Quirky Cookery Easter Bunny

Yes, I fully realize that Easter was a few months ago, but whatever.

What happens when you cross this original:

With this purple evolution/spin:

With a couple dozen pre-cracked eggs:

With a silly Jessi who just let her family know that she had a blog right before Easter?

You get this entered into the yearly egg contest:

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.

Fries are just a vehicle for dipping sauces

I love a good fry. Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, hot, and salted just enough to not be overbearing.

A bad fry? Still edible. Soggy, mushy, unsalted or salted too much, chewy, cardboardy, droopy. Whatever.

While I can adore a good fry without any sauce at all, I think they truly shine as just a dipping sauce vehicle. I don’t just mean ketchup either. Mustard, french dressing, salsa, cottage cheese, cheese, barbecue sauce. Whatever.

So it’s no surprise that when we stopped by Arby’s, I didn’t turn down a single sauce offered.

Actually, I started off by ordering their new buffalo chicken sandwich, hoping the sauce there would offer something new, but I can say that it was underwhelming enough that I just added Arby’s sauce to give it flavor. Oops.

new buffalo chicken sandwich from arby's - no sauce, sloppy, disgusting looking

The fries were the real stars of the meal, though. Delicious rings of deep-fried potatoes in all sorts of sizes and shapes, perfect for smothering in creamy sauces.

curly fries from arby's

honey mustard sauce, horseradish dip, arby's bbq sauce, and new triple pepper sauce

Arby’s and horsey sauce were of course featured, along with trying their honey mustard and a triple pepper sauce that had a funky taste that we couldn’t quite place. Weird.

The absolute best way to use fries is to scoop up the sopping mess from over-saucing an Arby’s roast beef sandwich with a combo of Arby’s bbq sauce and horseradish sauce. I don’t care how unhealthy it may be or how disgusting it might sound or look even, as an occasional treat, it rocks my socks.

Arby's roast beef sandwich with arby's sauce and horsy horsey horseradish sauce and curly fries

Who knew fries were such multi-taskers, huh?