Sweet Potato Casserole

I know this is a bit late for the holidays, but we were busy on New Year's Day and didn't get to make it so we made it a few weeks later for our celebratory special New Year's dinner.  And hey Easter's almost here so you should make it then.  It's really good.  Well my family likes loves it.  If they had to choose their last meal I'm 83% positive that at least two of them would choose this dish and all four of them would have it in their top five.  I would choose a flaky pastry stuffed with cream.  But that's me.
But seriously this is a yummy recipe.  Last Thanksgiving (not the most recent Thanksgiving but Thanksgiving 2011) my cousin's high school band was playing in a Thanksgiving Day parade close to us so they came over for Thanksgiving.  Well my cousin could not stop raving about this dish.  He's the most rambunctious little kid and I swear he told us at least four times during dinner that the sweet potato casserole was so good were we sure it wasn't dessert?  And since it wasn't dessert could he have some more?  Lol at least something tasted like dessert because I forgot the sugar in the pumpkin pie . . . but ANYWAY, let's not dwell on my failures in entertaining and instead focus on this recipe so you can make it and your cousins can rave about it too :)

Ingredients needed:

Potato Mixture:

4 medium sweet potatoes (about 2.5lbs)
1/2 cup sugar
1.5tsp vanilla
1 egg white
5oz fat-free evaporated milk

Topping:

1 cup packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
1 cup chopped pecans
1/3 cup butter

Start with the potatoes, sugar, vanilla, evaporated milk, and the egg.

Cook the sweet potatoes.  You can do this in the oven or you can prick them with a fork and microwave them for seven minutes, then flip them over and microwave them for another seven minutes.

 Next peel the potatoes.  If I were you I'd wait until the potatoes were cool before you peeled them.  But if you were me you'd have to peel them immediately because you were behind so you can either stick them in the freezer for 15 minutes or you can put clean dishwashing gloves on and peel them with the gloves.

Peeled potatoes!

Now mash the potatoes up.  You can do this with a fork but I find it goes faster to mash them with a pastry cutter.

Did you know I also use a pastry cutter to mash bananas for pancakes and banana bread?  Works really well.

Now add half a cup of sugar.

Open the can of fat-free evaporated milk.

Realize after you poured a little bit in the bowl that you only need 5oz and you have a 12oz can.  Freak out because you almost ruined everyone's favorite dish, then measure out the correct amount.

Pouring, pouring, pouring.

Add the vanilla.  And if you're like me you'll add more vanilla than the recipe calls for . . .

Separate the egg yolk from the white.

Add the egg white.

 Mix it all together.

Drop it into a 9x13 pan sprayed with cooking spray.  Hey look those are my hands!  As in two of them!  That's because Sarah was home and she was taking pictures for me :)

Keep plopping.

Then spread the mixture out evenly.

Now for the topping.

Add the brown sugar.

Add the flour.

Now the chopped pecans.  You can chop them up more but we just dumped them in.  The bag said chopped pecans so we believed them.

Mix it all together.

All mixed.

Start dicing the butter.

Now Sarah's dicing the butter and I'm taking pictures.  She dices very slowly.

Or I should say precisely.  You should see how long she takes to chop vegetables!

Add the butter.

Start mixing.

You can use a pastry cutter but hands work well too.

Now sprinkle it on top of the sweet potato mixture.

Spread it out so that everything is covered.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes until the top is caramelized.
Now go make it!  And see if my cousin was correct and if your family will love it as much as mine does!

Christmas Parties/Craziness

Wednesday last week was the culmination of days of baking and weeks of planning in a massive amount of Christmas parties!  I baked close to ten dozen cookies (and decorated them all) and missed Small Fry's Christmas concert (no worries I went last year and the parents went this year) so I could decorated a gingerbread house for my mom's office dessert competition!

Did I mention they were all on the same day?

Did I also mention that I'm a perfectionist and no one else can touch my cookies?!

Yes well.

Here are all the gingerbread men.  Dad needed six sets of six for his office cookie exchange and I needed some for my office Christmas party.

At this stage I had made the dough, cut out the cookies, made the frosting, and outlined the cookies.  I also added a cute little scarf.  Then I just had to fill in the cookies with their respective frostings.  Have I mentioned how much I appreciate having an outlined cookie to decorate?  It's a pain in the buttocks but I can fill that cookie full of tons of icing and it doesn't cascade off the cookie like a waterfall!  So not only do you get a thicker layer of frosting, you also get a pretty cookie ;)

Here's the beginning of the gingerbread house.  I've never made a gingerbread house before so let's just say I used A LOT of frosting to "decorate" (cover my mistakes).  Here I've cut out the walls and the steeple and the front is cooling and waiting to be cut out.  I cut the shapes after the cookie had baked because that meant straighter and flatter edges.

Here are the sugar cookies!  Not outlined our decorated.  I'm slacking I'll admit it.

Alright, here the sugar cookies, or should I say santa cookies, are halfway decorated.  Squeeze bottles are SOOOO much less messy than using a spoon for frosting btw.  And they're super cheap at craft stores.

Oh and don't you just love my nativity?!  It's my favorite because the emotion Mary is showing is so realistic to new moms :)  It makes me realize that even though the Holy Family was pretty much the holiest family ever they were still human and the love of a mother for her new baby and the love of a father for his wife and new baby is universal.

And now . . . THE BIG REVEAL!

Days upon DAYS of frosting coolies till my hands cramped have finally paid off!

Here are the finished products :)

The santa cookies!

Aren't they just adorable?!  Is santa supposed to be adorable?
(I used the same hard frosting I used to outline the cookie to make the texture in the hat.  Just start squeezing and plopping frosting all over to make it look 3-D).

Now the gingerbread men!

I used a powdered sugar and water icing for the brown body because that makes the cookie the softest and then used the harder meringue frosting for the red and green scarves.  They were delicious!


And the piece de resistance!
My gingerbread spanish church! (mom's office theme was a Southwestern Christmas)

I totally blew the competition away to win best themed cake! (there was cake inside holding up the walls . . . don't tell).

I also don't think many people entered/took it too seriously . . . but it was a competition and I had and idea and by golly I was gonna try and make the best possible entry!

The roof is my favorite part :)

So Merry Christmas Eve everyone!  I'm off to go to the gym so I can fit in my Christmas dress for mass tonight ;)

Thanksgivng Memories

Now I know that it's Christmas in two days but I was looking through the photos on the camera and I saw these fun ones from Thanksgiving so I thought I'd post a random photo montage of that holiday real fast.

Although I guess it won't be a montage because I'll be talking through it.  So montages have voice overs?

Oh well, here goes!

Here's our turkey getting all ready to be roasted!

Dad  actually bought brussel sprouts from Trader Joe's on the stalk.  They were kinda cool.  Sarah thought so too ;) 

The beginning of our cranberry sauce.  We baked it in the oven this year which was different but it tasted quite yummy!  I just think the colors of this picture are gorgeous!

Our gorgeous table-scape designed by yours truly ;)

I love my velvet pumpkins.  Like really, REALLY love them.  I don't know why, but they speak to me :)

Our plates.  Quite the colorful array.

And now to end things off with dessert and our cute platter turkey :)

And last but not least, it was Sarah's birthday earlier in the year but since she's at college we celebrate at Thanksgiving.  Dad created an awesome cake that he just had to stick a straw in like a real margarita :)

Winter Memories

It's the end of the semester for those still in college and it's also December.  With all of the fb posts about graduating and going home for the holidays i was reminiscing about manhattan and thought I'd share one memory that happened more than I wish it had. (my mind wanders randomly at lunch time, can you tell?)
Let me set the scene.  It's December (or January or February).  It's recently snowed so the roads in my apartment complex have been plowed but the roads in the neighborhood between my apartment complex and campus have not been plowed.  Since the neighborhood is between a busy campus and a busy apartment complex, the unplowed snow is pretty packed.  It also hasn't melted because it's still below 30 degrees outside.  Or if it has melted, it has since refrozen and is now ice masquerading as snow.   Fun.
Back to setting the scene.
I've woken up and realized that I'm going to be a wee bit late for class if I don't kick it into high gear.  I've also realized that the class I'm going to be late for is the one taught by a crotchety old grandpa of a teacher who we all adore but who thinks the day starts at 5am and if we're late will ridicule us to no end.  Sooooo I've got to book it.
Getting ready goes something like this:  roll out of bed, throw on yoga pants and a shirt, fly down the stupid steep spiral staircase to the bathroom, brush teeth, brush hair, put hair in pony tail, swipe on foundation blush and mascara, run back up the spiral staircase of death to grab socks, boots and cell phone, run back down stairs, tuck yoga pants into boots, put on fleece jacket, put on winter jacket, put on scarf, put on gloves, try to put on hat but realize you have to take out your pony tail first or it will look weird, take off gloves, take out pony tail, put on hat, throw books into back pack while gloves are off, put gloves back on, grab keys and run out the door. 
And that's not even the fun part.
I never drive to school because it was faster to walk because parking was disgusting, especially in the winter time.  I'd have to park as far away as my apartment so I might as well just save time and walk.
Well on mornings like this I didn't have time to walk.  When I said run out the door I literally meant run.  Run out the door, down the road (less slippery than the sidewalk), cut across the complex by the tower, dodge the mail truck delivering stuff to the office, cross the street into the neighborhood and switch from running to a modified skating/shuffling motion on the ice packed snow that doesn't require picking your feet up.  By the end of the road I'm getting pretty toasty.  Not only do I have a bunch of layers of clothing on, but I'm also running, and carrying a bunch of books and binders.  So off come the hat and gloves.
Cross the street on to campus.  Cut through the tennis courts by my old dorm, cut through the parking lot of my old dorm.  By now I've lost the hat, gloves, scarf, and winter jacket (taking articles of clothes off while running and juggling a backpack on icy sidewalks should be an Olympic sport . . .)
ANYWAY!  In my now semi-summery clothing choices, breathing hard, I decide not to risk sliding on the tile in the engineering complex and detour around it outside.  Then it's up the stairs, through the door, and into my seat right as the bell rings.  Where I unceremoniously drop all my outerwear on the floor, roll up my sleeves as far as they will go, and fan myself vigorously.  My classmates would give me weird looks because I was sweating and looked like a mess in the middle of the winter. 
Oooooh the memories. 
Happy almost Friday!