First baking fail

Okay so it's not my very first food making fail (like that time my half my pecan pie spilled over before I was finished baking it) but one I'm real disappointed for rushing through.

It was SO simple, I just wanted to make a tasty dessert that I had years ago at a summer cook out: Eclair cake.  Made with instant pudding, whipped cream, gram crackers and topped with chocolate frosting and no baking required it was perfect for our evening of stormy weather.  First thing that went wrong was when I went out to get the ingredients for it I'd forgotten what size package of pudding mix to get...yep, I got one too small.  Luckily my friend had two small packs of cheesecake flavor instant pudding...not my favorite but it worked just fine. 

So it basically went like this:
Line the bottom of wide deep dish with gram crackers
Cover gram crackers with about half of the following mixture:

• 6oz instant pudding
• 3 cups milk
• 8oz whipped cream

Make another layer of gram crackers, then the other half of the cream mixture, then a final layer of gram crackers.

Now the next part of the chocolate sauce topping was simple enough according to the recipe I was following:

• 1 cup sugar
• 4 Tbsp cocoa powder
• 2 Tbsp milk
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract 

Being the amateur I am in the kitchen (but I have such spirit!) I didn't have any assumptions about how it was suppose to come together...and there were no instructions on how to bring the sauce together.  It pretty much just said "Beat together".  Fortunately I was bright enough to assume my butter needed to be melted...but I did not know that all together it should be heated until the sugar dissolves.

That being said, I ended up with a delicious eclair cake...with a terribly sweet gritty chocolate frosting.

Live and learn....and then go get a hug =/

(Pic from about-recipes.com)

Quick, delicious salsa

It is WAY to hot to turn on the stove today so I decided to make a very quick tasty and very easy salsa.

• 1 can corn (drained and rinsed)
• 1 can black beans (drained and rinsed
• 1 can diced tomatoes with green chilies (drain off a little juice)
• 1 avocado cut into pieces
• a few stalks of cilantro coarsely chopped 
• salt & pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and serve with chips.
The cilantro really made this a very refreshing salsa and I was pleased to see that my avocados have stayed nice and green even though I made this dish a few nights ago, which is probably caused by the acidity in the tomatoes.

Happy Eating!

Planning ahead= key to success?

Some day, I'm hoping that I can actually make this a notable blog, one that people will be interested in my thoughts and creations, but until then I'm just trying to stick to being consistent with anything really.

I'll get there eventually I believe and I think I've just got to plan for things better ahead of time.  It's not like a construction worker just grabs a bunch of supplies and just starts hackin' away at making a building.  There's blueprints that are carefully studied.  So the same approach should work for me...

In a few weeks I'll be housesitting and dogsitting for my parents, I have ten whole days to make a bunch of things I've been wanting to do: cooking, baking, crafting, sewing.  But the only way I'm going to be able to do all that I want is to plan it out well in advance.  So these next few weeks I'm going to break all my desired projects down into supplies, process and completion steps (with pictures along the way of course!).

I'm extremely excited about my mini vacation of crafting and cooking and of course some blogging!