St. Patricks Day Treat (Chocolate Bark part 2)

  T- minus 8 days till St. Patrick's Day.  Whether your Irish or not its a holiday to have fun with.  Wearing green more then usual or if for the first time this year, a special dinner of Corned Beef and Cabbage or looking for the pot of gold or a leprechaun!  I try to have a little extra special fun with the kids!

  Today we started out with bark.  Last year I bought gold sprinkles and spray and  made bark. See last years bark here. 

The ingredients are simple!

White melting chocolate
Green melting chocolate
Sprinkles
Chocolate pieces

  Lucky, for me I had quality control next to me in order to ensure everything was done correctly.

 
  With any bark it's the same steps.  Melt the chocolate first. For this process I use the double boiler method. Water boiling on the bottom, chocolate melting in a bowl on top.

I melted the white first and then the green.

Swirled the two colors together.

Next it was all about the sprinkles.

Green!

Gold!

Chocolate pieces!

After the sprinkles are all added to the bark it goes in the refrigerator for a few minutes to set.

So let the green fun begin.  Happy St. Patrick's Day!  Do you enjoy the Irish festivities?

Spin on s'mores by young chef

  Tonight to encourage one less set of feet in the kitchen I promised young chef she could make dessert.  She also needed to eat some dinner.  She did eat 4 gnocchi's so she was rewarded with dessert duty.

  This is our first dessert from scratch. I wonder if this is how you start.  We have been cooking all night but everything is always with a recipe or atleast a recipe is used a majority of the time.  I may add a little more or less of somethings but that doesn't count as an original recipe.  Which reminds me stay tune for our lunch tomorrow we ran across a recipe in a  magazine she will be making.

  So for our super easy recipe the ingredients consist of 3 items.

Graham Crackers
Marshmallows
Chocolate bar

She crumbled the Graham Crackers into pieces not bits and put them on the bottom of each bowl.

  Covered them with 3 marshmallows.

Then broke up 2 chocolate bars and put them on each bowl.

I put them in the oven for about 5 minutes at 350 ° and then turned broil on and watched it carefully.

The 4 recipient's (all under the age of 15) enjoyed with compliments to the chef.

Why wait for a camping trip to enjoy this classic.  They are funny and yummy all year long.

 

Young chef and a smoothie

  I am trying to eat healthier for a 30 day challenge and young chef is more than happy to help me with whatever task that requires in the kitchen.  Today she helped with a smoothie.  The even better news is she saw what went in it and still had a cup of it!!!

A peach and carrot smoothie was for breakfast today.  Some basic ingredients go in here and this smoothie went without yogurt as all my yogurts have been for the week.  This one did take water but a couple other smoothies from the week took almond milk.   I also haven't put yogurt in any of them.  Some may have called for Greek yogurt and at the moment I don't have any of that on hand either.

This smoothie just like all the rest called for a banana!

 Here comes the water!

Plus some carrots. Young chef is ok with carrots, she won't eat them but apparently can handle them.  She does however have this strange hatred towards broccoli. I told her I'm going to look that recipe up. I mean after all she just drank carrot and liked it maybe I can bring her and broccoli closer together.
 She is all of a sudden proficient in the blender.

I must admit she took the first sip before me but, only because I was still pouring my cup.  She approved it before I even took a drink.  I took a sip and decided to add the optional honey.  Umm, yeah. This smoothie was definitely strong in the carrot department in regards to flavor.  There were of course the shreds of it but, I didn't taste that poor yummy peach at all.  I will try this drink again and maybe reduce the carrots next time.

Recipe credit: peach-carrot-smoothie