Saturday dinner party

This weekend, I embarked on cooking adventure #2.  This time, I decided to take on a challenge more within my abilities as a novice cook.  I also decided it would be fun to host some friends to try out my creation.  Julie and Chris were nice enough to suffer through.  The thing about Julie is that she is very complimentary - which is exactly what I needed.  When she first walked in the door, she started telling me how good everything smelled.  Thank God for her!

For dinner,  I decided to make a cashew chicken casserole.  Jared and I were given this recipe at one of our wedding showers and had not tried it yet.  It looked easy enough and had a lot of things we love...cashews, chicken and it was a dinner in a single dish.  I am not yet to the point that I want to multi-task!

I went to Wal-Mart and bought all the necessary supplies.  I am loyal to Publix - I love their customer service and fresh produce and don't mind paying a little more for their clean environment and friendly employees.  I felt like such a traitor going to Wal-Mart but the prices are very cheap.

I was very worried about this dish at first.  All the condensed soups did not look appetizing as I was preparing the mixture for baking.  But it turned out looking great!

For dessert, I pulled down a great looking recipe from Pinterest!  For those of you that are not familiar with Pinterest, you should be.  Pinterest is a virtual pinboard full of great ideas from home ideas to photo ideas to recipes.  I LOVE IT!  But it is another time-sucker (like Facebook).  I might be addicted. Back to the food...

The recipe was for Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes.  Follow this link to view the picture: http://pinterest.com/pin/68034676/.  It is copyrighted so I couldn't show it here.  These were very easy to make and I really enjoyed making them and eating the batter that was created.

A note on the foil cupcake liners - they had these white cupcake liners inside them and I had NO IDEA what they were for.  Should I leave them in or take them out?  As you can see, I took them out of all but one.  I didn't see where it made a difference but maybe with regular cupcakes, it does?

So how did everything taste?  The casserole was good but not my favorite.  It needed some more flavor and my dinner guests agreed (even Julie).  Overall, we gave the chicken casserole a...

Now, the Oreo cheesecake cupcakes were incredible!  I mean so delicious.  They had a full Oreo cookie at the bottom which was topped with an Oreo cheesecake mixture.  Heavenly... We gave the dessert a...

Definite improvement from last weekend's project and I added a dessert to our family menu for many years to come!  

Well, at least I tried.

My husband's birthday was Sunday. I love birthdays because I love to celebrate, especially celebrations about people I love! For his birthday, Jared requested that I make Cake Pops versus buying a cake from a grocery store which is what I have done for all his past birthdays.  Cake Pops are essentially balls of cake on a lollipop stick. Jared was originally introduced to the idea by two talented ladies in our LifeGroup class at church and he has been in love with the idea ever since.  So I went to Books-A-Million and ordered my Cake Pops book in preparation for the big day.  The book is so cute and full of great ideas for people that are skilled enough to follow the instructions.

Jared originally requested that I make the monkey cake pops included in the book.  Boy, did they look difficult.  I agreed to make them - I mean it was his birthday - but I was secretly thinking "YOU MUST BE KIDDING".  I mean they were like little monkey heads with eyes, ears, mouths, drawn on smiles in other words - a lot of detail.  Didn't he know I am an amateur?

Saturday morning, I ventured out for the items needed and it was a long list.  Luckily, the baking powers-that-be were on my side because I could not find a lot of the items needed.  This could have been completely my fault as I had no idea what I was looking for.  Needless to say, the monkeys were axed and we went with a simpler recipe.  "Simple" cupcake pops with swirls on top...

Looks pretty easy, right? Well, looks can definitely be deceiving.  Everything started out very well.  To make these beautiful desserts, you must first make basic cupcake pops - precious little things - this is what I am talking about!

The first few steps worked out great.  I figured out I am good at a few things.  The first is making cakes from a box mix.  I know it isn't rocket science but it is a step in the right direction!  Also, I let the cake cool for the right amount of time and crumbled and assembled them in balls well! Things were looking up.

How quickly things changed.  After making and cooling the cake balls, you were supposed to put them through a flower-shaped cookie cutter and VOILA! - they became cupcakes.  Mine did not - they just looked like misshapen cake balls.  Next was dipping them into candy coating.  I have to admit, the candy coating was cool!  These little disks turn into melted candy ready for your dipping pleasure after about 2 minutes in the microwave.  Dipping was difficult!  The candy was so thick and took away a lot of the shape of the pops!

I also forgot to read ahead in the instructions to see that you had to stick the lollipop sticks in as soon as the balls were dipped!  So one ball was too hard to put on a stick by the time I read this section.  So after all of that, this is what we got...

Well, at least I tried. Two on a stick but nothing like the picture, two with the stick all the way through and one lone ranger just laying there.  We ate them immediately and it turns out they were pretty good so at least, they had that going for them.

Good things that came from this experiment:

1.)  It was a lot of fun!

2.)  Jared and I had a great laugh at the finished product.

3.)  I learned a lot for next time.

Any suggestions from other baker's out there on things I can do to make the dipping and shaping easier?

Lastly, I told Jared he has to rate everything I make for purposes of the blog and he gave this creation a ...drum roll please....

Not too shabby - I'll take it!

Hi there!

I am not a great cook - not even a good cook - in fact, average would be a stretch.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE food.  All kinds of food really but all food I eat has one thing in common - it was made by someone else.  I have tried to cook many times.  My favorite attempt is when I tried to make one of my husband's favorite dishes - chicken tetrazzini.  The recipe called for 1/4 cup of flour and I added 1 1/4 cups.  The sauce was a large ball of dough.  It was completely inedible.  

Despite these failed attempts, I do want to cook.  Food (cooked the right way) is beautiful and being a good cook is charming. I long to be the woman who brings the best dish to the party, the baked goods that are known throughout the town, and the host of a great dinner party without having to hide take-out containers. So, that leads me to this blog.  My attempt at learning the art of cooking and chronicling my progress along the way.  Here it goes - wish me luck!