Spring Fling

I'm naming this post Spring Fling because we're still going crazy with spring fruit. I got the idea from the title of a Fancy Nancy book. Now I read Nancy Clancy books, which are for older kids. Both series are really good, if you know any girls who don't already have them. But this isn't a book review blog, so now I'm going to go back to telling you about baking!!

Most years we go strawberry picking, but not this year! However, we've still gotten lots of strawberries lately, and so we found some good recipes to use them up. One morning we had whole wheat strawberry muffins for breakfast. These are really healthy and more like what my mom usually bakes us when we're not in quarantine. We all really liked them.

Our whole house smelled like a strawberry patch when we were baking these!

The muffins were really good, but our next strawberry breakfast was more exciting. We had strawberry breakfast popsicles! My Grammy Marcia introduced us to breakfast popsicles a few years ago and we love them. We usually make a delicious blackberry version, but decided to use our strawberries and try a new recipe. These are layered with granola and greek yogurt. The recipe calls for vanilla yogurt, but we used plain yogurt and just added some honey for sweetness. My dad thinks it would be better to swirl them, so that you get some of everything with each bite. We'll definitely try that next time, but the layers look very pretty! My sister and I really like putting in the colored sticks when we make them.

I think it's kind of silly but really fun to eat popsicles for breakfast!

My brother doesn't like yogurt, so he doesn't eat the popsicles, but he LOVED our next strawberry breakfast, which was strawberry coffee cake. He especially liked the pecans in the topping. I loved everything about it!

This was a big hit. The entire coffee cake disappeared really quickly!

Strawberry oatmeal cookies were our last strawberry breakfast treat. My mom actually gives us breakfast cookies a lot. They're usually made with oats and they're easy for us to eat on the way to school. Remember when we used to go to school?!

These are very soft and chewy.

We had strawberry shortcake for a strawberry dessert. We use the recipe from the Silver Palate cookbook. We baked the biscuits while we were eating dinner, so they were warm and ready to go when we were done.

Guess whose idea it was to make the shortcakes heart shaped!

Then we just layered them with strawberries and whipped cream. It was a perfect spring dessert!

But if you thought that we were done with rhubarb, you are incorrect! We made rhubarb cheesecake bars for tea one day. My mom really liked these, but my sister and I did not. I thought they were okay, but do you remember our rhubarb custard bars? I liked those more.

These are supposed to have a white and bright pink swirl, but ours mostly just mushed together.

Do you remember how Kelsie suggested that we make an upside down cake and so we made a nectarine one? Well we tried making a rhubarb upside down cake too! We made it with cake flour, and that made the cake VERY tender. The cake flour makes a big difference! But if you ever make it, you should know that it took us MUCH longer to get this cake cooked through than the recipe said.

This doesn't look very pretty, but it tasted amazing!

We served it with whipped cream. Of course!

This looked prettier sliced.

But then we made ANOTHER rhubarb cake. If you get tired of rhubarb, this would not be a very good house for you to live in!!! This one was a rhubarb custard cake. I don't know why it is called a custard cake, because it wasn't very custardy.

The rhubarb was supposed to be laid prettily on top. But when we were putting it in the oven, we saw the melted butter that was supposed to go in, still sitting on the counter!!!! So we had to pull the rhubarb out and add the butter and THEN put the rhubarb back on. And it didn't look right after that. Whoopsie! But it wouldn't have tasted right if we hadn't fixed it. And that would have DEFINITELY been worse!!!!

This rhubarb cake had a very chewy crust. We all loved that part. My dad and I liked the upside down cake better. But my mom and brother liked this one more. My sister didn't love either. This was my brother's favorite rhubarb dish that we've made.

Since we had a tie, we decided that we needed Rachel to be the tie-breaker.

And the winner was... upside down cake!!!!!

We've had a lot of good spring dinners too. We used a recipe called fiesta chicken, and made it with both chicken and shrimp. I liked the marinade and the salsa a lot, but I think that the recipe needs a better name. Fiesta Chicken sounds like something from a fast food restaurant. Maybe we should call it Harper's Mixed Grill with Avocado Corn Salsa!

I thought it looked nice how my mom arranged this like a pinwheel.

I liked Harper's Mixed Grill with Avocado Corn Salsa, but I liked our next grilled shrimp dinner even more. We had grilled coconut shrimp and scallops that we based off of this recipe. My mom picked this because my sister loves coconut and it became an instant family favorite.

We served them with grilled tomatoes, tomato mozzarella salad and grilled corn and it was a perfect meal!

For another dinner, we did something really special. First we watched a movie called Ratatouille. It is about a rat who wants to be a fancy chef. We don't usually get to watch movies, so we were very excited! My mom started a points system during quarantine and we get points for being kind and behaving well and lose points when we don't. So we were able to use 50 points to buy a movie!! But then, after the movie was over, my parents had another surprise for us and we made our own ratatouille. Actually, what we made is really called confit biyaldi. Confit Biyaldi is a variation on ratatouille which has the vegetables in thin slices, rather than just chopped up. Thomas Keller is the actual chef who was the food consultant for the movie and this is his recipe!

My dad sliced the vegetables using a mandolin. I wasn't allowed to touch it because it is VERY sharp!

When he was done, we had stacks of lots of vegetables. My mom used the extras to make zucchini chips and we ate them while the ratatouille cooked! It cooks for a loooooong time!!!!!

Then we stacked up all the slices in a spiral.

My brother and I were a little bit competitive at first about who got to do what. But then at the end, we were working together, which was more fun! The ratatouille was a ton of work, but I'm glad that we did it! It tasted really good and we all liked it a lot. We had it with fish. It was very filling and very healthy.

Doesn't this look amazing?!

Do you remember how on my last couple of posts, I've asked for suggestions about what we should make next? Well our super fun babysitter Chelsea suggested that we do no-bake cookies, and so we did! You might also remember how on our last post our other babysitter Kelsie suggested that we make upside down cake. Well the funny thing is that Kelsie and Chelsea are roommates AND their names rhyme AND they're both our babysitters AND they both like to cook AND we love them both so much!! So we listened to Chelsea and made no-bake cookie bars. And we actually made two types! First we made no bake chocolate peanut butter bars.

My former nanny Alex made something very similar to this for my third birthday and I still remember that my mom let me eat them for breakfast! Alex is in art school now but we miss her, and my mom texted her for the recipe, but she couldn't find it. So we found another one that we thought would be the same idea. This recipe was super easy and tasted just like Reece's peanut butter cups. My dad thought that they were a little bit sweet, but it was one of my mom's favorite things that we've made because she LOVES peanut butter! I do too!!

These are super easy and definitely worth making.

We also made a version called chubby hubby bars, which had pretzels in them. The best part about this recipe is that I did almost the entire thing all by myself!!! My brother helped me layer the pretzels, and my mom helped me do some measuring, but because everything is melted in the microwave, I really didn't need any help!!!! This is a great recipe for kids to do! My mom and Rachel liked the plain peanut butter bars better, but my brother and sister and I liked the ones with pretzels.

I like how you can see the pretzel layers when you cut these bars.

We made another special dessert that we'd had on our trip to Spain last summer. Do you remember how I blogged about cooking with Chef Ismael at the restaurant Rita? Well we made his deconstructed cheese cake dessert! This one was a little bit tricky, because we didn't have an exact recipe. And my mom didn't want us to eat raw egg yolks, which is what Chef Ismael had used. But we found a super cool way to make eating raw egg yolks safe by pasteurizing egg yolks ourselves! You have to follow the directions carefully, but you just heat them in the microwave enough to kill any bacteria, but not enough to cook them, and then you whisk them a lot.

They come out creamy, but not cooked.

We made a graham cracker crumble to put at the bottom of each bowl and then whipped sugar, cream cheese, cream and our egg yolks for a really long time. It was supposed to have a bruleed sugar top, but we realized at the last minute that we didn't have fuel for our kitchen torch. So we used a lighter instead!

The lighter definitely did not work as well as the torch, but this was still delicious!

Another special dessert that we made was sticky toffee pudding. First you cook chopped dates with water and baking soda on the stove, and then you mix them into the cake batter. Then before serving, you top the cake with a sticky sugar sauce and vanilla ice cream. The recipe says that you can make the sauce in advance and rewarm it again, but that did NOT work, and so we had to make the sauce a second time.

This is stupendous, but the sauce gets VERY sticky VERY fast!

Our second to last day of school, we had Harvest Day. Usually, when we're at school we harvest the vegetables from our school garden and do special activities. But this year we had a Zoom harvest day and got to pick special activities to do with teachers on Zoom. My teacher Mrs. Stevens did tie-dye cupcake decorating and of course I did that. Mrs. Stevens is the best first grade teacher in the entire world and I feel bad that every kid doesn't get to have her!!!! Unfortunately, my mom didn't read the email about the options until the night before and she had to be at work early the next day, so she got up REALLY early to make me vanilla cupcakes and frosting to use. She said that she never thought that she'd be up scraping vanilla beans in the middle of the night! But these cupcakes were very high quality and SOOOO worth it. Even she thought so. They were the best cupcakes we had ever had, definitely as good as ones that you buy at fancy cupcake stores. My dad doesn't even like vanilla very much, and he thought they were amazing too.

The tie-dye ones are the darker ones in the back. You make the tie-dye frosting by putting different color frostings in plastic wrap and then you put them into the piping bag, so that you can pipe different colors at the same time.

Harvest Day was also my brother's half-birthday, so we put a candle in a cupcake for him. My family celebrates half-birthdays because we celebrate EVERYTHING!!!!

Then, for the last day of school, my mom surprised us with a special breakfast. They were pink doughnuts and we were so surprised when we came downstairs! My mom actually makes us baked doughnuts a lot, but these weren't as healthy as our usual ones!!

I think that these baby doughnut pans are so cute.

I LOVED the pink frosting and sprinkles!!

Once school was over, we decided to make teacher gifts. We bake for our teachers every year, but this year we got to drive around and visit their houses!!!! It was so much fun to see all of my teachers and where they lived! The first thing that we made was inside out carrot cake cookies. These are sandwich cookies with carrot cake on the outside and cream cheese frosting in the middle. We don't use the frosting that comes with the recipe. We use my Grandma Linda's cream cheese frosting instead. She's a very good baker. She even made my parents' wedding cake!

This is me piping the frosting into the middle.

The other thing that we made for teacher gifts was oreo truffles. These were SO easy to make, but really fun and really good.

Our hands got a little bit messy rolling the balls, but dipping them in chocolate was even messier!

Then we drizzled different colored chocolate on top.

I thought that they looked very nice all boxed up.

I can't believe that school is over. I miss everybody, but I'm also excited for the summer. Definitely please give me more suggestions of things that we could bake! And now that summer has started, we're already doing some REALLY big baking projects. Stay tuned...