More PB&C

That's peanut butter and chocolate... One of my favourite dessert combos. A friend gave me her "Fantastic Fudge Brownies" recipe and I adapted it slightly yesterday and it was amazing! Especially warm with vanilla ice cream...

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix all together:
1/2 cup hard margarine
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1 3/4 cups sugar
4 heaping tbsps cocoa powder
3 eggs
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup chocolate chips (optional but yummy)
2 tsps vanilla

Pour into 9x13 pan and bake 45 minutes.

Mix icing together shortly before brownies will be done. Pour on top of hot brownies in pan.

2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsps peanut butter
2 tbsps cocoa powder
2 tsps vanilla
2-4 tbsps very hot water (I boiled some in my electric kettle)

Let cool. Don't eat them all!

Milky Colours

So here is another fun experiment:
I covered the bottom of a round cake pan with milk, let the boys put a few drops of food colouring in of different colours. Then... I put a couple drops of dish soap in the middle. The colours start to move and swirl all on their own! When the boys started to spin the cake pans to help "move the colours" it more or less just all turned mud coloured. Still fun though!

Live Long & Prosper

Happy birthday to my husband! Jacob wanted a party so we had some friends over and I made a cake that I thought was pretty cool. The day I made it though, I had some mega pregnancy brain... I ran out of icing sugar (to make the icing) so we walked to the store... They didn't have icing sugar but they had canned icing, that'll do. Anyways, locked myself and the children out of the house. No big deal, we only had to wait 40 minutes for Jeff to get home from work and it wasn't too cold and the oven wasn't on. Later on, Jeff found 3/4 cup of butter in the microwave... I don't know how but my devil's food cake turned out just fine with no butter in it at all!
So here is Jeff's 31st birthday cake:

All ICED and almost ready to serve...

Bet you didn't guess it was going to be a Star Trek cake! 

SURPRISE! 

Jacob is even wearing his "rocket ship" shirt.

Daniel put all the ships on his piece of cake.

Alleluia!

Happy Easter!

We made some great crafts to help decorate and celebrate.
We did beaded pipecleaner clothespin butterflies, which you can see hanging from the curtain. I tried to control a little too much and finally gave up and accepted that the boys didn't want their butterfly wings in any kind of pattern or even matching colours.
Then we did marble painting. I happened to have two cardboard boxes saved that perfectly fit an 8x10 paper in the bottom. Then I put blobs of paint randomly on the paper (their colour choices) and let them put some marbles in and then shake, shake, shake. Next time I might try dipping the marbles in paint instead of the blobs. Then I cut out all our marbleized butterflies and stuck them on our willow branches left over from Palm Sunday.
I just love butterflies at Easter!