I finally got around to listening to the Pippi Longstocking audiobook a few months ago, and, guys, I just gotta say…it’s a total gem! I looove Pippi. She reminds me of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes. I remember the artist (Bill Watterson) saying that kids and adults like Calvin for almost opposite reasons, and I totally see Pippi the same way. Kids love her grownup qualities (Independent! Confident! Super strong!), and adults love her childlike qualities (Imaginative! Spirited! Fearless!). I definitely want to read this one to my kids when they’re old enough. For now though, I’ll just have to settle for making them goodies from the book. ^.^
I thought there wouldn’t be much food in it since it’s so short, but it’s actually PACKED with all kinds of yummy goodness: pancakes, ham, cold roast, cream cake, cookies, and more. The food that stood out to me most was the cookies. They show up in multiple scenes, but my favorite is the one where Pippi is cutting out heart shapes from dough rolled out on the floor. They’re specifically called “pepparkakor” (a traditional Swedish ginger cookie). Since I’ve never made them before, I tracked down a recipe from Daune at Cottage in the Oaks. I added a little cream cheese frosting because I want it on all my spiced desserts from now until forever. I’ll admit the frosting is not strictly authentic, but it IS strictly delicious, which is all that really matters, right?
These were so fun and easy to make: the perfect weekend baking activity with little kiddos! 🙂
I have a confession to make: before this year, I’d never ready The Princess Bride. The years up til now were a distracted chorus of “I’ll get to it” and “It’s somewhere in my TBR.” I’ve seen the movie, so I guess I just didn’t feel a ton of urgency. It wasn’t until someone requested it as my blog’s next Book of the Month that I actually sat down to read it for the first time.
AND OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS IT IS THE GREATEST. Such a complete and utter joy. I can’t remember the last time I had so much pure fun while reading. It’s clever, heart-warming, and fiendishly funny. As soon as I finished it, I was more than ready to get in the kitchen, and I knew exactly what I was going to make: Miracle Max’s resurrection pills.
In the book, Miracle Max prepares a resurrection pill for the “sort of dead” Man in Black. Inigo is skeptical of its appearance, but Max’s wife Valerie assures him that it looks a lot better with a chocolate coating. This reminded me of chocolate truffles, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to make the filling from scratch. After all, I’ve got a 2-year-old, 6-month-old, and Mysterious Suuuper Seeecret Project (which I PROMISE I’ll announce soon–hopefully next week!) to worry about. To resolve the issue of time, I turned to my trusty Oreo truffle recipe. It’s quick, easy, and dependably delicious—just what the doctor ordered. Then I snuck in a Werther’s soft caramel center for the perfect surprise.
You don’t have to slave away for ages to make these addictive little morsels (but they’re so delicious that everyone will think you did). So whip up a batch—they’re even worth coming back from the dead for!
In The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, Gurgi receives a magical wallet as a reward for his faithfulness to his companions. The little leather coin purse may look unassuming, but it provides its owner with unlimited food for as long as there is enchantment in the land of Prydain! Pretty darn awesome. I’ve had several readers request a recipe from the Prydain books, so I decided to make cookies inspired by Gurgi’s wallet. After all, a coin purse with the power of unlimited snacks is SO my thing. 😉
Let’s talk inspiration. Have you ever seen on Pinterest or Instagram those cookies with the hidden pocket inside filled with candy, sprinkles, sugary cereal, etc.? I’ve heard them called surprise cookies, pocket cookies, and confetti cookies, but whatever you call them, I think they look SO COOL. Since wallets are for holding things, now seemed like a great time to make my own surprise cookie recipe. So I got to work!
I used a chocolate version of the sugar cookie recipe from my cookbook, A Literary Tea Party. Chocolate cookies made the most sense, since a leather bag would be brown. But I also wanted detailed decorations inspired by medieval leather tooling, so I broke out my favorite royal icing recipe (developed by Julie M. Usher), which would allow me to make more delicate shapes than buttercream would. As for the filling, I went with Reese’s Pieces to get that unbeatable chocolate peanut butter combo.Â
I was more than pleased with the results. The wallets looked so darling with their tidy little icing swirls and yellow Reese’s piece clasps. I can’t tell you how fun it was to give them a little shake and hear the candy rattling around inside. Now hurry up and go make your own! 😀
P.S. If it’s your first time using royal icing, I recommend Julia Usher’s how-to Youtube video. She has a lot of good tips to make it easier.
P.P.S. I’m taking reader requests for blog recipes, so email me here if there’s a classic book you’d like to see featured on the blog!
I LOVE chocolate caramels. I don’t mean caramels with chocolate on top (though those are good too). I’m talking about caramels that have had chocolate mixed into caramel itself as it heats, so you wind up with this dark brown, lusciously chocolaty confection. It’s a weakness of mine, so when I started brainstorming ideas for a Veruca Salt recipe for my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory menu, salted chocolate caramels stuck firmly in my brain.
However, my experience with making chewy caramels is limited…and by “limited,” I mean I’ve never actually done it. I accidentally made soft caramel while making honeycomb candy for the first time several years ago, but I don’t think even that counts, since I’ve never been able to replicate the result.
Rather than try to invent something on the fly, I found a recipe from Taste of Home that looked both simple and reliable. The only change I made was adding a little kosher salt to the top, and OH YOU GUYS IT WAS AMAZING. So chewy, rich, dark, and not-too-sweet. The salt turned out to be the perfect addition, adding just the right level of complexity.
I will DEFINITELY make these again. Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Do I have baking chocolate…I do! I could make these now!
Now is good.
NOTE: This recipe needs to set for at least 5 hours.
Can you believe I’ve never written an apple pie post before? I’ve made loads of apple recipes for my classic lit menus (homemade apple sauce, apple rose tartlets, and apple cider crullers—just to name a few) but never pie. Of course, when I decided to make one for my Sleepy Hollow menu, I knew it needed to be more than your average apple pie. I wanted to kick it up a notch!
I started with seasonal flavors, bouncing a few flavor combo ideas off the Mister, and we both agreed that maple and walnut were great seasonal additions to an apple pie. I decided to swap maple syrup for the sugar usually found in fruit pie filling, and since I’m not a big fan of chopped nuts in my pie filling, I decided to grind the walnuts up and mix them in with the pie crust. I used a basic version of the pie crust recipe from my cookbook, and the filling is just a slight variation on my family’s favorite apple pie recipe: the one from “How to Make Apple Pie and See the World.”
The result was a glorious pie filled to bursting with the flavor of sweet-tart apples, rich maple syrup, and a hint of nuttiness from the crust. I brought mine to Thanksgiving, where it was a big hit!
Ghosts are an essential part of the Scooby-Doo cartoon (even if they do usually turn out to be just some guy in a mask 😉), so I thought it would be fun to make a ghost-themed dessert for this month’s menu. I loved the idea of making spook cupcakes, and I decided to tie-dye the frosting for some psychedelic 60’s flair, perfect for Scooby-Doo! I started with my go-to chocolate cupcake and vanilla frosting recipe from my cookbook and gave the frosting an orange, lime green, hot pink, and light blue swirl. Then I used this recipe to make my own homemade marshmallow ghosts (but you can totally go with store bought ghost Peeps, if you want). These sweet little specters are a perfect addition to any Halloween menu or Scooby-Doo birthday party!
Note: The marshmallow mixture for the ghosts needs to set overnight.
Blue and gray and green. In Sarah Plain and Tall, these are Sarah’s favorite colors because they are the colors of the sea. To wrap up this month’s menu, I wanted to make a dessert reminiscent of Sarah’s home in Maine. I loved the idea of making sea glass candy—especially since sea glass reminds me so much of the little ocean treasures she shows Anna and Caleb—so I decided to go a step farther and make them in Sarah’s favorite colors too!
I used this sea glass candy recipe from Make Life Lovely, which turned out great. The instructions are simple and easy to follow, and the final product is delicious. I’m really pleased with the colors too. They came out with just the right misty, ocean-y feel I was hoping for. And they were delicious! They actually taste a lot like cotton candy. I wouldn’t recommend serving them to very young children since the ends can be a little sharp, but they’re great for older children and adults. We ate them right up! 🙂
Back when I first started planning my Calvin and Hobbes menu, the idea of a snow goon themed recipe easily made the short list. I wasn’t sure exactly what form it would take, but I knew the adorably horrific snowmen from Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goonssimply HAD to be in my menu. They’re too iconic to ignore!
I played around with a few ideas before settling on Golden Oreo snowman truffles, and although I loved the final product, the fact that this post exists is proof of my devotion to the snow goons. I ran into SO. MANY. ROADBLOCKS.
On my first try, the candy melts I’d chosen wound up being WAY too clumpy for dipping truffles. I tried again with some off-brand white chocolate chips I had on hand, and the results were even worse. On my third try, I rolled the truffles in powdered sugar, but it soaked right in, leaving them sandy-colored. I considered dipping them in almond bark, but the brand my store carried was very yellow (not snowy enough for these truffles).
Not gonna lie, I was tempted to play my “I’m Moving this Month” card and just skip the goons, since they were a bonus recipe. But the idea of finishing this menu without snow goons made me too sad. Luckily, my mom came to visit for a few days to watch the toddler while I packed for the move. She suggested going with Tollhouse white chocolate chips, since that’s what she normally uses for truffles and never has issues with clumping. I gave it a try, and they were PERFECT. Just what I’d hoped for from the beginning. Thanks, Mom! 🙂
If there’s one iconic food from the Calvin and Hobbes comics, it’s Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Calvin eats three bowls every Saturday for breakfast, and it’s hinted throughout the comics that it could be linked to his hyperactivity and short attention span. With its astronomical sugar and caffeine content, this is one intense cereal, and Calvin scoops on EXTRA sugar to boot! The C&H comics that feature Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs are some of my favorites, so of course I chose it as the dessert for our menu. 🙂
I started out with a pretty healthy homemade version of Cocoa Puffs from SheKnows.com. I added sugar to the recipe to amp up the sweetness and coated the cereal pieces in powdered sugar before baking to get that frosted look. The final result was a sweet treat which, thanks to the cocoa powder in the original recipe, had a rich fudgy chocolate flavor.
So pour yourself a bowl or three and chow down on Calvin’s favorite cereal!
NOTE: Apologies to all the email subscribers who accidentally got an email last week containing a post from next month’s menu. My computer was being spazzy, and when I hit “Save Draft” it decided to publish instead ?. I took down the post right away, so I don’t think anyone else saw it. At least you guys have an edge when I send out my photo hint about the new menu on social media next month, right? 😉
Time for our Wizard of Earthsea dessert! While I was developing this menu, I knew I wanted to have a recipe dedicated to the dragons. There isn’t a specific one mentioned in the book, and none of the savory ideas I came up with felt right. Then I thought of making a flame-themed dessert.
One of the tricky things about blogging for almost 5 years is that sometimes the ideas you get for new recipes are too similar to something you’ve posted in the past. Flame cupcakes were the first thing that came to mind, but I made them before for my Hunger Games menu and couldn’t think of a way to make a second version unique enough. Then cookies came to mind, but plain old sugar cookies just felt too boring.
Then I thought of meringue! It’s one of my favorite desserts to play with, and I loved that meringue cookies would allow me to make tiny 3D clusters of flame. I whipped up my favorite meringue recipe (a combo of the instructions from my baked Alaska post and this Taste of Home recipe) and started experimenting—and came up with these little beauties! They were SO fun to make. I love that each one is different. It makes you want to take the time to really look at and appreciate them before you take a bite. Enjoy! 🙂
