Plain ol’ pasta doesn’t have to be plain at all
I really don’t know what to call this dish. After all, it *is* simply rigatoni with sauce and cheese.
Then again, for whatever reason, turning all the noodles upright after cooking and then baking them this way made this dish way more fun….both to make and eat.
It didn’t take very long, but it did take longer than I thought it would. I figured I could do more than one noodle at a time, laying them in bulk, but not a chance. Each one had to be stacked individually.
Doesn’t it look cool when they’re ready, though? And then comes the sauce and cheese. And then more sauce, ‘cause hey, why not?
And then hey, why not some more cheese to melt on top of that?
Yum. Now the tricky part was actually serving it. You see, with all that sauce, the pasta couldn’t exactly stick together, could it?
Notice it going everywhere? (Oh, and those cheese biscuits in the lower left? Also really, really good)
Yeah…. So it might’ve been a little messy….
But it still looked cool in the pan and tasted so much better than just “plain ol’ pasta.”
Incredible edible Harry Potter cakes
With all the hype around Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 2 currently going on, I’ve seen some really awesome HP cakes popping up, too.
Now most of them seem to be from previous years, previous movies, previous books….but whatever. They’re cool regardless. The sources are all linked below the pictures and some of them even have how-to tutorials.
The Sorting Hat from The Quirky Confectioner
Mike’s Amazing Cakes (Yes, that’s a cake, and yes, that’s the last line of the book)
Snitch from Cake Nouveau
Mandrake from Chotda
Deathly Hallows graves cupcakes from The Party Animal
Harry Potter books from Follow Me, Follow You
~Edited~ Here are some more my sister sent me.
And here’s a video from College Humor feature Guy Fieri at Hogwarts. :P
Combining Canada Day and 4th of July – Pinwheel swirl cookies (Picture heavy)
An awesome thing about Canada Day and Independence Day being so close together is that the color scheme is so similar that I could logically be lazy *and* resourceful all in one.
So on July 1st, Canada, I mixed up my colors and made half of my cookie lollipops into red and white Canada cookies, and the other half into American red, white, and blue ones. Score!
I have quite a few pictures, so I’ll try to keep the text minimal here. Check out SugarBelle for the original inspiration, although I didn’t try to make mine look exactly like hers. Where’s the fun in exact replicas? Anyway, pictures:
Breakage happens, shhhh….
Twist and shout! This whole process was so much like playing with Play-Doh. Except this I could steal bites of without grossing myself out. Did you ever eat Play-Doh? Yeah, not recommended…
A little rugged, huh? Oops!
Can you see the crystals? I ran out of flour and “floured” my countertop with sugar for half of them to keep ‘em from sticking.
Before and after shots….sorry for the sucky lighting…but look how much they grew:
Oh yeah, I ended up with a bit extra of the red/white, so I did some candy canes and a snail creature. No sense in wasting it!
I didn’t bring popsicle sticks with me, so I ended up using skewers, breaking them in half for some and leaving them whole for others. They would’ve looked better if I had bigger or flat sticks, but it worked.
And for my mini-lollypop swirl, I decided he looked kinda like a cross between a snail and a worm, but either way, he got a face and a toothpick base.
This one may have gotten a little, uh, crispy around the edges.
Am I the only one that looks at the bottom of cookies, too? Probably.
The red/white/blue ones ended up not looking too blue on the outside, but rest assure, the insides were much more equally distributed.
Yeah, probably the only one to snatch a cookie pop from the eater’s hands to go take a picture of the inside, too, huh? At the very least, I could’ve waited until I was eating my own cookie and taken a picture of that one, but nope, had to take theirs, hehe.
All in all, great success. This is the sugar cookie recipe I used, except I cut it down to 16 servings instead of 60, left out the vanilla, and split it into roughly 4 cookies (plus candy canes, and minus the dough I ate).
Find other red, white, and blue treats at Cupcake Apothecary.
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