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.
Ladybugs on boats and bacon caterpillars – Tyson grilled chicken
I guess they’re more like rafts, since I didn’t add bacon sails like I considered, but still better than ants on a log.
Actually, my final dish is completely different than what I originally had in mind. Tyson and Foodbuzz sent me a coupon to try out Tyson’s new Grilled & Ready items. Turns out, my store only carries the chicken variety and not the steak like I was planning on, so those plans got scrapped.
Then I thought they were more stick-like and less flat, so my ideas involving various sized cubes wasn’t really going to look right. The next step I got mostly right, realizing they were larger pieces, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it wasn’t all strips like I thought it’d be.
See? There are a fair number of chicken strip type pieces but most weren’t very long and there were way more “bits” than I would’ve expected. Oh well. At least there were plenty of little pieces to taste test, I guess. :P
Ultimately, instead of the chicken becoming the main focus of the dish like would be typical of a review, the pieces were used as vehicles for my ladybugs. Had there been more full pieces like there should’ve been, there would’ve been way more ladybugs.
I wanted some bacon caterpillars, but wasn’t sure how well they’d hold up.
To get this little guys, I sliced turkey bacon into smaller strips, folded it onto toothpicks (skewers for the larger snake-esque ones, and just free form with the squiggly ones), and baked them on an greased baking sheet.
They slid off surprisingly well, but that left me with some holes to deal with. Which of course meant, more smiley faces. :P
It looks more like a ghost there, huh? Ooooooo.
While I’m at it, I had some other, um, odd turnouts. Before I settled on exactly how to make the ladybugs, I tried several variations.
Some were obviously better than others. When I was trying to cut the tomatoes the other direction, I got some weird lumpy ones, so I added smiley faces to those, too, and made ‘em look like something from Monsters Inc.
Alright, alright, enough pictures. Anyway, Tyson’s Grilled & Ready chicken was definitely tasty. L even said it was her favorite part of the dish, even over and above the bacon (*gasp*). It stayed tender and moist, heated up quickly, and the grill marks were a nice touch. I do wish the pieces had been more uniform in size and shape, but oh well, it tasted great and gave me a reason to split up the package into two dishes.
Pancake cereal – Mini pancakes rule
Yep, dozens of itty bitty pancakes the size of dimes. What possessed me to do this, I don’t even remember, but it turned out to be a really fun way to eat breakfast.
After painstakingly placing dozens of circles on the griddle, I actually attempted individually flipping most of them before staying “screw it” and leaving the rest to cook all the way through from the bottom.
It might not look bad, but wait until you try holding your arm up over a hot griddle for several minutes straight, only to then have to start flipping the first set before they burn. Yikes. So I didn’t plan that one out too well, huh?
I expected them to be eaten on a plate with a fork, but it turns out that it’s way more fun to toss them all in a bowl, pour on some syrup, and eat with a spoon like you would cereal. Probably not the most nutritious approach, but oh so good!
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