Windowpane Hearts--or whatevers

My oldest son wanted to make these Windowpane Heart cookies from Family Fun for Valentine's Day. I told him we would, but with the school Valentine's Day party and his grandparents visiting last weekend, we made them after Valentine's Day. Consequently, we decided not to make them heart-shaped, but used different cookie cutters instead.

I mixed them up on Saturday thinking that they would be fun to make with Grammy, but the weekend got busy, and we didn't get to it. The dough was in the fridge waiting for us, so we made them this afternoon after the grandparents left to go home. We were stuck indoors watching it snow, so it was a good snowy day activity.

The boys had fun helping to roll out the dough, and it wasn't messy, because the recipe tells you to roll it between two layers of waxed paper. I DO NOT enjoy making cut out cookies, but this was the best cut out cookie recipe I have used to date. I am pretty sure I will use it again to make normal cut out cookies to decorate with icing.

What makes this recipe special is that you bake the cookies on aluminum foil and fill the cut out centers with hard candy. Similar to the Family Fun recipe, we used Jolly Ranchers. The pieces were too big for our small openings, so I used a heavy knife to "whack" the pieces into halves on a cutting board. The boys liked dropping the pieces of candy into the little holes in the cookies too.

I can not even begin to tell you how pleased I am with the way these turned out. I did not have high hopes for them turning out anywhere near as pretty as the Family Fun shows them, but ours did! Yay! It's the little things in life, isn't it? The boys had fun and were so surprised at what they looked like when they came out of the oven. It was a fun baking day with the boys. Thanks for stopping by!

Kindergarten Valentine Party Crafts

These will be posted over on my stamping blog tomorrow, because these are craft-related.  However, they use food, so I decided to share them here on the cooking blog too, even though they're not cooked or baked.  Enjoy!

I planned the crafts for last week's kindergarten Valentine's Day party, and I wanted to share them with you.  It makes me happy.

 

The first project was a Jolly Lolly from the Family Fun website.  I made lots of mustaches and kissing lips out of craft foam for the kiddos to choose from.  Of course, there were black, brown and blonde mustaches along with bright red, pink and fuschia lips for all tastes.  I had them all cut out with the holes punched so the kids just chose the "mask" and slid it onto a lollipop stick.  Then, I printed mailing labels, one for each child, that said, "Happy Valentine's Day! Love, (insert name here)"  That also made it easy to tell who had made the craft and who hadn't based on whose names were still left on the sheet of labels.

Next, the kids made these little Candy Airplanes, also from Family Fun. I bought cheap valentines stickers for the kids to use to decorate the stick of gum. Then, they assembled the biplane with help from the parents and aides at the party. I had the candy and rubberband in individual baggies for each child. Once they built the plane, they put it back in the baggie and affixed another mailing label that I printed to say, "Valentine, you make my heart soar!" with little biplane cliparts on each side.

The kids all seemed like they had lots of fun making these cute valentines to take home and give to parents, siblings, grandparents, whoever. Thanks for stopping by!

Fall Fling Food

Happy Halloween!

Every year on Halloween night, our church, Wilkinson Church of Christ, hosts a huge community party called Fall Fling. We fill the church with carnival games for kids of all ages, inflatables, face painting, etc. We serve a small dinner for the kids coming through too.

I've never been a part of planning the food before, but our children's pastor asked me if I would be willing to co-chair it this year with another lady who has planned it before. I thought it sounded like a challenge, so I accepted. My job, thus far, has been to plan the groceries and gather the donations needed to make food for the 400 people we have planned for.

We started the planning a few weeks ago. I started searching for festive food to serve on the Family Fun website, keeping in mind that whatever we chose would have to be made in massive quantities. We ended up choosing the following two main dishes:

Pizza Mummies

Worms on a Bun
(I just finished cutting 25 lbs.,
200 hot dogs, into 9 worms each!)

Along with those two main dishes, we will be serving orange and black nacho chips with cheese and the following festive cookies for dessert:

Fudge Stripe Witch's Hats
(See yesterday's post for a picture of mine.
I made 311 of these!)

Nutter Butter Ghosts
(See yesterday's post for a picture of mine.
I made 318 of these.)

We always hand out Popcorn Witch's Hands to the kids too.

I've seen the cookie and popcorn hands all over the web, so I have no idea who to attribute the original ideas to.

I made the cookies yesterday, and cut the hot dogs this morning to prepare them for the Worms on a Bun. I hope this all comes together well tonight! Thanks for stopping by!

Pumpkin Smoothie

I love fall. I love the flavors and smells of fall baking and cooking. A few weeks ago, I was having a pumpkin craving, and I found this Pumpkin Smoothie recipe on the Family Fun webpage. I gave it a try. It was... ...interesting. It wasn't bad, but I don't think it's something I'll make again either. You should try it if you like pumpkin a lot. Thanks for stopping by!

Grandma Kuck's Rice Pudding

A few months ago, I posted about a rice pudding recipe I had found that you made with already cooked rice. It was pretty good, but I became less impressed with it the second and third times I made it. Have you ever had that happen with a recipe you thought you really liked the first time you had it?
Losing excitement about my former recipe made me want to try some others that I had stashed in my "recipes to try someday" collection. Today, I tried this Grandma Kuck's Rice Pudding recipe from Family Fun. It is fantastic! It is exactly what I was looking for--creamy and wonderful! There's no grainy rice texture in it at all, and it's super easy! Now I guess the real test is whether I will like it the second and third times I make it, but I'm sure I will! Thanks for stopping by!

Umbrella Cookies

Posting about the Rabbit Cookies last week reminded me of when we made the snack last year during "U" week at preschool. I couldn't come up with anything except for umbrellas! Coincidentally, that was the theme of the week. They had patio umbrellas set up in the room and children's umbrellas hanging upside-down from the ceiling for a paper toss game. So our Umbrella Cookies were a hit! Preschool is so much fun--for Mommy too! Thanks for stopping by!

Rabbit Cookies

It's time for another installment of fun baking on the Cookin' with Melissa blog.


My son was snack leader one day this week at preschool. It was "R" week, and he thought we should make Rabbit Cookies. I was skeptical that we could come up with such a thing. I did some research and found an answer online. As usual, the creative people at Family Fun created a way to make Easter Bunny Cupcakes. We only do cupcakes at preschool on birthdays, so I adjusted the recipe to make them into Rabbit Cookies. He loved them, and we had a great time chatting while we made them. Thanks for stopping by!

Mulligatawny

Do you remember the Seinfeld episode with the Soup Nazi? Various soups are mentioned in that episode, and one was called Mulligatawny. I have never known what that soup was or what was in it. Just recently, it was on a recipe list in a Family Fun cooking email, so I took a look at the recipe. It's basically a chicken and vegetable soup with a touch of curry. Jim and I love curry, so I had to try it. It is FABULOUS!!


If you read this blog very often, you know that I don't usually follow recipes exactly. I wanted to make this soup so that it would be hot and ready to eat for lunch when we got home from church. I made it up the night before and put it in a crock pot. I basically followed the recipe until the part where you add the chicken broth and tomatoes and let it simmer for an hour. At that point, I put the sauteed vegetable, chicken and curry mixture into the crock pot with the chicken broth and diced tomatoes. I let it cook on low overnight and then turned it off before we left for church. When we got home, we made up some rice, turned the crock pot on high just to heat it up, and Voila! Lunch was served!

I love making dishes that call for a lot of chopped vegetables. I like stand at my cutting board and chop a pile of veggies with my Santoku knife. I've taken some notes from watching the Food Network personalities, and I have to say, I've gotten fairly proficient at it for someone untrained in the culinary arts--not to mention I'm always looking for ways to get more vegetables into our family's diet. You may think this soup sounds a little strange just from its name or because it has curry in it, but don't be afraid to try something new. The curry isn't overpowering at all, and I think you'll be surprised at how good it is! Thanks for stopping by!

Butternut Squash Souffle

This is an excellent Butternut Squash Souffle recipe I think I first tried about two years ago. It's made with butternut squash, but it tastes like pumpkin pie! I have also made this recipe by substituting sweet potatoes for the butternut squash, and it's just as good that way as well.

Also, I have made a double recipe of this and then froze half of it till I wanted to make it again. Or, if one recipe is too much, then freeze half till next time you have a craving for it. I just got some out of my freezer and made the other day. it was yummy! Thanks for stopping by!

Quick Warm Blueberry Sauce

Yesterday while we were stuck at home with all the snow, we had hot fresh waffles from scratch for breakfast. The boys, hubby included, like their waffles with plain old syrup, but I love this Quick Warm Blueberry Sauce recipe from Family Fun for mine. It's great on pancakes and ice cream too!


I have made it with Splenda instead of sugar, and it's great! I mentioned in a previous post about blueberry muffins that I love to buy frozen blueberries when they're on sale at Meijer. You can't beat the price compared to fresh blueberries. I hope you try this one, because it's easy and fantastic! Thanks for stopping by!

'08 Cars Birthday Cake

As promised yesterday, here's a picture of last year's Cars birthday cake. It's been so much fun to start making the boys' birthday cakes now that they're getting older and understand what all the fuss is about at birthday time. Thanks for stopping by!

Blueberry Buckle Muffins

I have been baking up a storm today! A special boy has a birthday this week, so I was baking cupcakes for his preschool class tomorrow and a cake for the family on Thursday. We were just about out of the boys' favorite blueberry muffins, so I made some of those too. Then, I got a call about making chocolate chip cookies for church guests this week, so I baked four dozen of those. Whew!


The boys love this blueberry muffin recipe, so I thought I'd share it with you. It's from Family Fun. You can find it on their website here. Blueberries are expensive! When Meijer runs a sale on their frozen blueberries, I buy them in large quantities! Thanks for stopping by!

Hat Cookies

It's "H" week at Kids' Kingdom Preschool. "H" is for hat, so what better for a snack than hat cookies? Thanks, Family Fun magazine, for all your great ideas for kids! Thanks for stopping by!

Holy Cow! It's a Birthday Cake!

Someone has a birthday! I am a very amateur cake decorator. The idea came from the Family Fun magazine website.

Yes, that is a big white blur on the picture. For privacy's sake, I took the name off of the picture. Too many people freely give away their privacy these days. I'm probably going a little overboard, but better too much than not enough. Thanks for stopping by!