Giant Samoa Cookie: Father's Day Dessert

Life is Good: and we're celebrating!

So...in April, a Facebook friend of mine (thanks, Joanna!) posted this awesome tastemade.com video of a giant Samoa Girl Scouts cookie and I knew that I had to make it for Grant's birthday. Samoas are his favvvvvvve cookie!

The video looks both totally easy and daunting at the same time. It was several steps, but that was the most complicated (and not really complicated) part of the entire endeavor. The results were keep-this-thing-away-from-me-if-I-ever-want-to-wear-a-swimsuit-again-delicious!

I skipped the video's cookie recipe and used my own sugar cookie recipe because I knew that it is a solid recipe.

To make the Giant Samoa Cookie, first you need to make the sugar cookie recipe:

Elsie's Eggless Sugar Cookies
1 c. powdered sugar
1 c. sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1 c. butter, softened
4 - 4 1/2 c. flour (use 4 first and add in the last half cups slowly if your dough doesn't seem stiff enough)
2 t. baking soda
1 t. cream of tartar
2 T. vanilla (I use Madagascar)
1 T. arrowroot

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix all ingredients together and allow to cool in refrigerator for at least one hour.
3. Roll out dough in between two pieces of waxed paper and then use a plate to cut the dough into a big circle. 

4. Use a coffee cup, placed in the center of your big circle, to trace out the center circle and removed that dough. Use a fork to much a few light holes all over the cookie.

5. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 20 minutes. (All ovens work a little differently, so start watching your big cookie at 15 minutes to make sure that it doesn't scorch.
6. Allow to cool completely.

While you're baking your big cookie, crisp up 3 cups of shredded coconut (I used unsweetened, but the video calls for sweetened) on the lower rack in the oven at 350 degrees for 10 min. 

Once your big cookie has completely cooled, remove it from your cookie sheet and turn it over so that the flattest side is up.

Next, melt a bag of Enjoy Life (allergy friendly!) chocolate chips in the microwave. (Every microwave heats differently. I think I ended up melting mine (30 seconds at a time to make sure that it didn't scorch) for about two minutes. (This is more chocolate than the recipe calls for in the video. It barely covered my cookie and also, who doesn't want more chocolate?!?!) Pour the melted chocolate over your cookie and use a knife to distribute it evenly across the cookie. Any butter knife will do but these icing spatulas are great to have. When the chocolate is covering the entire cookie, place it in the freezer to make the chocolate harden.

While the chocolate is hardening, melt a bag of Brach's caramels (14 ounces) over low heat with 3 tablespoons of milk & a dash of salt, whisking constantly. 

Pull the cookie out of the freezer and turn it over onto your serving plate/platter so that the (frozen) chocolate side is on the bottom. Spread about 1/3 cup of the melted caramel mixture onto the top of the cookie. 

Then, put all of your toasted coconut into the remaining caramel mixture & stir. Smooth that mixture onto the top of the cookie with a knife.

Finally, melt another cup of chocolate chips in the microwave and then drizzle that melted chocolate on top of your Giant Samoa Cookie. 

Drizzling methods are as unique as the cook or baker doing them. You can use a knife loaded with melted chocolate or a fork or whisk. If you like to have a lot of control over your drizzle, you can buy a condiments squeeze container to use as your drizzler. 

And then it's time to cut a slice and dig in!!! I often question how "simple" online video recipes really are, but this one did not disappoint. And so yummy. 

I made this for Grant's birthday, but it would be a perfect Father's Day surprise! 

What to do when your kids are bored this summer

Life is Good: so good, it's super!

One of my biggest struggles as a mom is allowing my kids to be bored. I'm an idea person--by trade and by nature. And I love brainstorming ideas with my kids. But I know the value in uninterrupted free time and letting your mind wander. So this summer, one of my goals is to give my kids the opportunity to be "bored" a little bit. 

So far, we are just under a week into summer and the Big Kid and Little Kid haven't been too bored because they've been doing a theatre camp each morning. Afternoons are spent outside (ahhh, sunshine!) until our Little One takes his (mid-afternoon) nap. Then I get some nice quality time with the older kids without the constant interruption of a two-year old. (In his defense, it is important that I repeat every single word in his vocabulary back to him. Twice. Every minute of the hour. Sigh.) But once the Little One is napping and a quieter time begins, I have disappeared (ever so quietly & carefully) here & there so that I am not an open encyclopedia of ideas. The results have made me squee with delight. The Big Kid devoured The Hobbit. The Little Kid read Bird & Squirrel again. Lego creations were devised and constructed. The Little Kid hosted us at his (pretend) cafe. More than once, I found them playing together, laughing together, reading on the Big Kid's bed together. And this...

Out of a bin of construction paper in our mudroom closet and with the aid of a glue stick, scissors, and an ink pen, Superman emerged. 

Happy (not boring) Summer!

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Songs to Sing to Babies

Life is Good: our memories remind us so

I heard this song on the radio this morning. It used to be one of the songs that would lull our second born to sleep as a baby. ❤️ In case no one has told you today, "you're beautiful...like a rainbow."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LPn0KFlbqX8

Best Wacky Cake Recipe Ever

Life is Good: blow out the candles & make a wish!

Ever since we found out that our eldest son was severely allergic to eggs (when he was nine months old), making cakes and cupcakes has been a challenge. Early on, I made carrot cakes and carrot cake cupcakes. I felt like they were healthy for cake and they seemed to please everyone (except one little partygoer who seemed to like fewer things and fewer people than any other kid I'v known). As our kids got older, they wanted other kinds of cakes and I figured that out as well as I could but getting the cake dense enough without being too dense was always a challenge. A couple of years ago, our Big Kid asked for a white cake and so I turned to a "wacky cake" or "Depression cake" recipe to make it happen. He was happy, but was not satisfied. I started a quest to find the best recipe. And I think I found it in a thread on an allergy website. 

The recipe was posted by "Kathy P" and I am ever so grateful. Her original recipe is great. Since then, I have adjusted the flavoring a little and this cake is finally one that I don't judge over and over in my head as I watch people eat it. The flavoring is my attempt at what my Grandma's secret ingredient wedding cake tasted like. It's not exactly like hers because I don't use that secret ingredient. Because, well, that would not be secret, right?! But it's close...

One of the differences in this recipe versus other wacky cake recipes is that most of the recipes ask you to make holes in the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into the holes. This recipe mixes the wet ingredients in a separate bowl and then mixes them with the dry ingredients to combine. For some reason, this makes the batter look different and the cake taste different. I hope you enjoy it!

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 t. baking soda (make sure it is fresh)

1/2 t. salt (I use pink Himalayan)

1 T. white vinegar

5 T. vegetable oil

1 t. vanilla (I use Madagascar)
1/2 t. lemon extract
1/2 t. almond extract

1 cup cold water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

1. Mix the dry ingredients together.

2. Mix the wet ingredients together.

3. Mix wet and dry ingredients together with a spoon until smooth. Do not use a beater or mixer. 

4. Pour into an 8 inch square or round cake pan OR muffin/cupcake tin (this recipe makes twelve cupcakes).

5. Bake cake for 35 minutes (check often as ovens vary) or approximately 20 minutes for cupcakes.

We celebrated our Big Kid's ninth birthday (NINE!) once already. He asked for "Captain America's shield". Ugh. It's his birthday, it's my "humiliate yourself by showing off your lack of the cake decorating gene" day! 

I was slightly less embarrassed about this decorated cake, though since it was just a couple of frosted rings and a star. I used a saucer as a guide for my first ring around the cake, which made the subsequent rings easier to keep even. I used a star cookie cutter as a guide for my star and then added some layers around that to make it bigger. 

Next up...a trio of cakes for our family birthday celebration. The Big Kid wants a baseball cake, a basketball cake, and a Pokeball cake. WISH ME LUCK!

Words of Wisdom

Life is Good: just turn on the light

When The Going Gets Tough

Life is Good: God's Got This

Perfect Gifts for Teachers

Life is Good: it's the weekend!

Wow. What a week. It felt like it had a couple of extra days in there! If I'm going to get extra days, I would like them to be on the weekend, please! We had special celebrations for our read-athon that wrapped up (I won't be sad to have one less thing to do and stop logging in to that website.), teacher conferences, a houseguest, and our third grader's teacher's birthday.

As the room mother for both our 5- and 8-year old's class, I feel like I am constantly asking parents for donations and that feels icky. I want to help the school out, but I also hate making families feel pressured. We appreciate the teachers so much and want to give them gifts that are useful, memorable, show our appreciate, and are things that they like. 

For Christmas, we took donations from class families and gave the teachers VISA gift cards. I put them inside of a little bag and tied it with a pretty ribbon and a special Christmas ornament. A note thanking them for the important work they do finished it up. I feel like this works well. Instead of 20 families giving a small gift to the teachers, they got one pretty big gift that they can then choose how to spend. 

For our Little Kid's teacher's birthday, I suggested that we have each child draw a picture of the teacher and sign it and we could bind them all together into a book. One of the other room mothers offered to take on the project. She ended up taking photos of each piece of art and loaded it into Walgreens.com to make an inexpensive book from there. I've also seen great books like this from shutterfly.com and mixbook.com.

Here's the drawing that our Little Kid did of his teacher. I think it looks a lot like her! (And a little bit like a Cubist painting?)

For our Big Kid's teacher, the other room mother asked a local florist, Excelsior Florist, to make a little bouquet of flowers for the teacher's desk. They did an amazing job with lots of springy bright colors and even some butterflies. It looked great. We had each student sign a card and we also asked each child to give a descriptive word about the teacher which I then used to create a word cloud, also known as a wordle. I work on a Macbook Pro, so I found it a bit difficult to use some of the word cloud sites, though there are lots of them. I did a search on google to find a site that worked well with Macs. Even then, I had problems with a couple of sites not saving my files, etc. I ended up going with tagxedo. It has lots of shape options and color choices. You can also choose to have a word used once or repeated. I chose to repeat so that the entire shape was filled up. I tried it out a few times before I got the final one. 

I used a color scheme called "Quiet Morning". I really liked the shades of blue. I also thought it was hysterical to use a color group with this name knowing that it was going in a room of (LOUD) third graders!

Here's the (almost) final:

I picked a more pronounced-looking heart and for the final, added the words, "From your third graders 2017" and also "Happy birthday". His teacher seemed to like the gesture and the kids were so excited about it!

I did have one big snafu with this site. It prints out with a border and a copyright. I wanted to print this out at 50% so that the frame (this one from Michael's) was not gigantic and more of just a little memento. I ended up having to print it out, use some correction fluid (that still make that stuff!?!), and then make a copy of that. It wasn't perfect, which really bothered me since it was a gift, but in the end, it worked. And it was something I could do for under $25 and not ask the class families for a donation. 

And now the week is done, it's Saturday. Time for pancakes and board games and batting practice even though it's a bit cold still outside. Time for puppet shows and little boys running the house giggling. Life is good. 

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