So I am taking a break. Not a long one, but a break. I realized today that when I had read about my fiftieth cheesecake post that I never wanted to see a cheesecake again that something was wrong. I love cheesecake. I just am burned out. I mean I only posted once last week. That normally makes me panic. Instead I just shrugged my shoulders. Not a good sign.
So before I quit blogging all together I think I will take a little time off (knowing me, probably just a week). That includes coming around to your blog. My Google Reader burst through the seams everyday with over 300 posts it seems and I just can’t find the time to read, let alone respond.
I’ll be back, with this Turtle Brownie Mousse Bite recipe one of these days.
All the best,
Peabody

My very first teaching job, I had a principal who liked me. Really, really liked me. Even though I was a first year teacher she would often send visitors into my classroom, to “represent” our school.
My kids had been working on a research project and one of my super nerdy kids (J)was doing Mount Kilimanjaro. This was long before the days of the Internet were available to the kids and they were forced to use things like books (gasp) and magazine (the horror) to research their topic. At the time of the project I was a subscriber and avid reader of Outside magazine. I was dating a very outdoorsy kind of guy at the time. If you have never read it before, it is actually quite interesting, but every now and then, in the back they have what one might call a quirky tidbits and quips. But I thought nothing about it. I gave a copy of the magazine to J since it had a spread on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Again, thought nothing of it.
When the guest from New Zealand came through I was reading a story about a family of owls. This was 6th grade, so we still had story time from time to time. The kids were raising their hands and participating nicely. Everything was going great. That way until J raised his hand.
Let me be the first to say that in no way was this kid trying to be a smart ass. He was one of those kids like in Jerry Maguire who went around telling you how much the human head weighs, it was just his thing. So when he raised his hand, I just thought to myself, yay, the smart kid is chiming in. I called on him and out of his mouth he said, “did you know owls don’t have penises?” At first I was like WTF? But then I remember the little write up that was in Outside magazine about that. In total amazement I did not panic. Or sure, I panicked on the inside. Big. Time. But on the surface I just rolled with it.
“Most birds don’t” was all I said, and I moved on from there. And that was the end of that. The rest of the classes eyes got about as big as an owls, as well as the visitors in the back, but J was more than satisfied with my answer. We even later (with permission from his parents) researched why that was, and what did they have if they didn’t have penises? You will have to look that up, this is a semi-family blog.
The visitors were impressed to say the least that I just rolled with it. In a way, I was too.
I ran across an old copy when I was Spring cleaning. It had a quirky little article on mangoes. It got me wanting to make something with mangoes. So I did. At first I was thinking a Bavarian, but then I just ended up making it into good ol’ ice cream. I know many of my Phoenix friends are experiencing a heat wave, so a little ice cream will do them some good. As long as they eat it quickly.
Now go look up why owls don’t have penises, you know you are going to.

Mango Ice Cream

1 1/3 pounds ripe mangoes (2-3 mangoes)
½ cup water
¾ sugar
½ cup sour cream
1 cup heavy cream
¼ tsp vanilla extract
a few drops freshly squeezed lemon juice

Peel the mangoes, slice them into quarters, and remove pits. Cut the mangoes into chunks and cook them with the water in a medium, nonreactive saucepan over medium heat, covered, stirring once or twice, until soft and cook through, about 10 minutes.
Remove from the heat, stir in the sugar, then cool to room temperature.
Puree the cooked mangoes and any liquid in a blender or food processor (I then ran it through a sieve so that any pulpiness would be gone), Add mango puree with the sour cream, heavy cream, vanilla and lemon juice and blend until smooth.
Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator, then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Adapted from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

When people find out that you run a food blog, they often ask me who my favorite chef on Food Network is. I really dislike this question as half of them are not actually chefs, and second because no one seems to know my favorite sadly. Gale Gand had a show called Sweet Dreams, it was my favorite show. It’s not on anymore (or so I think) to make room for people to show me how to mix Cool Whip with Jello and set it in to an all orange kitchen. Bitter? Perhaps I am a tad. All I have left on the Foodnetwork now is my eye candy, Tyler Florence.
If you never got to see the show, too bad. Great desserts were shown how to be made by a woman who has worked at two of my all time favorites, Gotham Bar & Grill and Charlie Trotters. She has several cookbooks with Butter Sugar Flour Eggs being my favorite, but they all are good. So when I was asked if I would want to receive her Brunch book I was intrigued. Brunch? Up until now, I had only known her as the dessert woman, or guru. But heck yeah, I wanted to see what she did with brunch.
Gale did Brunch proud. And let me just say, this book made me want to eat brunch more than just on Mother’s Day and Easter. It covers everything from beverages, eggs, pancakes, coffeecakes, toppings and much, much more.
This being a baking and sweets blog, I thought I would stick with that. I made three things from the book; the Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake Muffins, the Chocolate Waffles, and the Banana Fosters topping to go on top of my Chocolate Waffles. Let me just say that Chocolate Waffles with Banana Fosters topping is definitely the way to start your day! And for you on the go people, the muffins were yummy. I liked them because they were more sweet than a regular muffin, and you know I am all about the sugar. Next I am needing to make the Almond Ciabatta French Toast and my husband some Peanut Butter and Jelly Turnovers.
The sad thing is, no recipes. But I can highly suggest that you buy the cookbook. I mean, come on, Arbor Day will soon be here, and surely you deserve to buy yourself an Arbor Day gift. Right?

Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake Muffins

Chocolate Waffles with Banana Fosters Topping

Some may call BS when I say I am a rule follower. But really, I am. I never even got detention once. Because I was smart enough to know how to push the right buttons but always within the limits.
The year of the Costco dresses, case in point.
At the time I had what some may categorize as a highly passive-aggressive vice principal. She gave me lots of suggestions over the years from why I should get married (even though I wasn’t really dating anyone), if I wasn’t going to marry a man (hint are you a lesbian) that it might cause strife for the school, and there was the time that she told me to quit going to graduate school so I could go to the PTA meeting. This VP was always dressed up nicely. She was an administrator, that was her job. Though I found her insane to wear pantyhose in the hot months of Phoenix, AZ.
Unfortunately, because she dressed so well, she assumed everyone else should. I had taught lab science for too many years to learn that good clothing and that subject don’t mix. Because they day you do wear something nice is the day you get hydrochloric acid on your dress. Plus I was an involved teacher, often down on the ground with the kids. Sometimes I would even go to PE with my class just to have them see me in a more relaxed setting. So I wore pants. A lot. This VP was obsessed with people wearing dresses, or at least skirts. The one day I did wear a dress, she kept making a point over and over about how good I looked. How I should wear a dress every day. She even wrote me notes. Showed me picture of professionals wearing dresses compared to pants. And in her true passive-aggressive way, she let me know that she loved the dress, just maybe not with those shoes. And so it festered. It is not good when something festers with me.
One day, shortly after all the dress talk, I was at Costco. They were selling these dresses that were one step down from a muu muu. Cheap, under $10 a piece. They had 4 colors. And so I bought all four colors. Every Monday I wore the blue one. Every Tuesday the purple. Wednesday was spirit day at school so you were allowed to wear jeans and a school t-shirt. Thursday was the gray dress. Friday was the black dress. This was what I wore the rest of the year. With dock martin boots (since I got note from my doctor saying I needed to wear such footwear…I did not). Sure I looked HORRIBLE. It made me look twice as big and about 16 months pregnant. But I was proving a point. All with in the rules.
One day as I was leaving my dog jumped up on me and got mud everywhere. I was forced to wear the Thursday dress on Tuesday. The kids were screwed up for the rest of the week.
At the end of the year in the slide show whenever my photo would pop up the kids would shout out “it’s Friday” because I was in my black dress. Or “it’s Tuesday” because I was in purple dress.
The great thing about it was that you never had to think about what you were going to wear that week. At the end of the year, those dresses were given away. We even had a party to say goodbye to them. The next year I went to back to wearing what I wanted. Point made. Nothing ever said again about what I was wearing on body or feet.
Today was the big TEA Party day across our nation. Now, I am not in favor of it, as I feel it is hard to say we have taxation without representation, when in fact we have representation, and we all just voted about 6 months ago. BUT I do appreciate anyone going out and protesting for what they believe in.
In honour of such an event, I made some mini pecan pies to go with whatever tea might be being served!
I found these on a website when I was browsing. I liked that they used a cream cheese crust and corn syrup in the filling.
Hope everyone gets your taxes in on time…the clock is ticking!

Mini Pecan Pies (or pecan tassies)
Makes 48 tassies

Tassie Filling
1 cup pecan halves
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 ½  cups packed dark brown sugar
½  tsp vanilla extract
¼ cup light corn syrup
2 TBSP unsalted butter, melted

Cream Cheese Dough
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour-measured by fluffing, scooping and leveling
2 TBSP powdered sugar
1 TBSP Bourbon
Pinch salt
8 tablespoons (4 ounces) unsalted butter, cold
8 ounces cream cheese, cold
¼ tsp  vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F., with an oven rack in the middle of the oven.
Spray-grease three nonstick mini-muffin pans.
For the filling:
Chop the pecans to medium-fine dice. In a bowl, whisk together the ingredients.
For the pastry:
Place the flour, powdered sugar, Bourbon, vanilla extract, and salt in a food processor bowl and pulse-process to mix the ingredients together. Cut the butter into ¼ inch chunks, add to the processor and pulse on and off, until the mixture looks like coarse meal.
Add the cream cheese, by tablespoonful to the processor. Pulse-process until the dough just starts to come together (about 10, 5-second bursts), and then turn it out onto a board. Press the dough together into a cohesive mass and then divide the dough into 48 balls.
Assembly:
The easiest way to press the dough into shape is to use a tart tamper, if not use your hands.
To use the tamper, place a ball in each cup and tamp down on each ball, lightly, just so that the dough is centered and fills the cup.
Dust the tamper with flour and then press down gently, and not all of the way to the bottom, just until the dough starts to curl around the top part of the tamper bulb. To get the tamper out of the dough, rock it side to side and pull up. Use the tamper to thin the edges of the tarts by patting it against the edges. Place the tamper back into the tart and push down until it bottoms out. Touch the bottom to make sure that it is neither too thin nor too thick, pushing the dough up or down to make it right. The dough in the bottom should not be so thin that you can see through it, nor so thick that it feels squishy when you touch it.
Place ½  rounded teaspoonful of nuts into each cup. Spoon in 1 ½ to 2 tsp of the sugar/egg mixture, filling the tarts to within a scant 1/8-inch of the top. Do not fill the tarts up to the top, as the filling expands as it cooks and tarts that have overflowed are hard to remove from the pans after baking.
Place the pans on a cookie sheet and bake for 23-27 minutes, until the filling is puffed and the pastry is lightly browned. Remove the pans to a cooling rack. Let the pastry stand for 5 minutes. While the pastry is still warm, run a skewer along the top edge of the pastry to loosen it from the pan and then remove the tarts from the pans. Set the tarts on a cooling rack to cool completely.

  Adapted from Amazing Dessert Recipes by Penny Eisenberg (not sure if it is in the book or just on her blog)