This Week in Desserts

So one of my favorite things that we do at our restaurant is celebrate our team members' birthdays. For one, who doesn't love getting a dessert on their birthday?? It is fun for everyone. Especially me because I LOVE dessert - both making and enjoying it. Towards the end of pregnancy I craved anything sweet and now that I'm in my fourth trimester, that craving has stayed with me! So this way, I get to sample a little and  not feel like I have to eat the whole thing. Because I would. Plus, it gives me a chance to make one of the thousands of desserts that I find on Pinterest. Oh how I love Pinterest! I love to be crafty and make things but have never been particularly creative, but I am a GREAT copier. Luckily for me there are people out there that come up with crafty things to do with things like blocks of wood, shoe box lids and scrapbook paper - so I don't have to :). 

Back to my original thought - desserts!! This month was particularly busy for birthdays at our restaurant, which our team loved. Last week I made this recipe for Oreo Birthday Cake which I found on, you guessed it, Pinterest. Here is what the cake looks like online:

Annnnnd here is what mine looked like (minus half - I didn't have time to take a picture before we left the house and it was immediately devoured once I got to the restaurant):

...not quite the same! As Chris said, "Is that mold all over the top??!" Uh, no. That's delicious Oreo icing - can't you tell? I don't know what I do to mess up icing, but this happens EVERY time. I try so hard to follow the recipe step-by-step, but something goes terribly wrong and it is too runny - note the puddle in the middle. Any of my baker friends, feel free to tell me what I am doing wrong! Luckily, it was still AMAZING and no one cared that it looked moldy.

This next one turned out better aesthetically  but I forgot to take a picture of that one period - again, no time! You know how it is rushing to get out of the house with baby, diaper bag, dessert, let the dog out, cover the couches so said dog isn't all over them with her hairy self while we are gone, turn out the lights, forgot the car keys - all to make it on time. Somehow photos fall to the wayside. But, I will try harder next time!

This recipe is actually from Eagle Brand. Enough said. Give me a can of sweetened condensed milk and a spoon and I'll have THAT for dessert. Much less anything that it is in! It is called Chocolate Truffle Pie and you can find the recipe and this photo on the Eagle Brand website. The only thing I changed was the whipping cream. I can't even get confectioner's sugar + butter = icing so there's no way I can turn cream into whipped cream. Yet, anyway. I just bought a tub of Cool Whip and used that in place. No one seemed to notice! It was also fantastic. 

So that was our week in desserts! Loved every bit of it and I'm sure you will too if you try either of these!

Life is Short & Goes by Fast

As our sweet baby girl nears her 6 month birthday, I am realizing yet again how fast life passes by! I can't believe that she is halfway to being one year old - just the thought brings tears to my eyes. But, it is so fun to watch her grow and learn and oh how we both look forward to all of the fun things that are to come as she gets older.

That being said, I want to be so much better at documenting these days: 1) because they are going by too fast to fully appreciate them and I know that in the future we will look back at these stories with great fondness and be so glad that we wrote them down; and 2) so that Emma can look back on them and see what nuts we were and how even though we have no idea what we are doing, we love her SO MUCH.

So here we go! I didn't take any photos of her today, so here's a flash back 
from the day she was born. Let the parenthood adventure begin! It seems like this was just yesterday...

Stay tuned, more to come soon!