This past November I had the pleasure of designing a wedding invitation suite for an amazing Old Hollywood wedding held at the Ebell of Los Angeles. It was such an elegant affair. The venue fit the style of the event perfectly. I custom designed all of the paper products for the bride, including the wedding program fan, envelope liners, menus, dessert cards, thank you’s, and more. :)
Photos courtesy of Amy Stone Photography
This week I tried two new things in the kitchen. First, I tried one ingredient banana ice cream. I have always had a very sweet tooth, and ice cream is definitely one of my major weaknesses. Since I don’t like chocolate, peanut butter & bananas have always been my “rich” flavors. So when I saw this super simple recipe for 2-ingredient peanut butter banana ice cream (without sugar! without cream!) I just had to have it. Instead of blending in the peanut butter, I swirled a small spoonful in after blending. I didn’t get a very great photo of it, because it started melting and Micah and I wanted to eat it right away! :)
Recipe:
Peel and slice 4 bananas into banana coins and place on a plate. Freeze them for 1-2 hours. Put frozen banana slices into a food processor (or powerful blender). Blend them, scraping down the sides every so often. It’ll look lumpy at first, but keep blending, and it turns into creamy banana ice cream :)
Then, this weekend Micah and I woke up early and decided to have some fun with pancakes. I made the pancake batter extra thin by adding a little more milk so that I could pour it into a squeeze bottle to make fun shapes on the pan. To get the best shapes, squeeze out the outline of your shape and then fill it in quickly.
This is our dinosaur pancake :)
Here is our caterpillar and butterfly pancakes
Pancake recipe:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cup milk (I used about 1 1/2 cup to make it thin)
2 eggs
2 tablespoons canola oil
Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Add wet ingredients and mix. Spray non-stick spray on your pan and begin your pancake creations, flipping when you see bubbles (that was Micah’s job) :)
Baking is like magic. Yep, I said it. It’s magical. Out of nothing (well, nothing significant when standing alone) appears something delicious. Flour, sugar, butter…throw together and POOF, desserts! I’ve always been a super frugal girl, so I joke with my husband Josh that baking is like creating free food – the BEST! Since there’s always flour, sugar, baking ingredients & butter in the house my brain doesn’t put monetary value to it, it’s just like the most amazing free food ever. :) Lol
Yesterday we hosted our small group for the first time, so I made it my mission to wow everyone with an array of delicious treats. I’ve always loved having people over and sharing time over good food, but over the past year I’ve really jumped head first into a passion for entertaining guests, cooking & baking.
I figured it’d be easy if everything was relatively bite sized (real intention: laziness motivated by not having to wash 15 sets of silverware!) I made my old stand-by, Lemon bars, which are an easy fix since I have an abundance of lemons dangling off the lemon tree in my backyard. I’ll post that recipe a little later, because the main focus is the mini-pies I made for the first time. Which ended up much better than I had anticipated (I was nervous about these little guys).
For these mini cherry pies, I used regular muffin tins. They are SO simple. Just store bought refrigerated pie crust and a can of cherry pie filling. I followed the tutorial from Sew Sweet Stitches, which walks you through a from scratch cherry filling. I didn’t have time to make the filling from scratch with everything else I was doing, so I settled for canned but they was seriously great.
I had half a container of fresh blueberries in my fridge, so I used the remainder of the pie crust dough to make these mini blueberry pies with a lemon streusel topping. OMG my new favorite! I took this recipe from Pillsbury and modified it a little bit. Instead of using their coconut streusel topping, I created a lemon streusel to give them some zippiness. Then I drizzled them with lemon glaze.
Lemon streusel:
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Lemon glaze:
Combine 6 tablespoons of powdered sugar with enough lemon juice to make a thick glaze. Drizzle over cooled pies.
(Photo credit Jessica Burns)
And last but not least, my third dessert was a new one that my amazingly talented foodie friend Jessica introduced me to. They’re Martha Stewart’s Strawberry Shortcake cookies and they’re one of my new favorites. You can find the recipe and an awesome photo-journey walking you through the steps of making these wonderful little treats here on Jessica’s blog. :)
Happy baking!!
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