Happy Thanksgiving

Hope you all had a great Turkey Day.  Here are some of our goodies we made for Thanksgiving. 

Halloween Day Treats

 This year's Halloween dinner consisted of mummy dogs (hot dogs wrapped in crescent rolls), zombie smiles (honeydew melons with marshmallow teeth), eyeballs (deviled eggs with an olive in the middle), and monster fingers (carrot sticks).

 And for dessert - Eyeball Pops (white chocolate covered oreos with gummy savers and chocolate chips)

Saturday's Halloween Treats

We had our annual church Trunk-Or-Treat party today, so we had a Halloween treat filled day. We started with Pumpkin pancakes (I added some pumpkin pie filling in).  I forgot to take pictures.  Then for lunch we made slimy macaroni and cheese(homemade mac and cheese with some green food dye)

with ghoulish smile apple slices (apples, peanut butter, and candy corns).

Then we topped it off with some ghost and mummy cupcakes.

(I made my own fondant using a marshmallow fondant recipe.  It tastes yummy and is fun to decorate with.  For the recipe I used, click here.)

More fun treats to come for dinner on Monday night!

Candy Corn Pancakes

I've seen these popping up all over. Clever!  I used my round waffle maker and put regular batter in the middle.  Then made a circle of yellow batter around that and orange batter around the edges.  A big hit for the kiddos.

Chocolate Cut Out Cookies

I've never made chocolate cut-out cookies before, but it sounded good. I got the recipe from Our Best Bites.  They were good - not a chewy moist chocolate cookie like I normally want from a chocolate cookie,  but good for decorating.  I rolled them in cocoa powder like she suggested which gives it more of a dark chocolate flavor.  Regular sugar cookies are still my favorite, but these are fun for Halloween or Thanksgiving when you think of dark rich colors and flavors..

Dirt With Worms

This is a fun easy dessert for the kids. It's chocolate pudding with crushed oreos (for dirt) and gummy worms. 

You can tell its good by how much pudding is on their faces.

Carmel Apples

Yummy Fall Treat from last Friday:

Carmel is my favorite! 

Autumn Treats

Holiday time starts in October for me.  One of my favorite things about the holidays are the treats.  Our family does dessert twice a week (one for family night on Monday and one for Friday night).  That way my kids don't expect dessert every day after dinner.  So I put together a little Holiday Goodies Chart to make sure we get in all the good stuff.  

Each Monday and Friday, they get to pick one of the treat cards out of the chart to make together and eat. 

This past Monday we made these Orange Kissed Cookies.  It's a new recipe I got from Our Best Bites blog that I wanted to try out.  I added some black sprinkles on top to make them a fun Halloween Treat.    They were oh, so good that I wanted to share them with you.

More yummy treats to come. . . .

Ice Cream Cake

I had an idea for my hubby's birthday.  I have always been a big fan of ice cream cake - the good ones with the cake and ice cream layers.  So I came up with my own spin off using a similar recipe to cake balls.

I started by baking a regular chocolate cake according to the instructions on the package. Then I  broke it up and put it in my mixer.

  I added about 6 scoops of cookies and cream ice cream

Mix it together until it's well blended.  You want a consistency about like cookie dough.

Next, I layered them into my dish.  I used a glass 9x9 square dish and was able to fill it to the brim.  For thinner layers, use a 9x13 pan.   Start with a layer of your cake on the bottom. Use 1/2 of your mixture.

Layer some softened ice cream on top.

Repeat layers finishing with ice cream on top.  Freeze overnight.  Serve how you like.

Our pieces were huge and yummy.  As you can see the layers are not perfect.  It tastes really good though.  The cake is cold and chewy.  The ice cream is creamy.  I'm totally going to do this again.

Happy Fourth of July - Rice Krispie Treats

This is my last fourth of july fun for this year.  Got this one from Random Thoughts of a Supermom.  Hope you all had a great Fourth!

Patriotic Pancakes

I split my batter into three parts. I put red food dye in one, blue dye in another and left the third.  I cooked up my pancakes, then Cut the red and "white" ones into strips.  I made the blue ones silver dollar sized then assembled them like a little flag.  SO fun!

The kids loved it!

Festive Jello

I used this recipe at Christmas to make red green and white jello.  It was a huge hit, so I figured, why not try red, white, and blue for the Fourth?  You can get the recipe at Tatertots and Jello.  It takes two days to set all the Jellos, but it's fun, yummy, and totally worth it.  I love the creaminess that the condensed milk brings to the jello!

Watermelon Waffles

Saw this idea on Random Thoughts of a Supermom.  Thought it would be a fun summer idea to pass along.

Our Valentine's Day

I always enjoy making fun pancakes for the kiddos on the holidays.  Here are my Valentine's pancakes.

A little red food coloring and a creativity goes a long way.  They are pretty simple really. I just poured the batter into a V-shape. Perfect for anyone you love.

I had lots of fun activities planned for us for Valentine's Day.  We decorated paper bags and exchanged Valentines

 The kids made the Valentines last Thursday so we could mail some and keep some for the exchange.  Plus Mom had some treats for them (M&M's and fun twisty heart straws)

We played Valentine's Bingo. I got the Free Printable from Lil Luna 

and Daddy even got roses for us.  He has this thing about not getting flowers because they just die in a couple days. So he bought us our own mini rose plants

We also had the kids eat early, then watch a movie while Jared and I enjoyed some steak "alone"  together. I'm proud to say that this is the first steak that I have cooked really well - not tough and full of flavor.  Yay!

Then we all enjoyed some little heart shaped apple pies together.

Ham Bone Soup

I've never actually cooked with my ham bone before, but I made this for dinner last night and it came out yummy so I thought I'd share:

Ham Bone (plus any extra ham you might want to throw in)
2 cans pinto beans ( you could use dried beans, but that requires soaking overnight and all that - so I'm a wimp and I used canned beans)
1 can of corn
1 can of diced tomatoes
1/4 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. sliced carrots
2 T. barbeque sauce
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
1 clove garlic
a little rosemary

I threw it all in my crock pot in the morning and set it on low for 8 hours.  Perfect for a cold day like yesterday.

Wish I had taken a picture.

Holiday Candy Train

Instead of making the traditional gingerbread house, we changed things up a little bit this year.  We used to make candy trains in my family when I was little, so that is what we made this year.

Hopefully you can make out the train in the middle. It has sour straw tracks and M & M wheels and is surrounded by a forest of candy trees and flowers.  It was a lot of fun to make and it will be even more fun to eat over the next week.  Yummy!

Pizza Cake

I always like to bake something fun for the kids' birthday.  Here's Mikyla's.

It''s a lemon cake with red icing, shaved whit chocolate, and fruit roll-up pepperonis. The kids thought it was great!

Halloween Food

Every holiday, I like to make a little something special to eat that day.  Here's our Halloween inspired foods that we ate.
Cinnamon Swirl Pancakes (although mine didn't turn out this cute) I got the recipe from The Idea Room blog.

Pumpkin and Bat Sandwiches with Jack-O-Lantern Smiles (oranges)

Mummy Soda

Spaghetti Brains and Eyeballs (just spaghetti and meatballs with a pea in the middle for the "eye")

And some Homemade Apple Pie to top it off!

Since Halloween was on Sunday this year, the kids dressed up and passed out candy instead of trick-or-treating.  Mikyla said "It was the best Halloween ever!"  They enjoyed seeing some kids from their school come by and loved all the yummy food they got.  Hope you all had a great celebration, too.