Winner of Brownies

It's about time I posted a winner for the captionless picture, don't you think?

Maybe it's because the winner knew that's what his daddy does all the time.

Maybe it was the only caption I read while fully awake.

Maybe it's because it was put to the tune of a Primary song that appealed to my naughty-with-the-nice facade nature.

In any case, the winner is clauss house. Congrats! Hopefully you'll share them with your husband and only gain half the poundage! Yay!

To all who participated, thank you. I had a couple of doozy captions myself, one of which was "Dude, those aren't handwarmers", but so many others were possible that I thought it'd be fun to open it up to anyone else. We enjoyed it!

Giveaway! Bragging Rights and Brownies

I'm not one to do giveaways often, but I was trying to come up with a way to get as much input as possible. You know how sometimes you have pictures for which you can think of absolutely no captions? And then you have pictures that could feasibly have, like, 20? This is one of the latter.

So let's have it. Shoot me your best caption for the above (unstaged!) picture, include your email address if I don't have it already, and next Saturday, Nov 13 at 11:59pm (Eastern time), I'll announce the winner according to the one that makes Ted and me laugh the hardest. Here's the bonus: I'll send you a batch of homemade brownies (unless you live in Australia. Sorry).

On a different note, that's the first time I've noticed how long my nose is.

What's Cookin: Chocolates

This is what the winner received in the mail a couple weeks ago, although she reported it probably looked better on my end than it did on hers. I just happened to mail it during a not-uncommon October heatwave in Southern California. Not all of them melted, thankfully, and I believe she said she ate them all anyway. If you recall, this is the same girl who licked her knitted stocking clean after her dad lit a fire just underneath them for Christmas, not realizing there was chocolate in each one. For this story alone, Valerie, you are a bosom friend.



Here's a run-through of my first attempt at making chocolates.

Behold, the peanutty centers of the PB balls. I just love the name. I dipped these in semisweet and then milk chocolate. Next time I think I'll do just milk and reduce the powdered sugar in the filling, as they were a bit more crumbly than I'd like.



Next were the ganache truffles. I did some dark chocolate and some chocolate raspberry, but the method was pretty much the same. Melt the chocolate with warm cream, whisk until smooth, add any flavoring, then refrigerate. When cold enough, roll away. I think I let these get a little TOO cold, because the ganache broke my small Pampered Chef ice cream/cookie scoop. I'm still ticked about that one. But I guess you don't get great without a lot of mistakes, blah blah blah.



The rolling:



And the finished rough-looking balls. These are called truffles because when rolled in cocoa (which I did with just the dark chocolate), they resemble the mushroomy truffles that pigs find. The name now includes all sorts of chocolates that have a chocolate and cream base, but most are now dipped (which I did to the chocolate raspberry ones). And this particular pig is very good at finding these kinds of truffles, thank you.

These last ones were a favorite for Ted and some wonderfully obliging taste-testing neighbors, C&A. Melted caramel topped clusters of cashews and dried cranberries,

then were topped with melted milk chocolate.

Ted and I tried a similar confection after the chocolate exhibit at the Raleigh Natural Science Museum and loved them. The creator dubbed them "Bog Frogs" - a play on turtles and the fact that they contain cranberries, I imagine. We just called them scrumdiddlyumptious, and I was certainly not disappointed with my knock-off. Until next time, chocolate lovers!

We have a winner!

I didn't make any predictions about how many people would leave a comment to get some free chocolate, but because I'm curious, I compared the number of comments for the chocolate post with the number for the post about boob nicknames. Despite passionate declarations of love for the food of the gods, based on the number of comments, women are even more obsessed with their ta-tas. Go figure.

To make sure there was no bias whatsoever, all the names of the commenters were put into a pot, and I gave Ted the honor of drawing with his eyes closed. And the name on the piece of paper........

VALERIE BUNKER!!! She told me a little story about how her dad lit a fire in their fireplace one Christmas morning, then later realized there was chocolate in the stockings. Oh no! Her sisters lamented over the brown goop, but as they turned to Valerie, they noticed she was face deep in her own stocking, licking the contents right out of the fabric. I cracked up because the same thing happened to me one Christmas, and this is why we are friends.

Congratulations, Valerie! You deserve some chocolate, and hopefully this batch won't be melted when you receive it. There aren't any fires going on right now in SoCal, are there?

Stay tuned for pictures of my chocolate-making experience! And thank you all for admitting your crippling weaknesses! I feel like I have soul sisters all over the place.