{"id":611,"date":"2009-05-21T15:38:15","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T20:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/?p=611"},"modified":"2010-05-10T20:53:26","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T01:53:26","slug":"pies-tarts-cake-balls-and-chocolate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/21\/pies-tarts-cake-balls-and-chocolate\/","title":{"rendered":"Pies, Tarts, Cake Balls and Chocolate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not necessarily in the order of the post title, but it&#8217;s been a seriously busy month! Knitting is not progressing fast enough to note, but the kitchen&#8230;oh the kitchen is buzzing!<\/p>\n<p>My last post was just before Easter, and that weekend at the Stitch n Bitch, I made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cutoutandkeep.net\/projects\/chocolate_nests\">Chocolate Nests<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kraftfoods.com\/kf\/recipes\/chocolate-mint-grasshopper-pie-109578.aspx\">Chocolate Mint Grasshopper Pie<\/a>. The following week I made Strawberry Vanilla Pie, followed by Strawberry Mango Tarts, Banana Cream Pie and then last night Pineapple Pie. My Stitch n Bitch ladies (and Andrew) helped make about 200 <a href=\"http:\/\/bakerella.blogspot.com\/2007\/12\/red-velvet-cake-balls.html\">Cake Balls<\/a> for wee one #3&#8217;s baptism on the long weekend.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/chocolate-easter-nests3.jpg\">&nbsp;<img src=\"\/images\/chocolate-easter-nests2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The chocolate nests were really, really painfully cute. The kids loved them, but so did everyone else. They tasted much better than I figured Shredded Wheat and honey would taste, even with chocolate. I pressed the mixture into a silicone mini tart tray and let it set in the fridge, of course I had to use Cadbury mini eggs in them!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/chocolate-easter-nests.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Grasshopper Pie &#8230; This crust is Oreo cookie crumbs and melted Becel, next time I&#8217;ll try adding coconut to it. I didn&#8217;t make it exactly as the recipe, I didn&#8217;t use the Mint Oreos (instead used regular Oreos and a bit of mint extract), and I used vanilla pudding with green food colouring instead of pistachio.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/chocolate-mint-grasshopper-pie.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>I started making my own vanilla custard in March for fruit topped pies, and I&#8217;ve pretty much got it down now as I sometimes make it for the kids as well. But when I made this pie, I burnt two batches before I finally cooked one properly. Bad custard mojo? The last batch turned out perfect. Since I&#8217;m doing a <em>different<\/em> pie every week, I couldn&#8217;t just make this a repeat of Daphne&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/03\/16\/welcome-to-the-world-belated-birthdays\/\">Welcome to the World Pie<\/a>, so I used graham cracker crust instead of Oreo cookie crust. Gill has a strange love of winding yarn, which naturally makes us knitters very happy. Here she&#8217;s wound the second ball of my snazzy Greek cotton for my mother in law&#8217;s socks!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/strawberry-vanilla-pie.jpg\">&nbsp;<img src=\"\/images\/yarn-winder.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>I had been making a lot of these crumb + melted Becel crusts lately because they&#8217;re soooo good and so easy to make. But in the spirit of mixing it up and getting creative I had planned to make a mango pie. Of the mangos I had on hand, 4 were not ripe enough leaving me with only 1. I did however have strawberries that I just added in place of the rest of the mango pieces and made a tray of Strawberry Mango Tarts. Delish! This was the same evening that we made up the kofeta for the baptism, but I&#8217;ll save those pics for the baptism post. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/mangos.jpg\">&nbsp;<img src=\"\/images\/cubed-mango.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Banana Cream Pie has been on the list since I started making a pie a week, but I hadn&#8217;t gotten around to it till now. I used a graham cracker crust and banana custard with a layer of sliced bananas between! This was for sure one of my hands down faves so far!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/banana-cream-pie.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>I settled on a Pineapple Pie this week because I had never made or even tasted one and came across a recipe for it on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allrecipes.com\">All Recipes<\/a>. It was good, really dense but it wasn&#8217;t heavy when we ate it. Emerald free handed a pineapple cutout!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/pineapple-pie2.jpg\">&nbsp;<img src=\"\/images\/pineapple-pie.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Now, on to the really fun stuff. When I made Cake Balls for my friend Lindsay&#8217;s birthday last month, all of us loved them enough to marry them. Really, they&#8217;re so amazingly good. So of course I wanted to make some for wee one #3&#8217;s baptism on the long weekend. We ended up making even more because several of these were eaten as the night wore on.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"\/images\/cake-ball-creation.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Next post will bring everything back up to date with a full post on all the crafty (and tasty) creations we made! My ladies are good at this stuff!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not necessarily in the order of the post title, but it&#8217;s been a seriously busy month! Knitting is not progressing fast enough to note, but the kitchen&#8230;oh the kitchen is buzzing! My last post was just before Easter, and that weekend at the Stitch n Bitch, I made Chocolate Nests and Chocolate Mint Grasshopper Pie. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[167],"tags":[222,86,218,217,219,223,220,221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1537,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions\/1537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soverydomestic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}