In this post, I’m participating in The Daring Kitchen, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Tuesdays at the Table

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

This was my first official Daring Baker challenge and I was so excited to do it, and now I am so excited to show it off!! The theme for this challenge was ‘September’, it was pretty easy for me to figure out which way to go with that when I am surrounded by these beautiful September colours! The first photo was taken in my backyard (it’s part of the view from my kitchen window), the second photo was taken in my front yard. With these colours as daily inspiration, I used brown, green, orange and red on my cookies.

I’m jumping ahead here, I actually baked them on Sunday afternoon and spent wee one #3’s nap on Monday decorating them. I prepared them exactly as Mandy instructed. Sugar cookies are pretty basic, but it’s the most basic recipes that are the easiest to mess up. In this case, whatever you do, DO NOT overmix! As soon as you’re combined, stop.

This recipe was a total winner and was explained so well, I can’t wait to make more. And more and more and more. Amazing. Kneading the dough into three balls and then rolling between parchment paper to reduce both chilling time, and the necessity to re-roll was genius. I have made a zillion sugar cookies, and these are by far the best.

Also, this is just the second time I’ve used my Granny’s rolling pin. It’s so weird and sometimes feels so wrong that I reference her so much more since she’s passed than I did when she was alive. It makes me feel both like a terrible granddaughter, and somehow really connected to her. Ever since we traded city for country I’ve been thinking of her a lot – she was certainty an old fashioned country girl making the city work for her. Anyhoo, her rolling pin is very, very heavy – it’s marble with wooden handles and I love, love, love it. In this case specifically, where I’m rolling out soft dough on parchment paper, it makes the job come together in a snap.

I really think the rolling, chilling, cutting, chilling, baking procedure makes the cookies hold their shape so well and make them so easy to handle. Which doesn’t matter much if you’re just going to eat them plain. However, if you’re, oh I don’t know, about to attack them with a kilo of royal icing, it would be so nice if they were sturdy cookies that didn’t fall apart when handling!

Ahem. Excuse my baggies, I need new piping bags desperately. My birthday is less than a month away and pretty much everyone knows I’d love a refresh of my baking gear. 😉

Decorating these cookies was so much fun! Wee one #1 was at school, wee one #2 was home from school with a cold (as much as she wanted to go the poor thing) so she was in the other room playing Mario Kart and wee one #3 was blissfully napping. A quiet, (mostly) uninterrupted stretch of time?? Really? I took it! LOL

I had intended to also pipe out our initials (we planned when we named everyone to not repeat any initials!) but I got so wrapped up in the magic of dragging a toothpick through the icing, I had attacked all three dozen! Next time I make these, that’s the plan, but in brighter colours I think.

These cookies are destined to be in our neighbour’s tummies tomorrow afternoon. As I mentioned earlier, I have been here for 3 weeks and have only met two neighbours, so I will rectify that situation after wee one #1 gets home from school. Hmm. Maybe we should give some to the school bus driver as well!

In this post, I’m participating in Marriage Mondays.

This morning I had what I often refer to as a ‘God moment’. To my non-Christian readers, I am not about to start thumping my Bible no worries, and to my Christian readers I’m not trying to play down a connection to God by being flippant about it. It’s just that as connected as I feel throughout the day, there are some moments when I just feel like he’s working overtime for me, you know?

In our new neighbourhood, garbage pickup is at 7am, and really most of the time it’s more like 6:45am. No one in this area can leave the garbage out the night before because the foxes will get to it and make an awful mess. So, everyone around here must drag their tired behinds out of bed in the dark to get the garbage out in time to be collected. Small price to pay for living somewhere so beautiful and peaceful.

Anyhoo, this morning as my alarm went off my husband nudged me to get up at 6:20, and I said (much grumpier than I should have) ‘I have another alarm going off in 10 minutes, I’ll get up then’. He replied that I should just get it over with and do it now. Very grumpily I sat up and was filled with contempt for my still sleeping, snuggled under the covers husband. I recognized the feeling and after seeking out (and finding!!) a Good Morning Girls group to be a part of- I could not let myself be annoyed with my dear, sweet husband. So I asked God to help me be thankful I woke up on time for the garbage truck, thankful that I have a healthy, wonderful husband in bed beside me, thankful I’d have time to read a bit in my Bible and reply to some Good Morning Girls and even hammer out his blog post. What a reminder for me on Marriage Monday!!

So why do I put out the garbage? Why doesn’t he do it? I’ve always been able to get by on less sleep and I have no idea how. When I was a teenager, I’d happily sleep for 12 hours if I didn’t have work or school! Now my usual is 5 or 6 hours a night with the occasional 8 hour night. Maybe in a different season of life when my kids are older I will get more sleep, but for now in order to do what I want to do (which includes spending time at night with my honey), that’s the sleep I get, and I’m happy to have it.

And right on cue, this little wee one has woken up and wants to start her day! I will do my best to keep this feeling of thankfulness in my heart today. Thank you Good Morning Girls!

In this post, I’m participating in Completing Him Challenge and Marriage Mondays.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I lost my Grandmother in the last few weeks and stepped away from the blog for a bit. Though I wasn’t blogging, I was still participating in the marriage challenge. 🙂 My Granny loved my husband and always thought he ‘had a good head on his shoulders’, which is a phrase I hold dear because only my Granny, my parents and my husband ever say it and when they do, the person they’re talking about is always special. I’ll recap the weeks I missed here, and then thoughts on the whole process.

I last posted on week #5, which was priorities in marriage, and making sure mine are kept in line with his. The conversation was very helpful, and surprising that it was actually, because we routinely talk about every item on the list, I just always had them in a different order!

Week #6 was about following your husband’s lead and his vision for your family. Depending on how this is worded, the idea is received differently. The very concept of a wife following her husband’s lead simply because he is their husband is so foreign it even seems wrong to some people. I tend to think of it more like, I picked him as my husband 10 years ago because, among other reasons, he is a good leader and is a smart, level headed guy. I would not have married him if I didn’t think I could trust his judgment. While he’s figuring stuff out, he’ll bounce ideas off me, we talk about possible plans and I’m usually part of the brainstorming process, but to me it’s not the end of the world if I’m not. Very few times have I been hesitant to do something he’s planned to do, but since his decisions keep end up being sound, I haven’t had any reason to be!

The week 6 challenge suggested we talk with our husbands about their goals for the family in 1 year, 5 years and 10 years. We love talking about this stuff so we do it often. I already knew his vision for our family, and I am totally on board. <3

Week 7 was about respecting your husband, and asking what it is you do that makes him feel disrespected. Sometimes it really is little things that we do that can have the biggest impact. Think about the little things that bug you about your husband – do you think he even knows? My husband reaffirmed a few things I already knew, like eye rolling, information overload when he gets up, bugging him to hang out, and not keeping up with the house or going horribly off budget. He also mentioned a few things I didn’t think would be on the list, and I am thankful for the heads up.

I think it’s important to be mindful of the things I do that bother my husband, if for no other reason than to have a peaceful home. How much better is everyone’s day if I’m not part of whatever happens to contribute to a rough day for him? Plus really, he’s respectful to me, so why wouldn’t I be??

Our last week was my favourite as any regular reader would know. Week 8 was about sex, mainly focused on being open to having it as much as our husbands want it. In my marriage we have the opposite issue where I bug him for it more than I probably should. As I mentioned in my post on priorities, my husband says ‘there are more important things’ – it has been suggested that he feels this way because he knows I’m always into it so it’s not something he ever has to stress about. Having said all of that I know we still fit into the ‘often’ category, so it’s not like I’m horribly neglected. 😉 The overall goal of this challenge though was to get on your husband’s wave, either way. If you happen to be in my shoes instead of the more often written about ‘SAHM is exhausted and husband wants to get it on every night’ situation, it’s just as important that we lay off our husbands as it is the tired new mommies put out. You dig?

I really liked this challenge and I’m sort of bummed that it’s over. I’m going to take everything I’ve learned and be mindful to apply it to daily life – where it really matters. I would love to get in on more group challenges like this one. Even when I’m left shaking my head and not sure exactly how I’m supposed to handle the situation, I just love him like when I was 18, so I want to do the best I can. <3

I know it’s been more than a month since Canada Day, but I don’t want to ignore the amazing themed food I made for my usual suspects that weekend – prepare to be schooled. I made a dish from each of three provinces that I have a connection to. My father’s heritage is what I love to call ‘painfully Canadian’. It’s true that both his mother and his father’s families go back to Scotland and England, respectfully, but the first few generations back are from Saskatchewan and Quebec. My father is one of four siblings, three of them born in Ontario, plus my husband and his family are from Ontario as well. One of my oldest and dearest friends is from Northern Ontario and Miss Talea is from Saskatchewan as well and actually supplied the recipe I used! My grandfather’s entire family was from Montreal and the surrounding snobby French towns, so that’s my third!

Ontario obviously is at the top of the list, being the only province I’ve ever called home, and though my husband has lived in two other provinces, he was born in here and has spent the most time here. The farmers association in Ontario is called Foodland, and there is even a chain of grocery stores (only in small towns – mind you they’re in every small town) by the same name. There are way too many different fruits and veggies to pick a real ‘staple’ of Ontario foods, but we have an abundance of apples and cranberries, plus apples and cranberries are probably my favourite locally grown foods, so I went with Ontario Apple Cranberry Crumble Pie.

Ontario Apple Cranberry Crumble – from Foodland Ontario

Streusel Topping:
3/4 cup quick cooking oatmeal (not instant)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup coarsely chopped hazelnuts (optional)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

Filling:
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
6 medium Ontario Apples, peeled, cored and cut into 1/4-inch wedges
1 cup Ontario Cranberries

1. Preheat oven to 400° F (200° C). Thaw pie shell for 10 minutes. Set on a baking sheet to catch any drips while pie is baking. To prepare streusel, combine oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, nuts and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Add butter cut into cubes. Using fingers or a pastry cutter, cut butter into oatmeal mixture just until fine crumb consistency. Set aside.

2. In a small bowl, stir together sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and nutmeg. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine apples and cranberries until mixed. Stir in sugar mixture and coat fruit well. Spoon into pie shell. Sprinkle streusel topping evenly over top. Bake on lower shelf in centre of oven for 10 minutes. If topping begins to brown too quickly, cover loosely with a piece of foil. Reduce oven temperature to 350° F (180° C) and continue to bake until apples are tender, filling is hot and topping is a deep golden brown, about 50 minutes. Remove from oven and let stand at least 10 minutes before cutting into wedges.

So so so good. Foodland suggests serving it with vanilla ice cream. I served it with this Ice Salad from Saskatchewan.

I can’t possibly explain why a general rule of thumb in the prairies is that anything with more than three ingredients served cold is called a salad. It’s not a rule I’ve ever heard from anywhere else and it’s certainty met with raised eyebrows, so I have confirmation that it’s not just me that thinks this is weird. Also, the prairies have a thing for Jello. They love it in an unnatural, 1950s sort of way. My Saskatchewan dish combines the two in a family recipe from Talea for Ice Salad. The recipe she gave me was for this pineapple-orange version which I loved but not everyone else loves pineapple as much as me.

Saskatchewan Ice Salad – from Miss Talea

One 14 oz can of crushed pineapple
One 3 oz package of lemon jello powder
2 Cups of vanilla ice cream
Water

Drain juice from pineapple. Add enough water to juice to make one cup. Heat to boiling and add jello powder. Add ice cream and stir until melted. Add crushed pineapple. Refrigerate.

I modified the recipe a little and made these pink ones, a strawberry-raspberry version. I followed the same basic guideline and used vanilla ice cream, but I used raspberry jello instead of lemon and because I ditched the concept of fruit bits, I didn’t have the juice, so I used strawberry fruitopia. Yum!!

When thinking about food from Quebec, the very first thing most people think of is poutine. I’m just really not big on the whole cheese curds situation. Aside from poutine, the only other thing out of Quebec would be tourtiere. It’s a meat pie, traditionally made on Christmas Eve.

Quebec Tourtiere

Make your crust (mine is 3 cups flour, 3/4 cups butter and 5 tbsp water) and line it with thin slices of marble cheese. But not cheese slices, you dig? Then sauté your onions and garlic in a bit of butter and mix in and cook your ground beef. Mix in the corn and pour into your (cheese-lined, uncooked) pie crust.

Mix the egg with a bit of water to make an egg wash and brush over the top crust of the pie. Bake it at 350 for about 45 minutes, check on it about halfway and brush with the egg wash again.

I also served Tim Horton’s coffee of course!! Next year I want to make nanaimo bars (for British Columbia), maybe some beef stew (for Alberta) and some kind of seafood (for the Maritimes).

The first time I sat down to write this post, it opened with ‘my granny died 10 days ago’, and that was three weeks ago. I’m still not sure if I want to write about her just yet, but I do know that I want to write and I also know that I wont post anything else until I write about her because I can’t just ignore that she’s gone.

She was 87. 87! That is seriously old and she didn’t squander those years either. I don’t know if I can put it to words in a way that would do justice to her life, but I don’t want to cop out before I’ve started so I’m going to try. Just know that she was a force to be reckoned with.

Even her quick bio is a little awesome to me. She was born in 1923 – think about that for a minute! The town in Saskatchewan that she grew up in had a population of 600 – she even rode a horse to school and that horse’s name was…wait for it…Maude. If I was reading this blog and I didn’t know my family I might not believe that, but it’s true. Her mother died when she was a young girl and she moved with her sisters and brother to Winnipeg where she did most of the cooking and baking for the whole family. She joined the army at 18, was stationed in Montreal and eventually met my Grandfather as a result – he was also in the army and Montreal was his hometown.

After marrying my Grandfather, they had four children. My Uncle Bob was born in a hospital in Montreal in 1947, my father was born in a hospital in Toronto in 1949, and by 1952 my grandparents had moved to the middle of nowhere, on the northern tip of Lake Superior where my Granny gave birth to my Uncle Glenn in a cabin in the woods with no running water or electricity. A few years later they had moved back to Toronto and my Granny gave birth one more time, to my Aunt Wendy, at home in their apartment – so quietly that no one else in the building knew she had a baby!

Grandpa, Uncle Bob, Grandma and Daddy, 1950

She waitressesed her way through her 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, (with a brief break in her late 20s when they lived in nowhere land), and worked hard until she she retired. And even then, she was still up at dawn every single day. When my mother went back to work after I was born, she and my Grandpa not only took care of me and walked me back and forth to school but she taught me real life skills and lessons I may not otherwise know (I can make all the tricky stuff in the kitchen because of her). The very first pie she taught me to bake was Lemon Meringue, how convenient that would turn out to be one of my future husband’s favourite pies! We made a lot of bread, muffins and cakes and HEAPS and HEAPS of cookies. Man, she loved to bake cookies. To me pie represents what I think cookies must have represented to her – the ultimate domestic staple. I’ll even add bread to that catagory, if my house smells like either it just feels so right.

When my aunt and uncle bought a neighbourhood restaurant, she baked all the pies, tarts, muffins and other treats from scratch. Every inch the typical Granny in this way, she’d always go to bed by 10, when everyone else was still having fun and get up while it was still dark to do her baking before the rest of the house even woke up!

There are so many things about her that I aim to emulate, she hosted Sunday supper every weekend without fail from 1975 till the weekend before she passed (though to be fair, my aunt did all the actual work in the last few years because my Granny couldn’t). What a wonderful legacy! There are 35 years of weekly memories created because she wanted to be sure we all stayed connected to each other. It worked. We have always been, for better or worse, one of the tightest families I’ve ever met.

Grandma and Baby May, 1980

Rando facts that I find endearing:
-she loooooved Glenn Miller (so much that she and my Grandpa named one of my uncles after him) and Christmas music (year round)
-she hated wee one #3’s name when we picked it before she was born, and then she kept forgetting it after (but never forgot the names of the other two wee ones)
-from the time I was wee until I got married, we would go to Fabricland together and pick out patterns for dresses or skirts and heaps and heaps of placemats and napkins, I loved it
-she always buttered both crackers and bread before putting peanut butter on and when asked would always say ‘you can’t just put peanut butter directly onto the bread/dry cracker‘, and give a stink eye like you had 10 heads
-when I was a teenager, she’d send me to the store with way too much money and let me keep the change

I thought this would be easier but tears are trying to break through and it’s biting. I am so thankful for the time I had with her, but I am also so bummed with myself that I had even more opportunity to hang out with her that I didn’t take. It’s easy to say that I have a busy life, but it’s not right to use that as an excuse.

Grandma and 4 Year-Old May, 1984.

My eldest uncle passed this March, which I have no doubt had a serious effect on my Granny’s health, and I felt the same way after his funeral. So I’ve been proactive about it I think. I make sure I check in with my folks everyday and my aunts and uncles hear from me weekly. More importantly, I go hang out and insist they visit us as well. It’s important that I stay in touch, of course, but it’s just as important that my kids nurture the bonds they have with every member of our family. For that, naturally, we need face time. <3

Yes, this happened two weeks ago, but it was a great day and the treats were really fun to make and turned out exactly as I had hoped. There are other fun creative domestic adventures that have happened even before the last day of school, but I really wanted to share these photos first.

I plunked down with the wee ones and the laptop and they picked what they wanted to bring to their last day of school parties. Wee one #1 picked Barerella’s Oreo Truffles and Wee One #2 picked Bakerella’s Candy Apple Pops. I love that they both picked from the same site, even with all their other options!

Oreo Truffles – from Bakerella.com

1 package Oreo cookies (divided, but use the creamy filling too)
1 8oz. package softened cream cheese
white chocolate (or whatever you like)
Oreo crumbs (optional)

1. Crush about 7 cookies and keep them for topping the truffles, or use a box of Oreo crumbs.

2. Crush the rest of the cookies and mash the cookies and cream cheese together. Bakerella suggested using the back of a spoon for the mashing, and it was a great help – so use the back of a spoon!

3. Roll the mix into 1″ balls and line up on wax paper covered cookie sheets.

4. Pop them in the fridge as you melt the chocolate to make it a little easier on yourself. Coat in chocolate, sprinkle some of the crushed cookies crumbs on top and transfer back to wax paper. Sprinkle with the cookie crumbs and let them dry. Pop them back in the fridge for a few to set up – don’t eat them yet!!

The recipe used white chocolate, and the look that gives is way more visually appealing than milk chocolate. It just looks more Oreoy, you know? However, wee one #1 and his friends are not fond of white chocolate, and they were the ones eating them, so milk chocolate it was.

Once the chocolate has set up and hardened in the fridge, they are amazing. They’re amazing even before they go in the fridge, but if you wait till they’ve been in the fridge for a few hours, they have a perfect little crackle when you bite into the hardened chocolate. Mmmm.

Apparently, these went very fast at his school party and all of his friends asked him to bring them to school parties next year! A few of them even asked

Candy Apple Pops – from Bakerella.com

1 batch of cake pops
Red candy melts
Pretzel sticks
Green candies (I used green apple licorice)

My husband does all of the grocery shopping and errand running around here – which I am eternally grateful for – and this list was no exception. He knows that school treats are a big deal around here and rightly assumed that meant that last day of school treats would be a very big deal. He must have called me 10 times during that shopping trip with thoughtful questions!

Regular pretzels or pretzel sticks?
Is a pound of candy melts enough?
What kind of green candy? I’ll get green apple flavour for the apples!
Do you need packaging for them?
Can I eat one?

So first, make your cake pops. Either while the cake is baking or cooling, gather your leaves and stems. I cut up the green licorice leaves and I broke up the pretzel sticks. Set up a little assembly line to make putting them together go faster and smoother.

Once they’ve chilled and are ready to be coated in chocolate, melt down the red candy melts. I prefer the double boiler method, but you can just as easily use the microwave if you’d rather that or don’t have a double boiler. I always dip my cake pop stick in the melted chocolate/candy first so it sticks to the inside of the pop better. Then I use a soup spoon to coat it evenly and set it on it’s head to dry. In retrospect, I should have let them dry standing, in the contraption I fashioned to assemble them (I poked holes in a small cake board and balanced it over two tall glasses).

Poke the pretzel stem into the top of the apple pop, if you’ve let them dry first just dip the bottom of the pretzel in a little melted candy and poke it in. Same goes for the green candy leaves. They go from being a red cake pop to an apple cake pop in no time!

These were a serious hit at school, all of the kids loved them and almost all of the parents who saw them commented on them. They were very, very fun to make. My husband came into the kitchen and helped out with assembling them all and it was hilarious. He is very detail oriented and wanted to place each leaf just so.

After school, we had a little ‘Yay Summer’ picnic on the porch and this is one of the wee treats I made for them. We had so many pretzel sticks left over, and I always have about a ton of chocolate in the pantry, so I made some chocolate covered pretzel sticks. I also saved some Oreo Truffles and Candy Apple Pops for them to share with the kids on our street. I’ve got big plans for a Yay Summer party next year now!

If you’re not obsessed with Lost, this post can still be useful – I made the Classic Snowball Cake, which is something I think all domestic goddesses should know how to make. 😉 I have been hooked on Lost for a couple of years, I started watching all the episodes in order after the show had already been on the air for 3 or 4 seasons. Being able to watch so much of the show at once, it was pretty easy to develop an unhealthy obsession. I owed my friend Romi a birthday fete and she’s just as crazy for Lost as I am (and arguably more die hard, as she’s been loyal since ep 1, season 1), so I ran with it and her 2*th birthday was all about Lost. 😀

The Dharma labels are all courtesy of Max Pictures, who clearly also has a serious love for the show. Dharma chocolate bars were necessary, as Miss Romi loves chocolate. She’s also fond of red wine, so we needed to Dharamize that as well. We all had personalized boarding passes from Oceanic flight 815, except ours were all leaving Sydney and arriving in Toronto – don’t worry, we know the level of geeky we’ve risen to. What’s with the Dharma evaporated milk? Well, I am a baker you know, I always have to have this sort of thing on hand…

Instead of talking about the cake first, I’m going to go on about the icing, because the construction of the cake itself will likely steal the show. It’s one of those very simple, but very good (good in this instance refers to deliciousness, not good as in ‘good for you’, just to be clear) quick recipe from Kraft. It is just five horribly indulgent ingredients and takes maybe five minutes to pull together.

The cake itself is actually a plain chocolate cake, the recipe used a devil’s food cake mix but you can use your favourite chocolate cake recipe of course! For the snowball effect, the cake is made in an oven safe glass bowl.

Essentially, you whip up a chocolate cake and pour the batter into an oven safe bowl. Mix the cream cheese, egg and sugar, and put that on top of the cake batter. It’ll sink a bit as it bakes. Mine was still visible after it baked, so next time I will knock it down a bit. My concern was that knocking the bowl would make it sink too far but that doesn’t seem likely now.

The video was helpful when putting this cake together, the only thing I didn’t do the same was sprinkle coconut on top because my sister hates coconut with the burning passion of 1000 suns, and naturally she was on the guest list. The candles are sparkly and have wee stars on them, because grown ups or not, birthdays are for being a little silly. Which is also why there are mini M&Ms on top!

The texture of this cake was amazing, I used my usual chocolate cake which is already pretty fantastic, but made so much better with this cream cheesy center! It’s not overpowering and just sweet enough. It’s two years in a row that I’ve made a cake with both vanilla and chocolate in it. We call it our ‘racial harmony’ cakes. 😉

I also made Salsa Roll Ups, another quickie from Kraft. I end up with a very long ‘must try’ list after trolling that site for too long. I also made turkey-chicken meat balls, but I’ll save that recipe (courtesy of my Dad) for another post.

Mix the cream cheese with the salsa and spread onto the tortillas, then sprinkle on shredded cheese. Roll up the tortilla tightly.

Cut the logs into whatever length works for you, you may have to use toothpicks to keep the rolls secure.

So happy 2*th birthday, Romi!! I’m already plotting next year’s cake (and theme, hmmm). <3

In the spirit of new blog friends, and good friends starting new blogs, I’m posting a rando ’50 Things’ list of stuff about me that isn’t too obvious. Consider it the intro I never wrote. I’d love to read your 50 things!

1. I got married when I was 19 and my husband was 21, and we just celebrated 10 years of marriage!

2. Our first child took us by surprise, it took four years of trying to have our second, and we patiently waited for our third (who arrived 3 years later).

3. I am a very good long distance friend. So many dear friends have left our amazing city for adventures in other countries and then settled there. I’ve also made some wonderful friends online over the years that are scattered all over the place.

4. My husband is a hard core computer geek and he works from home 100% of the time. I shudder to admit how many computers we have in the house – all actually doing something I swear.

5. I go to a big Sunday dinner at my 87 year old Grandmother’s house every Sunday where I get to see my parents, my sister, my aunt and my uncle.

6. Every weekend I host a knitting/board game night with my girlfriends and my sister, there are 5 ‘regulars’ and another 10 or so that are in and out from one week to the next.

7. I was born on University Avenue and am an unapologetic Toronto snob.

8. I am still very close with the two first friends I ever made in kindergarten.

9. I am firmly planted in 1996. Soundgarden is still my favourite band, Party of Five never gets old and I still say ‘duh’ and ‘rad’ like they never went out. However, I do not wear plaid flannel shirts or babydoll dresses with no stockings and mary janes like I did in 1996 – there are limits.

10. When I was 24, I was freaked out about turning 30. Now, I’m 29 and totally fine with it.

11. I am way more religious than I ever let on. Partly because it’s really none of your business and partly because I can’t help but feel people will look at me differently, even though I’m still just me.

12. I am still totally head over heels for my husband, and we are so into each other life is still spicy! Yes really.

13. I got hooked on fitness and nutrition after my third wee one was born. I work out 6 days a week and allow myself one cheater meal a week (but not on my off day lol).

14. I am the opposite of a helicopter parent. I really think it’s important for kids to do kid things like playing in the dirt and sneezing on each other and making messes and splashing in the tub (with the curtain or shower doors closed!)

15. I have 9 tattoos (both shoulders, back of my neck, side of my neck, right breast (scandal), right leg, left big toe and both wrists). Somehow, I don’t look like a biker. 😉

16. I am a 50s housewife to the bone. I own a closet full of cute dresses and only 2 pairs of pants. I cook almost all meals from scratch, handle the kids on my own, keep the house impossibly tidy and fetch my husband coffee. Sometimes with pearls on!

17. Ever since I got pregnant with my first wee one, I’ve been reading books on parenting and I have learned so much. I also read heaps of classic fiction and my friend Romi has got me into new fiction – which I also love.

18. I learned to knit 6 years ago and I loooove it. I feel like I hardly knit anymore, but I still do. My preferred thing to knit is socks and small creatures. I taught a bunch of my girlfriends how to knit a few years ago and now one of them knits way more than I do.

19. I’ve been off and on with blogging a lot, but lately I’m so in love with it I can’t picture stepping away again. I think I just needed to find my groove.

20. I got hit with awful postpartum anxiety and it lasted a year. I am terrified of it happening again, so no more wee ones. Otherwise? I’d have two (hundred) more. I recently feel like I’m coming to be ok with this and really, if I had a fourth would I have a fifth? Where is the line? I live in a major city!

21. I call my Dad at least once a day, sometimes more. He gives good advice, has great recipe ideas and is really good at listening. I refuse to believe that one day he wont be there, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

22. I am more addicted to my BlackBerry than I care to admit. But it tends to keep me off my actual computer during the day.

23. I aspire to be an amazing gardener, but I’m not very good and mostly just resent my flower beds for allowing weeds to sprout. I’ve also been known to say ‘I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself’ (yes, I stole that from a tshirt).

24. I won a beauty pageant when I was 8. My mother was terrified of pageant moms and didn’t encourage me to go to to the next level – which I am so thankful for!

25. I quit smoking over 2 years ago!

26. I have dyed my hair every colour possible in the last 14 years. Currently, it is black with blonde chunks. Yes, I am ‘that’ girl. I even sometimes rock the guido poof!

27. When people say ‘and Becky was all like, OMG, I know!’, they’re talking about me.

28. I have broken my right ankle 5 times, all my fingers and toes at least once, and my left arm once.

29. I took pre-law in university and honestly thought I’d be able to put my kids in child care and go off to law school and be a lawyer. Maybe when they’re all grown.

30. I’ve given birth three times. First and third were natural, second time I had an epi and later wished I hadn’t.

31. My husband and I have a monthly date night, even though we hang out every night.

32. My three favourite magazines are Martha Stewart Living, Cosmo and Today’s Parent. Which is actually a pretty good layout of my life. 😉

33. I caught chicken pox from my sister when I was 14. It sucked.

34. I love really, really bad television. Like Bromance and Paris Hilton’s new BFF. I know it’s awful but I can’t help it.

35. I could play Mario Kart everyday and I played an 8 hour game of Mario Party last year.

36. My husband and I are huge on movies and watch at least a few every week.

37. I have a serious crush on Anderson Cooper.

38. I once dropped a butcher knife in the top of my right foot and I had to *pull it out*. Yuck.

39. I used to hate cars and never wanted to learn to drive or buy one. Then my husband got his license and a car last year and now we go on road trips all the time and I loooove having a car.

40. It is eerie how quickly and easily I adapt to new situations and circumstances.

41. Our favourite date night activity is going to the drive in <3 42. I wear makeup every day, even if I stay home all day. 43. I used to drink 3 + cans of pop a day. This year, I quit! 44. I have alarmingly ugly 70s tile in my kitchen and I embrace it. My dear friend Brigitte made me an apron from matching fabric. Bless! 45. I keep a 'quote book' file on my BlackBerry to record all the hilarity that goes on with my girlfriends, my husband and our kids. The funniest quote is too graphic to even put here! 46. My bestie, aka my girl soul mate, aka Talea moved 5 hours away almost 5 months ago and we both feel like we lost a limb. We text and Facebook message each other like we’re 17.

47. I really love red wine. I didn’t at all until a few years ago when the above-mentioned Talea got me hooked. Now, it’s all I drink, aside from theme drinks for parties, of course. Thanks for turning me into a wino!

48. I’m awesome at Monopoly and suck serious ass at charades.

49. I have drank my coffee black since I was 14.

50. Technically, I was a teen mom. My oldest was 3 months old when I turned 20.

When I was a kid, I wouldn’t eat anything green – unless it was some form of candy or ice cream. This horrified my then strictly vegan father, a hippie powerhouse of health, which very likely amused my mother, who was a Kraft Dinner loving, late night ice cream eating kinda gal (I say ‘was’ because she had a heart attack 5 years ago and now eats like my dad). He was huge on smoothies, but not just the delicious fruity ones, he’d also do the veggie shakes – who does that?! He made his own breads and chocolate cakes and cookies and all kinds of amazing treats as well as wonderful stir fry’s, casserole-type dishes, and soups. I’d eat some of the treats, but mostly I’d turn my nose up at them and eat some disgusting sugary and/or marshmallowly concoction. I didn’t know it then, but most of these creations were hiding a veggie or two. I do it too now, some recipes are from him, some I’ve found online or in cookbooks and others still are from my friends. Gill makes the most amazing black bean brownies, Jessica Seinfield has a chocolate chip cookie recipe with chick peas – it works!

Now? I’m on the phone with him constantly asking for ideas and tricks for substituting healthy options for the more horrible ingredients in my favorite recipes. The easiest change to make was using mashed bananas or applesauce instead of oil in cakes and muffins. Mashed bananas work best with chocolate or oatmeal items and applesauce is a good pick for pretty much everything else because you can’t taste it as much. Usually people don’t notice there is applesauce in it unless I say something, or people comment that it’s moist. Sometimes, if the main taste of the cake is a fruit anyway, I’ll just add more of it’s liquid in place of the oil called for, like in the chocolate-cherry cake I made for our Miss America party (I swear, I will post about this little gathering soon).

My favourite combo is chocolate and banana, there’s just something about it that tastes ‘right’, you know? Here is the recipe I use the most – this was the decoy cake I made for our dear friend Andrew’s 29th last year. It was the decoy for a hilarious cake Gill had done for him at Dairy Queen, where they used an image of Burt Reynolds body on a bear skin rug – with Andrew’s head! Anyhoo….

Other more obvious tips were to use low fat or no fat vanilla soy milk instead of 2% milk, whole wheat flour over white flour in pretty much every recipe (I drew the line at pie crust for lemon meringue, it just wasn’t right), and to use parchment paper or a non stick pan instead of greasing. That’s all fine and the flavour of most of my regulars haven’t changed much.

There have been a few silly attempts at making fundamentally unhealthy food healthy. Like when I tried to make onion rings with crushed Fibre 1 cereal as the coating. Not only was that a bad idea (I guess it wasn’t *that* bad, but it wasn’t exactly a substitute for the taste, or even the texture, of an actual onion ring. The real secret to making decent-for-you onion rings is in the oil! Using french fries as a classic example here, if you fried them in vegetable oil (as most people do), you’re looking at a top temperature of about 300 degrees. The issue with that is most foods (yes potatoes included) don’t have a low insta-cook temp, so they have to sit around in the vegetable oil for a few minutes to cook and while they do that, they of course soak up awful amounts of oil that no amount of paper towel patting will remove. Now, enter higher temperature oils, like canola, saffron and sunflower. These oils have temperature ranges much higher, closer to about 450+, which is perfect for your fries and little shrimp pops and yes, even your deep fried chocolate bars (even I think that’s gross and I looooove Snickers muffins). Most foods will cook within about 30 seconds in oil that’s 450 or 500 degrees. I’m not saying that your canola oil onion rings are going to be totally free from any oil at all, but I am saying that the amount absorbed is negligible and that’s before you’re patted them down with a paper towel! Sidebar, don’t mess around with weird and likely dangerous ways to guess your oil’s temperature. Just use a candy thermometer and know for sure! Second sidebar, make sure you’ve got a fire extinguisher when you’re cooking with oil. I know we’ve all used oil hundreds of times with no issue, but a grease fire is unpredictably dangerous and not something to mess around with at all. Also, from experience, keep the fire extinguisher just outside of the range of fire from the stove and not right beside it. ‘Quick, jump through the flames to get to the fire extinguisher!’

I’m still not especially fond of most green foods, but I know better and actually eat them now.

In my efforts to be healthier in general and make better snack choices, I have been skipping cake days occasionally and the domestic goddess in me is outraged. But the slimmer and overall healthier-feeling goddess emerging is totally cool with it. I’m sure there will be enough potlucks and school fetes by year’s end to have at least 52 different cakes or cupcakes. As of tomorrow, we’re at week 24 and cake #24! I’ve also been having too much fun to blog lately so I’m behind with my posts, but I have a lot of photo-heavy posts coming up as a result.

Unlike my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Cake, these little gems are straight up cocoa cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. The Cocoa Cake recipe came from Now…you’re cooking, and it was super simple and good!

Cake #21 – Cocoa Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Mini Cupcakes

You know the drill, beat the butter, sugar and eggs till ‘light and fluffy’, then in a separate bowl mix flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Mix water and vanilla, add. Gradually whisk the flour mixture into the egg mixture and you’re ready to pour.

This recipe will make an 8″ cake, 12 generous cupcakes or 24 mini cupcakes. Bake any of these at 350, 30 minutes for a cake, just slightly less for the cupcakes and 15 or so for the mini cupcakes. Check early and often! I used my silver tin mini liners for the first time and I am madly in love with them.

For the peanut butter frosting, cream the butter and the peanut butter together, gradually add the sugar and once it’s thick add the milk, a little at a time till you’ve reached the consistency you’re after. Voila! I had ‘just a taste’ of this frosting and wanted to mainline my icing bag. It is pretty sweet though, so a little dollop on these minis is slightly more than enough.

Overall, these wee creations were a hit except my sister pointed out, and then didn’t want to let me live down, how wasteful the liners are. Especially since we ate them here, it’s not like they had to be transported anywhere. I think in the future, I’ll save all liners for bake sales, school fetes and gifts.

There is so much going on this summer in the way of theme parties and road trips and baking with friends and so many fun things to blog about. I am most looking forward to the Barbie party (the idea for this was based on a shockingly pink nail polish) where we all dress as different kinds of Barbies like say Homeless Barbie or Soccer Mom Barbie. Right?! There will also be a Bind girl night, where all drinks are ‘shaken, not stirred’ and a ghetto/club dress night. That one needs to happen this summer because my friends can’t be getting on the streetcar in micro minis in November.

Here’s hoping there will be enough time between each adventure to stop and write about them.