poprock cookies

That’s what it says on the desserts page of the menu for The Ostinato. In school, we had to design a restaurant and my group chose a musical theme for ours. There are 6 different dining rooms for 6 different styles of music and different meals themed around each of the 6 styles of music! One of the desserts is POPROCK COOKIES! (Guess wich style of music – Pop.) so we decided to try and make Poprock Cookies to hand out as samples in our presentation. I had Corrin over after school and we used the Best- Big- Fat -Chewy- Chocolate -Chip -Cookies -Ever recipe with a few Ostinato touches. My mum went to Bobby Clow’s to get brown sugar, Rolos (which we were going to use for the caramel), and poprocks. When she got to the store, she called us to say that there were no rolos, and no poprocks! But there were caramel squares. And the closest thing to poprocks was nerds, so better nerds than nothing! Corrin cut the caramel squares into pieces and added them to the batter, and we sprinkled the nerds on top right before they went into the oven. Like someone in my class said, ” They have everything!”

mothers day/italian night/tadpoles

Happy Mothers day, Mothers! Today the weather was gorgeous! My mum sat in the sun all morning with nobody to disturb her because we were all swimming. . . but she got a sunburn. I was doing a project pretty much all day, so sadly, I didn’t get to enjoy much of the sun. When we got home, we had a scrumptious brunch. And for supper we had homemade ham and cheese pizza pizza and brushetta. (That’s why it was italian night.)The brushetta was SO good!!!!!!!! (melting feta cheese, crispy bread, juicy tomatoes. . .!) Finally, for dessert, we had Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cake! It said, “Happy Mothers Day” Oh! And remember the frog spawn that Darragh brought home on “big baking day”? It hatched onto tons of tadpoles! We moved them into a tank in our kitchen so that they’re easyer to see. Darragh is starting a blog called Tadpole Times about the life of our tadpoles. It is from the point of view of a tadpole called Arnold and she is a really good writer so I’m sure it will be quite good. But I won’t spoil it for you. If you want to read it, just go to tadpoletimes.wordpress.com

pretty spring flowers

brushetta!

big baking day

everyone enjoys themselves

For some reason, all our family came over for dinner today and I only found out last night. So I decided to help my mum make a blackberry and apple crumble for dessert. Then I decided to make the crumble by myself. Then I decided to make a custard tart too. Then I decided to make a jam pasty with the extra pastry. Oh, and we also got out the brownies that I made on Friday. Everything on this post is a thing you’ve already seen but now they’re all together in one “never-before-seen-feature-presentation”. And there were a few changes made: I made more custard so the crust wasn’t as big, I didn’t spill the nutmeg on the custard tart, I put more jam in the pasty because last time Darragh said there wasn’t enough, the brownies were not skor this time, and I just realised I forgot to put sugar on the top of the pasty.

Today was really fun and I’m glad because I don’t like to waste the last day of the weekend. In the morning, I peeled apples for about an hour for the crumble then baked for the rest of the morning until the guests arrived. Then I baked some more while they were here. For dinner my dad made burgers – delicious! We hung around the yard for most of the evening, then went for a walk and had a look at my uncle, Jon’s new recording studio. (Darragh and my cousin, Kiera came back with some frog spawn.) When we got back, dessert was served! That was. . . 14 desserts! 14 absolutely delicious desserts !   

P.S. there are quite a few pictures!

mmmmm chocolate brownie

BIG CRUMBLE

My cousin Simon enjoys dessert!

 

my cousin Nia says “cheese” (that’s pretty much all she ate for supper)

rock cakes

I can’t believe how long it’s been since my last post – it’s probably a world record! Anyway, when my grandad came back from England, he brought me my great grandmother’s Be-Ro cook book. I was looking through it and I saw Rock Buns which reminded me of Hagrid’s Rock Cakes that he makes in Harry Potter. I decided to make them. I delayed the process because we didn’t have any currants   But I just used raisins instead. The recipe said to cook them for 20 minutes between 425 and 450 degrees, so I put the temperature at 435. But that turned out to be too hot and the bottoms burned. I tried one anyway, and I don’t think you could really notice that they were burnt – that just made them even more Hagrid-ish!

picture will come soon, I just didn’t want to wait any longer to post it!!

no wheat, no dairy

I have been trying not to eat much wheat or dairy this week because I had a sinus infection. So this morning I made no wheat, no dairy pancakes. I made the normal recipe but instead of normal flour, I used spelt flour. And instead of normal milk, I used rice milk and soy milk. The batter was quite thin, but they were fine. I can’t believe yesterday we had two crocuses and today we have a snow storm! I just put some cereal on the deck for the robins. We might have ham and scalloped potatoes for supper – maybe another post!

custard tart

baking blind

When my dad was little, his mum always made custard tarts for him. And today, we made one together. Last time I made a pastry, I had trouble getting it to stick together, but this time it was okay. This is also the first time I have “baked blind” (which does not involve the baker being blind) We put parchment paper on the pastry, and filled it with rice. This is to weight it down and to stop the pastry from bubbling up. Then my dad showed me a trick for getting all the extra pastry off. We quickly heated up some milk and sugar, and mixed it with 2 eggs. Finally, we sprinkled a bit of nutmeg on (I accidentally spilled a bit) and put it in the oven. The dish was really deep, and we could have doubled the amount of egg mixture, but oh well. Darragh doesn’t like custard(unbelievable!) so I made her a jam pasty with the extra pastry. I brushed the top with egg, cut vents on the folded side, pushed the open sides together, and sprinkled a little bit of sugar on top. It looked like it came right out of the book!

Darragh's jam pasty

custard tart

alexa’s cookies

Yesterday, Darragh had her friend, Alexa, over for a sleepover and Alexa brought cookies that she and her sister had made. they were decorated with jelly beans and colourful icing. One of them had icing that was a blueish – grey colour. (Alexa’s sister was mixing the colours)

the deathly hallows

 

Today, Leavesden Studios (where they filmed the Harry Potter movies) is opening 3 hour tours and to celebrate the grand opening, I made a cake and a few cupcakes decorated with the symbol of the deathly hallows. I made the starlight yellow recipe (like always) but this time, I wanted to try something new. So I made starlight brown – looked at the ingredients that it calls for to make marble cake, and instead of adding them to one thirdof the recipe, I multiplied it by three and added it to the whole thing. But we were debating on whether or not it would need the extra baking soda – we decided it didn’t. And we were wrong. Luckily, the worst that happened was that the batter was really dense.

round tops!

When the cupcakes came out , they were so perfectly round – it was movie-like! The only icing we had was vanilla and I don’t think that looks very good on chocolate cake. So I tried making chocolate buttercream frosting. I thought it worked pretty well, but it hardened in about 80 seconds! I managed to ice the cake and one cupcake in chocolate, but on the second one, the icing was so hard it destroyed the cupcake! It wasn’t even fixable -  half the top came right off – so Liah and I taste-tested that one and the others were done with vanilla. And I also came up with a new definition of the deathly hallows! The elder wand, the cloak of invisibility, and the resurrection cake!

                                                                                        

bread pudding

A few days ago, my aunt, Sarah, was looking at flyers and she found a recipe for bread pudding. She showed it to me and said how delicious it looked. Today, (which is awesomely a storm day!) we were going to Sarah’s house for supper so I made cinnamon raisin bread pudding and brought it as dessert. Everybody loved it except for my sister, Liah.

egg and milk

When I poured the eggs and milk together to make the sauce, it looked really cool because those were the only ingredients in the bowl. Also, my sister, Darragh, made everyone a snack today that consisted of green apple, cheese, crackers, and biscuits.

Before it's cooked

Darragh's snack

final fruit tray

For the last day of the March Bake, I made a fruit tray. It was meant to be a healthy break from the cakes and stuff that we had all week, but that didn’t really work out, because it was served with the rest of the district 12 cake. So we got out all the different kinds of fruit, cut them up, and I tried to figure out a good pattern to put them in. I think it turned out pretty good. My cousin, Simon, kept taking a bite of melon (which he called “orange”) and then putting it back on the plate. I am not looking forward to going back to school but I guess there’s not much I can do about that. Even though March Bake is over,  I’ll still be posting when I get the chance!

and a side of cake