Almost There

Matt and I gave the Apple Crisp Dessert a second chance while his dad and Karen were in town. We are getting closer to creating something that looks like the picture.

The Lunde Snowbird Adventures

Fred and Karen came in for a long weekend and we had a blast. Highlights from the weekend included: Campanias, Costco, Katy Trail, Outlet Mall, Matt's famous fajitas, Pedicures, Top Golf, Whole Foods, Fort Worth, Joe T Garcias, Cattle Drive, Sour Belts, Wine, Lemmon time, Uptown Trolly, Starbucks, Eatzis, Lake Highland Open Houses, Half Price Books, Good Company!!!

Grandma and Grandpa Lunde SPOILED Lemmon with toys and LOTS of attention.

Lemmon's Got A Brand New Bed

Lemmon got a new bed...and it lasted 2 hours.

The chew resistent couldn't even last through her first bite. Needless to say we returned it. Now, even though her crate is plenty big, she refuses to let go of her baby bed.

LundeMacher Date Night

Our recipients of the Mini Orange (Mousse) Cheesecakes were the Wannemachers. We had a gourmet dinner date with shrimp pasta, breaded mozzarella, salad and, of couse, dessert. We made dinner a group activity and I am convinced these recipe books straight up lie about the prep/cooking times. I took four, intelligent adults, an hour and 15 minutes to prepare what was "supposed" to be a 40 min process. Luckily it was delicious. We LOVE date nights with the Wannemachers. Next up...guys and girls nights!

Mini Orange Cheesecakes

Ingredients:

• 8 oz plain sweet biscuits (please explain to me what store carries an ingredient labeled "plain sweet biscuits". Central market told me they use graham crackers so that is what I did.)
• 4 oz unsalted butter, melted
• 4 oranges
• 8 oz cream cheese, softened (Matt and I are thinking we were supposed to let it soften by letting it sit out, that didn't happen so we stuck it in the microwave. weird.)
• 3/4 cup condensed milk (did you know the grocery store carries both sweetened and unsweetened. I went with sweetened. and p.s. GROSS, condensed milk is disgusting.)
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon orange juice

This week I went to get ingredients on Thursday. Minus the sweet plain biscuits, which I got at Central Market during lunch. And, great news, I found Amaretti cookies, which I bought out of principle. The trip to Central Market did NOT help our budget. lol.

Tonight's dish was made for the Wannemacher's. We think a paring with Blue Moon beer will go nicely. We also mentioned it to another one of Matt's friends who wanted some so we doubled the recipe. With all the excitement around our first homemade cheesecake we invited Jamie over for dinner and dessert. Only after did we read the last sentence of the recipe which stated "refrigerate overnight". So she took it to go.

We will see how it goes. I am a bit concerned that we substituted "using an electric beater, beat on medium speed for five minutes" with Alex holding the bowl and Matt stirring "really fast". Perhaps I will look into some bakeware for my birthday.

Pictures include:

1. Lemmon trying really hard to be good while we cooked.

2. Our makeshift "3 inch fluted flan tins" - where do they sell these? Not at Michael's or the grocery store.?

3. Matt, the food processor

4. Matt, the blender

5. The final product going into the fridge

Well it should be said that last Friday's dessert, while it looked nothing like the picture, tasted pretty good. Brian was the recipient - and he says he liked it.

Doggie Mother's Day

This was waiting for me when I got home from work today. The card said the following:

"Alex - I just learned how to speak dog so I will try and translate.

Bark Bark -

Bark bark bark bark grrrr.

Bark bark bark grrrr grrrr bark

bark bark bark grrrr.

Bark,

Bark

Mommy -

Did you know that doggie mother's day is always 4 days after human mothers day. I love you. Sorry I peed inside this morning. Love, Lemmon"

ADORABLE

Not so little Lemmon

This little one is growing SOOO fast. We have officially had her two months today, and I am not gonna lie, it seems like so much longer. Check out the difference.

Amaretti Apple Stack with Caramel Sauce

Preparation Time: 40 Minutes + standing

Ingredients:

• 1 cup plain flour
• 2 eggs (did you know you are supposed to bake with eggs at room temperature. We did not get this memo in time, ours were straight out of the fridge)
• 1 cup milk
• 30g unsalted butter, melted
• 1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur, option (we chose to go with optional)
• 125g Amaretti biscuits: FAIL (this was ridiculous. I went to Albertsons, Whole Foods, Simon David and La Madeline. FAIL. Instead we substituted Nonni's biscottis. I don't even know if that is anything like an Amaretti biscuit. I do know that the bonding I was supposed to be doing with my husband was spent wandering around all the grocery stores in a 5 mile radius of our house. This weekend I plan to hit up Central Market - just to see if I can find some.)
• 5 cooking apples, peeled and cored (please tell me the diference between a cooking apple and a regular apple)
• 185g unsalted butter (this second entry for butter is very confusing - why are they listing butter twice???)
• 1 cup soft brown sugar (I guess we used soft)
• 1/2 cup golden syrup (Again, this description doesn't help me. We used the Albertsons brand we had in the fridge)
• 1/2 cup cream (wish they would be more descriptive here)
• 3/4 cup light sour cream (gross, we just had this on our tacos)

Our baking started around 8:30 after we finished the homemade BBQ chicken pizza Matt made for dinner. Luckily by this time Lemmon is tired so she wasn't too much of a hassle.

We started with the crepes. Our first time to ever make crepes. It mentioned something about sifting the flour - so we tried to sprinkle it slowly into the bowl. Matt did a great job, although we were apparently supposed to get 10 crepes out of batter - we got a solid 4 1/2.

Next step: roughly shop the biscuits in a food processor. Note Matt, our processor.

We sliced the apples REALLY well, and then layered our 5 layer crepe cake instead of 10, put it in the oven using a baking sheet to cover it instead of foil and baked it twice as long as it said to because our crepes refused to get crisp.

We spread the sour cream, put on the glaze/sauce (that I didn't burn) and gave it a go. It was fun to use the dessert plates my friends made for me at one of my bridal showers. The end result was that the dessert was edible and not half bad. Matt liked it more than I did. That being said it did not look AT ALL like it did in the book. ha! We had a good time though.

Friday Nights

Matt and I have friends that blog, and update facebook daily, twitter, etc - and while we enjoy keeping up with everyone's activities, our "blogging" up to this point has been in the form of my scrapbooks. Today while I was getting a coffee at borders, I noticed a $5.99 cookbook called "the essential dessert cookbook". Pink on the cover with strawberries. For some reason it called to me. Everyone knows what a disaster I am in the kitchen, and proper baking, well I can't even imagine the trouble I could get into...but the challenge seemed exciting. (This coming from the girl who used powdered sugar in a cake instead of flour and had no idea what went wrong when the cake came out soupy.) So I called Matt and told him I thought Friday nights should be dedicated to us, being together, baking random desserts and then giving them away. A fun project for us to do that kills two birds with one stone. We get to hang out and have fun together, AND, pending we don't go crazy on ingredients, it can help our entertainment budget as we continue to save for a house!!! I'm not sure if I will make this blog public, but for now, it should be interesting to at least write about what happens.