Homemade Animal Crackers and Goldfish Crackers

In the last couple of years I've been trying to cut packaged and processed foods from our diet. But I don't want Bug to miss out on yummy and cute things like animal crackers and goldfish crackers. I had been buying those super-overpriced organic bunny snack crackers, but Bug was pretty lukewarm about them. So one day I tried them- they taste sort of like cardboard! Bleck.

One day it occured to me- why not make our own? Somebody has to have done it. And sure enough, there are lots of recipes out there. I tried a few, and have now come up with a couple that work really well for us.

I also spent far too much time searching for a goldfish cracker cookie cutter. The only one out there that looks like the pepperidge farm one is seriously overpriced for a tiny cookie cutter, and I haven't yet gotten around to enacting the DIY goldfish cookie cutter directions that are out on the web. Clever, but I don't have any soda cans lying around, and haven't been inspired enough to dig one out of someone else's recycling bin.

In the meantime I fell for the super-cuteness of all the other mini-cookie cutters out there- how cute are those little frogs, turtles, dolphins, and dragonflies! I've decided that I don't need my cheese crackers to look like Pepperidge Farm goldfish afterall. Bug doesn't seem to mind either.

So here is my Animal Cracker recipe. It makes me feel good that it is full of good stuff like ground flax (high omega 3s!) and oatmeal flour. There is a lot of butter in it... but I don't think that milk-fat is a bad thing for kids, especially as a treat. This is an adaptation of the King Arthur flour recipe:

Omega-3 Animal Cracker Recipe 

3/4 cup (12 tbsps) butter
1/8 cup organic cane sugar
1 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups Whole Wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup of oat flour (I grind up rolled oats in an old coffee grinder)
1/2 cup ground flax (I grind up flax seeds in the coffee grinder too!)
2 tbsp water

I make it in a food processor. Cream the butter and sugar, then add the honey and vanilla. Mix the salt, baking powder, ww flour, oat flour, and flax. Add to the food processor, and pulse until it resembles coarse, wet sand. Add the water 1 tbsp at a time and pulse. Empty the food processor bowl into a ziplock or onto a piece of plastic wrap, and press together into a ball. Chill for 30 minutes. Roll out to 3/8 inch thick on a floured surface, and cut with floured cookie cutters. Bake at 350 until the edges get a touch of gold on them.

Omega-3 Goldfish Recipe 

8 ounces sharp cheddar cheese
4 tbsp butter
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup ground flax
1/4 cup oat flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp water
In the food processor, grate the cheese into the bowl of the food processor using your grater attachment. Switch to the usual blade, add the butter, and blend until the large chunks are gone. Add the flour, flax, oat flour, and salt, pulse until it resembles coarse, wet sand. Add the water one tbsp at a time, and pulse until just combined. Empty the food processor bowl into a ziplock or onto a piece of plastic wrap, and press together into a ball. Chill for 30 minutes. Roll out to 3/8 inch thick on a floured surface, and cut with floured cookie cutters. Bake at 350 until the edges get a touch of gold on them. 

They are totally fun to make too! Of course I get lots of help, some of which includes poking holes into my nicely rolled dough and tossing handfuls of flour on the floor. The cookie cutters themselves fascinate her, she loves picking out the cutter and handing it to me, and washing them up in the sink afterwards.

They are soooo yummy. And they make good play too.

Roar!

Crunch!

It is pretty satisfying to start the week with full jars of yummy snack food to put into lunches!

Monster Cupcakes! For Julian's 8th birthday.

The cake is a basic vanilla cupcake from scratch (an adaptation of a recipe from Martha Stewart Kids, found online) and the icing is also vanilla-flavored (not spinach, in case you were wondering!) cream cheese and butter.

One could really go crazy here, but I tried to keep decorations as simple as possible:

--3 colors of gel-icing tubes (white, black, and red)

--candy eyes (found at Michaels Crafts, in the cake section

--red licorice laces

--M&Ms in white, black, yellow, and aqua (bulk section of the supermarket!)

--mini M&Ms

Julian got right into the decorating! I made some too... (with permission from the head artist!). They are sooo cute that I had to take pictures of them all...

I was going for scary, but this just turned out cute!

Big Grin monster (Julian)
Baby Vampire (me)
Zombie? Julian
Animalistic cyclops (me)
Evil vampire (me)
Triclops (me)
The inspiration cupcake (me)
Stalk-eyed monster (me)
Stabbed cupcake (Julian)
Green eyed horned monster (me)
Classic cyclops (Julian)
Things got a little crazy on the last cupcake (Julian)
Frog eating a fly off of his forehead (Julian)
Tri-eyed monster (Julian)
Happy polka dot monster (me)
Girl monster (me... made scarier when Julian tried to make her grin)
Drippy eyed monster (Julian)
Long-tongued alien (Julian)
Mess cupcake (Julian-- he claims this one for himself!)
Guess who? (David)
Cyclops with mono-antenna (Julian)
Injured monster (me)

Pesto

I had to prune back the basil plants to let the peppers get some sun... which resulted in mass quantities of basil leaves!

Pesto recipe (Adapted from an Ina Garten recipe)

16 cups of basil leaves, loosely packed

4 heads of local garlic

1 cup pine nuts

1/2 cup walnuts

2 tsp salt

2 tsp fresh ground pepper

3 cups olive oil

(2 cups parmasan cheese)

Peel garlic, then process in the food processor with pine nuts and walnuts. Add basil, salt, and pepper, process until smooth. Add in olive oil in a steady stream, while running the processor. If you plant to freeze, leave out the cheese (add it later when you eat it!).

Store in the fridge with a layer of oil on top for up to a week. Or freeze it! Last year I did the ice cube-tray thing... but I have so much this year, and I hated trying to get the pesto-smell out of the ice cube trays (if I do this again, I will try lining with plastic wrap, but this sounds so fussy...).

Lazy freezing method... freeze in ziplocs, in flat, thin slabs. Break off a piece of the slab when you want to use it. So far so good... the oil in the pesto prevents it from freezing too solidly!

Wedding DIY- Cupcakes

I decided cupcakes would be so much cuter, and cheaper, than a cake.

The cupcake stand is made out of foam core and decorated with tiny paper flowers.

The cupcakes were made a couple days in advance, and frozen (placed on the unheated, screened porch in January!) The night before we iced and decorated them.

We decorated them with hearts made out of rolled fondant (store bought). Two different size heart cookie cutters were used to cut out the hearts, and they were left on cookie sheets to harden overnight. They were brushed with pearl cake decorating powder mixed with a little water. The cupcakes were also sprinkled with white crystalized sugar and tiny metallic hearts that I found in the cake decorating section of the local craft store.

Plastic cupcake holders were essential-- we talked a local bakery into selling us a few.

Next time I use fondant as a decoration, I will put them on at the very last minute... probably the day of the event. They got a bit soggy and droopy overnight, and I spent a bunch of time propping them up with toothpicks.

The cupcakes were a big success... our guests loved them.

Mirabelle Plum Wine: Part II

After 5-7 days, the wine should be done with the heavy duty fermentation. You can tell by taking a hydrometer reading, or by just seeing a slow-down in fermentation activity. I decided it was time when my must was less frothy. A hydrometer reading confirmed that the must was more alcohol than sugar or water, with a reading of 0.996.

Remove the pulp and skins. Since I used a nylon bag, this is easy-- just lift out the bag, and squeeze out the liquid until all that is left is a dry pulp.

All of your tools and containers should be sterilized. I have a product called "EZ clean" from the brew store, but you could also use a campden tablet crushed in 1 gallon of water.

Rack the must into your carboy(s). In this case, I am using a 3 gallon carboy. For other batches, I've used 1 gallon glass jugs.

Add water or sugar water to get the volume up to 1-2 inches of space in the neck of the jug. In this case, I sorely underestimated volume, so I added almost a gallon of water and 2 lbs of sugar. The water is filtered, then boiled and cooled to lukewarm. The boiling ensures that I'm not adding any additional microbes, and the cooling protects the yeast from being killed off. After adding sugar water, I was back up to a specific gravity of 1.07.

Finally, add the air trap. I filled my air trap with sulfite water (1/4 campden tablet in 1 quart of water) and put cotton in the top to keep fruit flies out.

At this point, the wine ferments for 1-3 months, or until sediment has built up on the bottom and fermentation slows to a barely perceptible crawl. Some sources suggest that it won't hurt to leave it "on the lees" for 3 months or so.

Shortly after racking to the carboy, vigorous fermentation started up again, no doubt revitalized by the fresh supply of sugar.