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.

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!

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.

As I sit here, listening to The Andrew Sisters (yes, really) and planning out the menu this week, I’m already thinking of the banana bread I’m going to make this afternoon. The rant about it is after this week’s menu plan and no, I didn’t post the recipe. I swear the book is worth the mere $10 for the eBook. This week, for whatever reason I’m not sure, I’m feeling especially like a domestic goddess. Maybe my weekend soap making adventures with my friends working out pumped me up? Maybe it was reinstating Sunday dinner that did it? I’m not sure, but I want to scrub the patio and wash the windows and cook and bake everyone’s favorite everything! This week’s menu is a little of everyone’s favorite everything.

This Week’s Menu!

Sunday – Lasagna with Homemade Rolls and Blueberry Pie for dessert

In her book, Peas and Thank You, Sarah Matheny boasts that this recipe will make you actually want to make banana bread – that it will no longer be a necessary way to deal with spotted bananas on the counter. I read that and thought, dude, it’s banana bread, we all like it but no one makes it on purpose. Well, it’s true. I now purposely put some bananas in a paper bag (speeds up ripening) the same day I bring them home from the grocery store. I love this banana bread and so does everyone I’ve served it to!

So, you know how I feel about children in the kitchen. I strongly encourage it and I really think they can learn so much. Obviously, they learn about cooking or baking and they might learn a bit about the dish they’re making, but they also learn a lot about fractions when we double of halve a recipe and they learn a little baking chemistry as well! One day, I’ll gift wrap brand new copies of The Cake Bible and The Pie and Pastry Bible for them to learn all kinds of crazy kitchen chemistry. In the meantime, I’ll assault them with information as we bake. I’ve also noticed that random questions about life pop up when we’re all relaxed and enjoying each other’s company in the kitchen – and that’s always a good thing.

All of the kids love to be in the kitchen. Wee One #2 likes big bakes mostly, like cakes and pies and breads. Wee One #1 likes to cook more than he likes to bake. Wee One #3 though, she shares my affinity for small, quick batch baking. Cookies, cupcakes, muffins, and the like. ‘Teatime Treats’ is usually the chapter of baking books she gravitates towards. When I announced that I wanted to bake up some cookies, she was my first volunteer and this video is the result.

I have tried other chocolate chip cookie recipes, but my Granny’s is just always, always better!

This is her recipe:

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large egg
1 cup chocolate chips

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes!

This week, I’m linking up with The Organizing Junkie and The How To Mommy for Menu Monday!

Happy Monday!!

Monday has become a day of celebration around here because we try to only hit up the pool in our complex when we know it’ll be empty. We’ve been here for a little over two months, go almost everyday and we’ve only ever seen other people there four times! During the week, we go during our lunch break from home schooling and unless we go around dinner time, we don’t go to the pool on the weekends. Most weekends are filled with Daddy time and having fun with our awesome new friends (thanks for taking us thrifting and hosting a kiddie bbq!) so we are all generally too wiped out for the pool anyway. We didn’t go anywhere near the pool (or the ocean) this weekend, so when we take our mid-day break (somewhere between math and reading) we’ll break in our new pool toys!

After two weeks in a row of out of town visitors (we miss Brigitte, Hal, Lindsay and her mom already!), we are visitorless this week and we will likely be catching up with each other – which means we’ll cook together a lot and go for walks and probably stay up late making paper dolls and playing video games. 🙂

Menu Monday is one of my favorite bloggy days because I love to see the week in food laid out in front of me, even if I totally abandon it for whatever Martha is raving about in this month’s magazine (I can’t be the only one that feels compelled to make some ridic creation rightnow). This blueberry swirl coffee cake is not only amazing any day of the week, my 6 year old makes it pretty much by herself! She’s a pint size domestic goddess, but I swear it’s not hard. Recipe after this week’s menu!

This Week’s Menu (June 11 – 17)

Sunday – Roasted Chicken with Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes and Corn (& gravy oooof course) for the fam, probably more Veggie Potstickers with Pilaf for me and Chocolate Buttermilk Cake for dessert

I have been eating these vegetarian pot stickers I’m totally hooked on and I’d eat them everyday if I ever made enough so my menu this week is a little pathetic. Also, notice that Mondays have become Spaghetti and Meatball day and Fridays have become homemade pizza and/or calzone day. The kids make their own and are incredibly happy to eat what they made!

Blueberry Swirl Coffee Cake – adapted from Betty Crocker’s Best Christmas Cookbook

Set oven to 350F, and grease a jelly roll pan (or use your trusty 9×13 pan). Beat sugar, butter, shortening, baking powder, vanilla, almond extract and eggs with an electric mixer (or a whole lot of elbow grease) till smooth and then stir in the flour – make sure you scrape down the sides of the bowl!
Spread two-thirds of the mixture in the bottom of the pan. Spread the pie filling over it. Then dollop the rest of the mixture over the pie filling by tablespoonfuls. Bake for about 45 minutes! Mix the icing sugar and milk to make a quick and yummy glaze to drizzle over top of the coffee cake while it’s still warm.

This is what you make when you want to usher something out of the kitchen that is as hilarious and exciting to serve as it is to eat. Cutting and serving this cake was no joke but since everyone that ate it fell in love with it, I’m filing it as a win. It’s the prefect cake for someone who loves candy and of course works especially well for someone who has a house full of people who also love candy!

Scroll down for pics of the cutting and serving!!

Chocolate Kit Kat Skittles Cake – via The Kitchen Magpie

First, preheat your oven to 300 and melt the chopped chocolate in the hot coffee. Just pour the coffee over the chocolate, and in a separate bowl whisk together sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
Theeeeeeen in a smaller bowl (though you’ll probably want to use a bigger bowl than the one I did…), whip the eggs till they’re thick and then combine them with the oil, buttermilk and vanilla. Once that’s mixed well, add it and the melted chocolate to the dry ingredients.
The batter was runnier than I had expected, but just roll with it – it’s perfect! I poured it into 3 greased 9″ cake pans and baked for almost an hour.
Then I made the frosting and dyed it blue – use your favorite frosting recipe, or even *shudder* a can if you must. I used a little between each later, mostly just as glue and for the same reason I slathered it all over the outside so the Kit Kats would stick.
Line up the Kit Kats around the side of the cake and use the ribbon to pull them tight to the cake, but don’t pull so hard you break them! Make a cute bow at the front and voila! Super cute! Then I covered the top with more frosting and dumped two big bags of Skittles on top!
The cake looked so not like a cake that someone stuck their hand in it, thinking it was an elaborate bowl of candy!
The blog I first saw this on made no mention of the hilarity that ensues when the cake is eventually cut. The platter I put it on is made of pretty light plastic, so as the Skittles fell from the top of each piece to the platter they made the same plinking noise as the Skittles that hit the floor in the commercials! So so funny. It was messy, but thankfully the hosts are lighthearted and it was all good.
So obviously this cake looked amazing, but how did it taste? Well, I made this for our new friend Steve’s birthday. I didn’t know anyone at the party other than him and his (amazing & delightful) girlfriend Vanessa. When each guest left and said their goodbyes it went like this ‘Thanks for the invite Vanessa we had fun, happy birthday Steve have a great night, I loved the cake May!’ So ridic, I love it. Someone even loved it enough to draw it’s likeness in chalk on the brick wall in the backyard.

They don’t look like fishies, but they taste pretty bang on!! I was going to follow the little homemade goldfish cookie cutter tutorial on the post with the recipe, but I just moved about a million miles and don’t have kitchen scissors yet! I know, I know, it’s total insanity. It really is, I’m forever saying ‘why didn’t I bring that?!?.

The recipe itself is very simple and as long as you have a food processor you’re totally set. You have to pop the dough in the fridge for a while so it’s easier to work with, and then of course you’re rolling it out and cutting it, but it’s absolutely worth it. Any time you make a snack from scratch yourself it’s worth it because you know what’s in it!

Homemade ‘Goldfish’ Crackers – via Miss Anthropist’s Kitchen

1 cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoon cold unsalted butter
8 ounces grated cheddar cheese
3/4 teaspoons salt
1/8 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon fresh-ground pepper
1 teaspoon baking powder

So simple – first process the flour,onion powder, salt, pepper, and baking powder. Then add the butter and cheese.
It’ll look doughy and hold together. Now wrap it and chill it for a while.
Flour your surface and roll it out! Cut whatever shapes you want, just make them small and mostly uniform so they bake the same.
Yes, I used a water bottle lid. Ahem. 10 minutes at 350 did the trick for me! So good!