Hot chocolate from the tooth fairy

I just had a wisdom tooth taken out. The doctor told me I was not supposed to eat anything for a few hours but that I could drink any liquids i wanted. When iI got back home I decided i would reward myself with a nice cup of hot chocolate. You could say he practically forced me to make hot chocolate with all that don't eat anything talk.

Last week I watched a family friend make the best hot chocolate ever by melting a couple of handfuls of chocolate in a saucepan on the stove top and mixing in hot milk so I decided I would try to re-create her recipe. But when I was melting my two handfuls of chocolate in the saucepan it occurred to me that the chocolate was half way tempered. So instead of adding milk, i took my saucepan off the heat and throw in one more handful of unmelted chocolate and stirred to melt.

Now, with melted chocolate that was not really in temper considering that I had not paid any attention to accurate measurements or the appropriate melting temperatures for the chocolate i had, I decided that I needed to dip something in. Thankfully, I had a whole pound of strawberries that I had just gotten at my local grocery store.

Having finished dipping my strawberries in chocolate, I returned the saucepan to the heat and I poured in 4 cups of milk. Yes, I poured in four cups of milk straight from the fridge. As you can imagine, the result was not so pretty. Actually, why imagine? Here, take a look for yourself.

I rescued my hot chocolate by removing the milk, heating it up and re-adding it gradually to the chocolate. The result was phenomenal. Just what the doctor and the tooth fairy ordered. I am the mom and tooth fairy in this house and I this tooth fairy is bringing hot chocolate to warm me up in the -18C weather and strawberries for DH and DS who will surely both deserve a treat after putting up with the headache I will certainly develop when the painkillers wear out.

Heavenly Hot Chocolate

Ingredients:

two handfuls of your favorite chocolate, chopped up

four cups of warm milk

melt the chocolate in a skillet, gradually add the warm milk and stir.

and above all, make sure you use chocolate you actually like to eat. None of that awful baking stuff.

Christmas Cookies

My husband and I have a wonderful tradition. Every year we make cookies and use them for decoration on our Christmas tree. It's a really nice tradition since in the middle of all the commercialization and all the buying and consuming we take a few hours to make something from scratch. Together, as a family, we collaborate to make something beautiful.

The tradition started the year we got married. We were poor students and our budget was very tight. That year we bought a Christmas tree but decided we would wait another year before buying decorations. I insisted on putting up the tree even thought it would be bare. My husband - the sweetest man on earth, woke up in the middle of the night and decorated the tree with cookies I had baked and iced with a friend. He said they were so pretty he had to put them in the tree.

So ever since then, every year we make cookies. We invite our families and friends to help us ice them and we proudly display them on our tree.

And the best part is that when Christmas is over, we take them off the tree and eat them :) How much sweet is that?

To make the cookies i used a commercial roll of frozen gingerbread dough. I added I cup of flour per roll of dough mostly because i thought adding more flour would lessen the amount of unhealthy fat and sugar per serving. I am delusional, I know.

As for the icing, i made Wilton's Royal icing recipe. I find their Royal Icing recipe to be very reliable. Easy to make and easy to work with. Just make sure you do beat the ingredients for the required 7-12 minutes (depending on the type of your mixer). It really makes a huge difference.

And if you have a toddler like me, make sure here's doesn't go behind your back and eat all of your decorations off the tree.

My son is a little bit too young to understand what Christmas is all about. But, he does understand that something special is going on. Every morning he points to the tree and says the word pretty. I hope that when he grows older this little family tradition will be something special that ties him to me and his dad.

Happy Birthday to Me

Yesterday was my birthday. I had been looking forward to my birthday this year. DH was going to get me a pannini grill and we were going to spend the evening together eating pannini even though he hates to have sandwiches for dinner. It would have been fun.

But I forgot all about it. Yup, I forgot my own birthday. And nobody reminded me.

Sure, my mom remembered; she left me a message complaining how I'm never home. My husband did buy me the Panini grill and he did hide it in a closet and say I had to forget about it and that i had to pretend to be surprised when he gave it to me on my birthday. But when I woke up this morning happy that it was my birthday and that I was finally going to have my long waited for panini he kept saying "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I forgot your birthday". And even with all the apologies it took me a while to realize that today, Wednesday, is the 28th not the 27th like I had originally thought.

I have no clue how I mixed up my dates and thought today was the 27th. Yesterday I did check the date on my syllabus to see what i was teaching. And when I recieved my contract I did sign nd date it. I even saw tons of ads for the Republican debate on CNN and was reminded endless times to tune in on WEDNESDAY November 28th for it.

And, it's not like people totally forgot. DH did get me a nice gift which is still hiding somewhere. And he did even plan a birthday party for me last weekend at his parents' house where his mom made the most delicious stuffed turkey breast in her toaster oven because I love turkey and her oven is broken.

It's just that every year on the day of my birthday I take time to think of my friends and family and the people that I am thankful to have in my life. And this year it's almost as if they never remembered me. But it's not true. I am sure they remembered or will remember. There are notes from my cousins on my facebook page. My friends will surely send me e-cards in the next few days apologizing for forgetting my birthday. That's what I do for their birthdays every year :) They do care. I know that. It's just that everyone is busy and that I keep moving because of education and because of work.

I have been in Montreal for less than a year and today I realize that in the last year I have not made any new friends. I wake up, take care of my son, go to work, get my son from day care and if i am lucky get to spend a little bit of time with my over worked husband before we all go to bed, exhausted.

I have so many friends that I love and I know that they all love me and miss me just as much as I miss them. But it seems that life (and moving too much) has interfered with those friendships. I am grateful to e-mail, facebook and cheaper long distance charges that allow me to stay in touch with them. But, I have to admit that I have not been as good as I would like to be at keeping in touch. But this birthday reminds me that I need to invest time in my friends and in myself.

This year my birthday resolution is to spend a lot more time talking to my beloved friends. And a little bit of time making new friends. Not because I want people to remember me on my birthday, but because I miss those people and I really love them.

Happy Belated Birthday to me!

Of Chocolate Swans and Other Desserts

For a while I have wanted to make chocolate cream puff swans. I have picked a recipe. I have planned the steps involved in making them. I have even planned how to plate and serve them. I have visions of elegant chocolate swans with a light powdered sugar dusting swiming in a lake of chocolate dancing in my head.

But the reality is that I am a busy mother with a toddler who refuses to let me spend longer than 5 minutes at a time in the kitchen. And cream puffs, at least all the recipes I have, are time sensitive. You can't just mix in one egg into your heated dough and pop out of the kitchen to breastfeed your toddler who's on a solids strike for the day and then come back and mix in the rest of the eggs. It just does not work. Believe me, I've tried. So I dream of chocolate cream puffs and other desserts that I will make one day when I have time, energy, or a babysitter. In the meanwhile, I run in and out of the kitchen at regular intervals trying really really hard to cook something decent for dinner and to have it on the table before my husband gets home, late, as usual.