Month: June 2017

Starfleet Punch: A Star Trek Bonus Recipe

Posted June 29, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments

        

Last year when I finished my Star Trek Next Generation menu, I posted a Romulan Ale cocktail as my bonus recipe. I loved the idea of ending my Original Series menu with another drink, and I immediately thought of making a multi-colored layered drink as an homage to the different Starfleet divisions.

Turns out, I had no idea what I was signing up for! 😛 My first thought was to make a molecular cocktail in red, blue, and yellow, but I couldn’t get the drink to layer properly. I then decided to try layering plain juices and stumbled across a recipe from Katrina’s Kitchen. She uses juice and Gatorade to make an easy, delicious layered punch in red, white, and blue for the 4th of July. All I needed to do was add a little yellow food coloring to get Starfleet’s signature red, blue, and yellow colors and I was in business! 🙂 The final result was tasty and just plain gorgeous—I couldn’t believe how well the juices kept their layers, even after being jostled around!

Drink up, space travelers! We’ve got a final frontier to explore. 🙂

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Star Trek Tea: Vulcan Mocha

Posted June 27, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Teas / 3 Comments

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Though Vulcan Mocha isn’t mentioned in Star Trek: Original Series (or maybe it was and I just don’t remember), it’s a very popular drink in later series, and it’s considered to have been part of Vulcan cultural cuisine for centuries. The preferred drink of many Vulcans and non-Vulcans alike, Vulcan Mocha is said to be incredibly potent in its effects, yet sweeter than Earth coffee. I was intrigued by the idea, so I decided to make a tea for it!

I’ve made several coffee-inspired tea blends in the past (like Elementary: A Sherlock Tea and Chocolate Mocha Tea for Ze Little Grey Cells from Hercule Poirot), so I relished the challenge of making something new. Like most of my “coffee teas,” I started with Adagio Tea’s Mocha Nut Mate, a toasted mate blend with distinct yet subtle nutty flavor. It’s a great foundation for building blends, since it marries well with other flavors. For this blend, I wanted something  subtle, faintly sweet, and complex—the perfect go-to beverage for the universe’s most logical alien race.

I added chestnut tea to the mate for a lighter, less dominant flavor. Then I put in just a hint of Tiger’s Eye, a unique Adagio blend with flavors of chocolate and caramel. I LOVED the result. Enjoy! 🙂

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Star Trek Insignia Cookies

Posted June 22, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments

        

I’ve been wanting to make these cookies ever since I saw on Pinterest that you can use a star cookie cutter to make Star Fleet insignia badges. So when the time came to whip these up, I got out my favorite recipe for royal icing sugar cookies (the same base recipe I used for my X-Files Alien Cookies) and went to work! There are several recipes about there for insignia sugar cookies, so to make mine unique, I did the detailing with food markers—a nice shortcut instead of making multiple colors of icing. And I decorated each insignia with the symbol and color of the three main Star Fleet divisions: Sciences, Command, and Operations!

Royal icing takes a little extra time than regular frosting, but you can’t beat those crisp, clean lines. Plus, the flat surface is super easy to decorate! 🙂

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Red Shirt Fruit Salad

Posted June 15, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes, Pop Culture Corner / 2 Comments

      

Red Shirts (also known as Redshirts) get a pretty raw deal in Star Trek TOS. The term refers to Star Fleet engineering and security officers who wear a red shirt as part of their uniform…and they have a tendency to die at every opportunity. It’s such a common occurrence that the term “red shirt” has become a pop culture term referring to any character who is killed off to show the situation is serious.

I wanted to dedicate a recipe to the Red Shirts, so I came up with the idea for Red Shirt Fruit Salad! It’s composed of four kinds of red fruit and drizzled with pomegranate dressing (plus some blueberries for contrast). It was easy to throw together and even easier to eat—a dish any Red Shirt would be glad to snack on as a final meal before being sent to their inevitable doom! 😉

 

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11 Father’s Day Foods Sure to Make Dad’s Day

Posted June 13, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 0 Comments

 

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Father’s Day is just around the corner, and I’m extra excited this year!

This Father’s Day will be my husband’s first official Father’s Day AND it falls on his birthday, so I really wanted to make it count. Especially since most of the gifts baby makes for him these days come wrapped in diapers! 😉

I usually wind up cooking something for the Mister on gift-giving occasions (for Christmas I made him white rum and almond hot chocolate!). So for Father’s Day, I decided to peruse my archive of meaty main dishes for inspiration when I realized that lots of other moms are probably in the same boat! So I decided to share a roundup of all the dishes I’m considering, so you can use them too!

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Starship Enterprise Pizza

Posted June 8, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 7 Comments

 

When it comes to Star Trek, what feature of the show is more iconic that the Starship Enterprise? The ship has a beautiful streamlined, distinctive look, and I loved the idea of using it as inspiration for a Star Trek entree.

But what to make? Pizza was the first thing that came to mind. From the beginning, I wanted to make party-friendly finger foods for this menu, stuff you could serve at a Star Trek party. And pizza is easy to throw together and wonderfully shareable—the ultimate party food!

So I pulled out my favorite pizza sauce recipe and got to work! With party food in mind, I decided to go with premade pizza dough, since it’s faster to work with. The sauce I used is easy to whip up in about 10 minutes (and can be made and chilled beforehand). I used pepperoni for my decorations and whipped up some homemade pesto for dipping.

So grab a slice of Starship Enterprise Pizza, and let’s boldly party on! 😉

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Tribble Energy Bites

Posted June 1, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 4 Comments

       

 

Fandom Foodies announced earlier this year that they would be doing a Star Trek recipe month this June. This was perfect, since I was already planning on doing a Star Trek TOS menu this month anyway! 🙂

[EDIT: Sooo it turns out the Fandom Foodies theme was changed to Game of Thrones? Lol! You should totally still check it out. There’s always good stuff on the Fandom Foodies linkups. I’m gonna keep doing Star Trek though, since I’ve been looking forward to it for so long. :)]

All the recipes I’ll be making this month are crowd-friendly finger foods, perfect for any Star Trek party.

We’re starting the month off with a Tribble-themed appetizer: cranberry almond energy bites coated in shredded coconut. It’s a recipe I came up with while I was pregnant with the Little Mister, when I needed a quick make-ahead recipe for postpartum breakfasts and snacks. It’s delicious, quick, and easy to customize based off what you already have in your cabinets. Plus, it looks just like those fuzzy little Tribbles: my favorite characters in all of Star Trek TOS!

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