Say hello to our Where the Wild Things Are dessert: a giant chocolate chip cookie! This is the dessert I made for the Little Mister’s Wild Thing-themed birthday party. As a one-year-old, cookies are easier for him to grasp than cake, and he seems to prefer the flavor. Plus, a cookie is much faster to decorate than a whole cake, which was a big deal to me since I was already making deviled eggs and fruit salad for the party.
I used the Tollhouse giant cookie recipe in conjunction with my own buttercream recipe to make this dessert. The words are made by dipping Trader Joe’s cinnamon schoolhouse cookies in colored icing. I LOVE how it turned out, especially the Wild Thing in the middle. We ate it up, we loved it so! 😉
I don’t get to make reading kits for picture books very often, so when I do, it’s a fun change of pace. It’s a chance to get creative, since I can’t use a lot of the items I typically include in kits (candles, scarves, etc.). I love imagining what a young reader would want to have in a kit, and there are tons of book-themed clothes and toys out there for kids! This Where the Wild Things Are reading kit includes plushies, costumes, blankets, and more—all themed after the long beloved children’s book. Enjoy! 🙂
At the Little Mister’s Where the Wild Things Are birthday party, fruit salad was my go-to side dish. It’s always easy to throw together for a party, and it’s a big kid-pleaser too! I assembled mine right before the party without any trouble, and it was a hit. I even had someone ask for the dressing recipe!
At the party I was sure to include the Little Mister’s favorite fruits (apples and grapes) in the salad, but for my blog version of the recipe, I decided to go with a tropical fruit salad. Tropical fruits make me think of the Land of the Wild Things, since so many of them have the whimsical look and juicy flavor of fruit you’d expect to find in an imaginary world. I chose dragon fruit, starfruit, and kiwi for my tropical flavors, then I added clementines and strawberries for some familiarity and extra color. Toss it all in my favorite lime dressing, and you’re set to go!
P.S. Don’t let those awesome, funky dragon fruit skins go to waste—use them as bowls to serve your salad!
Early last month, we celebrated the Little Mister’s 1st birthday at his grandparents house. It was crowded, loud, and fun–everything a children’s party should be–as family came from far and wide to celebrate with us. The party had a Where the Wild Things Are theme, which I picked out an embarrassingly long time ago (aka literally weeks after I brought the Little Mister home from the hospital).
I figure there are only so many of his birthday’s I’ll get to make all the design decisions for, so we’re doing book themed parties for as long as he’ll let me! 😉 I thought it would be fun to make a menu based on all the foods we ate at the party, so that’s kind of what we’re doing this month. However, I’d be lying if I said this was EXACTLY what we ate at the party. That would require things going according to plan…and me cooking for almost 50 people…and to that I say HA.
I wound up making regular deviled eggs for the party, but these precious little egg boats are what WOULD have happened if I hadn’t forgotten to dye the eggs before I started filling them. I was kinda bummed that my vision never made it to the real party, but I whipped up a mini batch this week so I could share them with you all here on the blog. Maybe they’ll get a chance to make a little boy smile at one of YOUR parties! 🙂
One group of characters often forgotten from James and the Giant Peach is the Cloud Men (perhaps since they were left out of the movie). In the book, the Cloud Men are responsible for creating such atmospheric phenomenon as rainbows, storms, and snow. When James and companions float past a Cloud Man city in their flying peach, they see Cloud families preparing dinners of fried snowballs.
These sounded delicious, so of course I wanted to make them for the blog! And I knew exactly how I wanted to create my own interpretation: mashed potato balls mixed with bacon and cheese, rolled in panko crumbs, and deep fried. Utterly delicious and fun to make!
We’re back with another kit, and boy am I excited about this one! As you may have guessed by the fact that I’m doing an entire recipe menu based around the show Firefly, I’m a pretty big fan of the Firefly/Serenity universe. The Mister and I may or may not have the theme song among our repertoire of lullabies for our baby. #BabyBrowncoat ^.^
So when I started putting this kit together, it was hard not to go overboard. I mean, c’mon, ThinkGeek has a WHOLE SECTION OF THEIR SITE devoted to Firefly paraphernalia. Still, I managed to restrain myself and only selected the Internet’s best Firefly goodies.
Normally I feel like March drags on FOREVER (perpetually gray skies are NOT my thing), but this year I had loads of exciting blog stuff to keep me busy!
Our Three Musketeers menu went off without a hitch. Five shiny new recipes are now tucked safely away in the archives. This month, I made my very first copycat recipes, and I did them back-to-back: 3 Musketeers candy bars and Cafe Angelina’s French hot chocolate! I made mini versions of the candy bars for my family’s Easter party, and they were a big hit. And my oh my, the French sure know their hot chocolate! For a chocoholic like me, it was like drinking liquid happiness. Milady de Winter’s Soup
I also premiered a delicious new tea. While we’re on the topic of 3 Musketeers bars, I should probably mention All for One and One for All Tea: my new chocolate caramel tea from Adagio. I designed it to taste like a 3 Musketeers bar, and I daresay I succeeded. It’s super chocolaty and sweet enough to make a perfect dessert tea with a some milk and sugar. You can order it here.
On a more embarrassing note, I had my very first blogging snafu this month. For some reason I cannot fathom, I thought it would be a good idea to schedule my Drunken Ham post before it was finished…and I accidentally scheduled it to publish a day early! The post was up for an ENTIRE HOUR before I realized the mistake, and although all the text was ok, the pictures were all placeholders from old posts (I hadn’t uploaded the edited pics yet). YIKES! Lesson learned.
The Mister and I went to C2E2, a Chicago comic con, where we had a blast. There were babies dressed up as BB-8, steampunk cosplayers selling tea, and SO MUCH FAN ART. It was perfectly awesome…though I may have dropped the ball and forgotten to get us tickets for some key YA fiction panels, which would have been perfect for the blog. * sigh * C’est la vie, I guess? Anyway, I promise to plan better next time! 🙂
We also threw a Daredevil party to marathon Season 1 before Season 2 came out on Netflix. I didn’t have time to make a post about it, but I shared the food in some tweets. We made Kingpin Omelets (which were basically the Aramis Omelets I made earlier this month), Anatoly Applesauce (this recipe from Taste of Home), Avocados at Law (aka Epic Meal Time Guac Grenades), and World on Fire Cupcakes (which are the same as my Girl on Fire cupcakes from The Hunger Games). All the food was well-received, but I think I had the most fun with the Avocados at Law! 🙂
But now it’s time to bid March adieu and turn our gaze towards April. Ready for your photo hint? Take a guess at what our next Book of the Month will be:
HINT: It’s a series.
The new menu premieres this Thursday!
Any guesses at what our next Book of the Month will be? 🙂
So…if you missed the excitement a couple hours ago, I accidentally published this post a day early while it was still an unfinished draft. AND IT WAS UP FOR A WHOLE HOUR BEFORE I REALIZED IT HAPPENED. * Cue death by embarrassment *
The full story is this: last night when I started drafting the post, I put the wrong date into the schedule bar. So it published at 11 am today…instead of 11 am tomorrow, when it was meant to be all finished and shiny. SOMEONE HIDE ME.
Funny thing is, I NEVER fill out the scheduler until the post is finished. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do it this time.
So after a giant round of panicking, I scrambled to finish editing and uploading my pictures, so subscribers wouldn’t click on the email containing this post and wonder what the heck was going on. EEP. I’m so sorry, guys!
Anyway, I should probably put my shame aside and try to focus on what this post is really about: namely, the Three Musketeers.
Our recipe today is a tribute to my favorite musketeer, Athos. I’ve got a soft spot for prickly characters, and he’s nothing if not stern and stoic. The only time Athos makes an exception to his rule of restraint is when it comes to wine. Athos LOVES him a good burgundy. This is proven when his friends get separated from him for two weeks while traveling, and they find him barricaded into an innkeeper’s cellar, drunk on four casks of wine and guilty of eating most of the innkeeper’s delicious hams.
I just read The Three Musketeers for the first time last year, and I was hugely impressed. Considering the size of the book and the time when it was written, I was expecting it to be a little slow and wordy. Instead, I laughed my way through the first chapter and rooted for D’Artagnan and his musketeer pals all the way to the end. Before the book was over, I knew I had to make a menu for it here on the blog.
I can’t adequately express to you how nervous/excited I’ve been to make this dessert. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at baked Alaska for years, and a menu based on a book about the Alaskan wilderness was a perfect excuse.
