Cooking for One?

What does a girl do when her guy is out of town...she plays in the kitchen. I'm working on planning what I hope is an amazing dessert party. I want to make cheesecake spoons. I think the serving size would be just perfect. I don't have any pictures of my work thus far (we lost the camera in Puerto Rico). They're not perfect yet, but here's how it went:

Materials

• spoons, semi-sweet chocolate, crisco, one box no bake cheesecake, berries (strawberry or raspberry)

Prep

• Heat the chocolate in a bowl deep enough that it's easy to dip into. For every 1/4 cup add 1 T. of crisco.
• Mix cheesecake according to the box and let chill for 30 minutes
• Mix sugar into graham cracker crust

Process

• Dip spoons in chocolate and quickly roll them in the graham cracker crumbs. Place on a cookie sheet and let cool in the reproduction
• Take the cooled cheesecake dough and place on the spoons
• Place back in the fridge and serve chilled

Variations

• Place berries on each spoon
• Redip in the chocolate and completely cover

I had a lot of fun experimenting. For those who are completely offended because I used a box cheesecake, it just seemed like the most efficient and economical method. What I plan on doing for my party is mixing a smaller batch of raspberry and zebra cheesecake. I think that will be yummy.

Gooolassssoooo- A World Cup tribute to Germany and Italy

Ever since our trip to Italy last summer, it has a cemented place in my heart. There wasn't one city, one moment that I didn't love about being there. My husband worked for a German company and spent 50% of each month for three years over there. That said, the World Cup caused a bit of a situation for us (well for him).

He's really into the World Cup and I'm not. But, when my team played, whew, was I ever the fan. So to pay tribute to our two favorite teams, I created a menu that would celebrate both.

The menu

Rouladens d' Beef
German potato Salad
Sauerkraut
Tiramisu

My dad loves Rouladens and I have a few recipe's, one from Rachel Ray and another I found from an old Army Brat's recollections; I chose the latter. It was great. The recipe says to put a whole pickle in the wrap, but I can't bring myself to do that, so I dice all the ingredients and I think the texture in the finished recipe is more desirable. On this round, I also added horse radish to the spicy mustard in the filling.

Now for the Tiramisu, I searched for a recipe and the one that took the cake (pardon the pun) was a traditional recipe found on Epicurious.com. I read through the reviews and noticed that most of them said that the lady fingers were a little runny. I tried to adapt and use only 1 c. coffee with 3 T. Fangellico. As I was soaking the lady fingers according to the recipe, I thought that there wasn't enough liquid. By the time I worked my way through 20+ lady fingers I had to add more coffee.

Well, here's my lesson learned. Soak the lady fingers less, thereby using less coffee, thereby a less soggy tiramisu.

Whew! all that cooking didn't lend itself to getting much laundry done. I don't know if you know this or not, but those clothes don't fold themselves. Sometimes when life is sooo yummy it can be so unfair.