaded Sole and Rice Pilaf with Ice Cream for dessert

All you need is:
French fries
Cheese
Beef gravy

First chop your cheese of choice into small easy to melt bits, then pop your fries in the oven and make your peameal bacon sandwich( if you’re getting all Canadian).
Aww look, Toronto sandwiches in love! Mr So Very Domestic and I, of course. Sorry, moving on. Plate your super hot fries and make sure your gravy is crazy hot.
Sprinkle your cheese bits on top of the fries and pour the gravy over top.
If you are getting Canadian, you’re going to want to go East Coast and have a Moosehead with this.

What a fun week!! It started out sadly though – my most treasured pie plate (and of course the only one I brought with me) smashed to the floor with a beautiful chicken pot pie in it. I am not a crier and I swear I almost shed a tear over this. It was about 40 years old, snagged from a friend who brought it to my house in Toronto about 5 years ago with a peanut butter cup cake in it. The nostalgic part of this story is that the cake she brought was her entry into our annual bake off for my sister’s birthday and she lost but about a year later we found out the entry that beat her was a store bought cheat!. I lifted my spirits with these cinnamon buns though. Then I made my very first Battenberg Cake for Daring Bakers, it was hard but totally worth it!

Also:

-We have a Stone Cold Creamery across the street and it’s become a weekly treat for the kids to get a small bowl and I am uber proud of myself that I haven’t caved in over a month!
-Strawberry cake makes me extremely happy and yes I snack on strawberries while I bake it!
-Nothing is more fun than a random tutu!
-We went to the pool every weekday this week and man were the kids happy about that (I’ve never been so tan in my whole life)
-Butter Tarts for Canada Day
-Canada Day dinner of Peameal Bacon on a Kaiser with Poutine and a Moosehead

Mandy of What The Fruitcake?! came to our rescue last minute to present us with the Battenberg Cake challenge! She highlighted Mary Berry’s techniques and recipes to allow us to create this unique little cake with ease.

This was my first month doing a Daring Baker challenge after moving and it was so fun! I can’t believe I stopped doing them for a while! I’m back at it people – though I am a day late for posting! Eep!!

I have seen Battenberg cakes before but I had never made one until yesterday! It’s always fun and rewarding to make something difficult and come out on top! I took it one step further (because duh, of course I would) and I made the fondant myself too! Recipes like this make me miss Toronto, because my mother would have loved to see! I sent her a picture, but it’s not the same as seeing my masterpiece in person! When I first read this recipe I was a little scared to be honest and now I’m bummed out that I didn’t make several versions of this over the month to make a lovely epic post about all the different ways we Battenberg’ed it up in June. Next month, that’s the plan.

I used the recipe Mandy supplied, an altered version of Mary Berry’s Battenberg recipe. It was super, super easy to make and really good! It sprang up exactly as it should and that always makes me happy. I want to make vanilla/chocolate versions, strawberry/chocolate versions, mint/chocolate verions and and and I’d like to use ganache as the glue instead of the apricot jam (or use strawberry jam in a strawberry version). The possibilities are pretty much endless!

First, make a tin foil wall for your pan so you have that rectangle shape. Super simple, then start on the batter. I was reading that the ‘drop it all in one bowl’ technique worked really well here, so that’s what I did.
After I put half of the batter in half of the pan, I added a few drops of red food coloring to the rest. Then I started on the fondant! The fondant was super simple. You need 1lb of mini marshmallows, a few drops of water, 2lbs of icing sugar and something to grease your hands with (I used butter).
Melt the marshmallows with a little water in a double boiler and then drop the mass of melted goo onto a seriously greased up counter top or cookie sheet or whatever. Then dump the icing sugar on top of the goo and knead it the way you’d knead bread!
Kneading the fondant takes a while so by the time I was done the cakes were ready. Let them cool in the pan for a bit, then let them cool completely. I stacked them to cut them into their four long squares.
Heat the jam in a double boiler and then press through a sieve or small strainer to get all the bits out.
Then glue your cake pieces together with the jam and roll out your fondant!
Place the cake (with jam glue on the bottom) on the fondant, then brush more jam on the cake and wrap the fondant around it! This is kinda tricky.
Then I used the back of a knife to make the traditional scores on the top of the cake!

Putting these cookies together was no joke! The dough itself was super simple and I will absolutely be making rainbow cookies (ooh maybe rainbow swirl cookies) in the immediate future, the tricky part was in stuffing these cookies. The original recipe used super cute horse cookie cutters to look like actual piñatas. The mood to make these little creations struck me as I was making the Chocolate Kit Kat Cake and all my cute cookie cutters are in Canada. I made due and just sliced them into rectangles and followed the rest of the directions. It’ll work for whatever shape you use really.

Nothing out of the ordinary here, cream the butters and the sugar, then add the eggs and oil. Mix the cream of tartar, salt, baking soda and flour. Then add the dry to the wet and blend in the vanilla and almond.
This is where the fun starts! Divide the dough into 5 balls and mix food coloring into each ball until you’ve got the color you’re looking for. If you’re doing this properly you’ll need a very small ball of black dough as well for the feet.
There is a reason there is a container used in the original instructions! The dough is buttery and so of course spready and slippery. Mashing it into a container in layers ensures it’ll hold it’s shape. I? Shaped each layer in a box lid and then crammed the whole thing in a yogurt tube box. Sigh. Next time, proper container.
Freeze this bad boy overnight of possible or at least 4 hours.
Slice the slab into rectangles and bake at 350 for about 12 minutes. Now if you’re using slices you’re done this part, if you’re using a cookie cutter, have at it but make sure you reverse one in three cookies (so when you lay them out you can put the darker sides together and only the pretty sides show). Work quickly while the cookies are still warm.
Mix your frosting ‘glue’ of milk and icing sugar together and then lay two cookies out darker sides up. Spread a little icing glue along the edge of one of the cookies.
Take a third cookie, cut a hole in the middle and place on top of the first cookie with the glue, then fill with mini M&Ms and put more glue along the edge of that cookie and top with the second cookie.
These things are pretty epic, def not for one person!

It’s that time again! Last week I held pretty true to the list I made for my week, this week I’m going to try to make recipes I haven’t posted before and hopefully photograph them as I make them so I can add them to the list!

This Week’s Menu (June 25 – July 1)

Sunday – This is Canada Day so we’re going all out
   Breakfast – Pancakes with real maple syrup for the kids, Cream of Wheat for us and pemeal bacon for everyone!
   Lunch – Poutine!!
   Dinner – Pemeal Bacon on a Kaiser* and Ice Salad, Nanaimo Bars and Butter Tarts for dessert

*this is crazy regional to Toronto and specifically St Lawrence Market but that’s Canada to me

A few weeks ago, I made mini chicken pot pies and ever since then the kids have been encouraging me to make mini versions of other dinners they love! So far I’ve made mini chicken hot pockets and these mini pizza bites. I served these with pizza sauce to pour over top or, as Wee One #3 chose to do, dunk in. Next time I will add some sauce to the mini bites before I cook them and see how that works out. This week I’m making Mini Shepherd’s Pies!

Your homemade pancake batter (or the batter prepared from a box or Bisquick or whatever)
24 slices pepperoni (or more depending on how much you love pepperoni)
1 cup shredded Mozzarella cheese
1-2 cups pizza sauce

Spoon about 2 tablespoons of the batter into each (lightly greased) muffin cup, and top with cheese, pepperoni and more cheese.
Pour about 1 tablespoon of the batter over the pizza bites (adding more or less depending on how doughy you like your pizza). Bake for about 20 minutes at 350 and serve with dipping bowls of pizza sauce!

This week brought us the completion of my fourth pair of socks for the year! Happy Birthday Nanny! Her birthday was in April, but she’s sweet enough to totally gloss over that when these cuties arrive in the mail next week. This week was also full of fun homeschooling lessons, I think we all genuinely enjoyed each day! Ok, that’s a dirty lie. Wee One #2 isn’t so keen on French (or cursive writing actually…), and while I’m aware that we are not currently in Canada, I am including it because even though we will be here longer than we originally planned, we’re not going to be here forever and they’ll need to know French eventually.

After whining about having to buy jugs of juice instead of squeezing my own, I found a little hand juicer! It’s perfect for making us each a glass in the morning to go with breakfast. This is probably what I am most hyped about in my kitchen right now.

Our little patio garden is doing well! I was pretty confident the seeds would sprout, but you never know until they do, so the kids were pretty excited when they saw the first little pieces of green poling through the dirt!

Hope you had a great weekend!!

Sunday = pair of socks #4 for 2012 DONE!	Monday = train wreck!
Tuesday = cursive writing practice for Wee One #2	Tuesday = juicer and fresh oranges!
Wednesday = Wee One #1 reading about nomads	Thursday = butterflies and fuchsia crayons
Friday = our seedlings in TP tubes are doing well!	Saturday = cinnamon brown sugar muffins

Our days are so different since moving to Los Angeles, which I guess is a redundant thing to say because duh but it’s more than just the geographic differences. The two huge differences to life before and after moving here are school and work because my husband has gone from telecommuting from home to working at the office and my kids went from being at school all day to being homeschooled all day! So, 3 months into this adventure we have found a new normal and it’s not what I would have ever expected, but it’s pretty sweet. My husband has telecommuted from home for years, so while him being at work 5 days a week is totally weird, he likes his job and it gives the kids and I a chance to loudly play board games and bake up a storm. Plus how sweet is it to come home from work and your wife is in a cute little apron finishing dinner?! The kids have really gotten into the swing of homeschooling, faster than I did for sure! If a lesson isn’t working for them, there’s always a way to tailor it a bit so it does work for them. Science should be amazing, reading should be inspiring, gym should take place in the pool whenever possible and art should always be messy.

Anyhooooo, one thing that has remained the same is everyone’s love of the weekend. Sometimes there is still some school or work to do over the weekend, but I celebrate every day that I don’t have to set an alarm before I go to bed at night. <3 I try to bake up something fun on Fridays, especially now that Friday has become homemade pizza day it's fun to have something a little epic to go with it. These were a big hit. I'm going to try out a bunch of different cake/frosting combos!

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temp
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 cup low-fat buttermilk

All I did was whip up a batch of Martha’s Vanilla Cake (recipe originally posted here) and spoon the batter into ice cream cones! I baked them for about 20 minutes at 350 and voila!

The recipe is pretty simple. Just whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in one bowl and beat the butter and sugar in another bowl with a paddle mixer till it’s smooth. Slowly add the eggs and yolks with the mixer on low and then beat in the vanilla. Then add a little of the flour mixture and mix, then a little buttermilk and mix and continue until both are all mixed in.