creative jewish mom

Quick Meringue Hearts In A Pinch

I'll make this quick, because after all, who really has time to spend making desserts for a dessert bar, especially when it is last minute? I'll admit, desserts are my daughter's thing, and she assembled these adorable hearts for a friend's engagement party dessert bar. Dessert bars need quite a few items to look great, so something like this, which simply requires filling some store bought meringue hearts with whipped cream, a cookie and a candy or two, can truly be a life saver. Who eats the desserts anyway? Maybe the little kids with the sticky hands that reach up onto that table? So I say, make something that is quick and looks great, with as little time investment as possible, and if you are like my daughter, invest in the beautiful cake that you leave in your newly married friend's fridge for the day after the wedding! Okay, need a shopping list to assemble these beauties? Lets do it!

A Gorgeous Candy Topped Engagement Cake

Want to make a really stunning cake that will surely bring oohs and aahs all around? The candy and cookies topped cake trend is just the thing, especially for folks like me who do not want to spend hours on a cake! And one could surely buy an iced cake, even a high cheese cake from the grocery store and simply decorate the top. "Simply" meaning assuming you have an assortment of really great looking candy and cookies, which, if we in our somewhat remote Northern Israel location can purchase at the store, you surely can!

Before I continue, let me just say, I did not bake and decorate this cake, but my teen daughter did, with a friend, together with the friend's semi-professional cake baking sister. My daughter's school had been cancelled but we hadn't started taking the strictest measures to prevent the spread of the Corona virus, so when daughter asked to go to a friend's house to learn how to ice a fancy cake I said yes, after all my daughter loves making desserts and this was an opportunity to learn something new. And, the cake they were to make was to give to friend for her engagement party dessert table that same week. In the end the engagement party was cancelled, but my daughter delivered the cake to her friend just the same, an amazing act of kindess at a time like this.

Of course before that cake went out the door we (myself and daughter who is delving into photography a bit) took some photos to share with you! Now sure would be a great time to learn some new skills in the kitchen, whether it be fancy cake decorating (my daughter) or possibly setting up a way to make our own sprouts (me), right?

Chocolate Chip Cookies With Sprinkles For Chanukah Or Any Festivity!

Wishing everyone a lovely light-filled Chanukah on this fourth night of Chanukah. It is pouring cats and dogs here in Northern Israel creating a very dramatic setting for the glowing flames of the holiday. My kids are all snugly tucked in bed with a book so I’m taking a moment to share these fun cookies with you. Courtesy of my teen daughter I might add, who does all the baking......and who baked some more goodies today as we have a small army of guests coming for meals this special upcoming Shabbat!

This idea is pretty self explanatory but keep on reading for a few tips......

Monogram Engagement Cookies With Printable Icing Sheets

Baking is now my teenage daughter's department, and she is doing a great job at it, sometimes too great in fact as I'm trying to avoid sugar. These monogram engagement cookies could be posted as a craft fail, but rather than be that harsh lets just say we (she, rather) learned a big lesson with this one: don't try out something new when under pressure! Our neighbor's daughter got engaged and my daughter wanted to help make some deserts for the desert bar, fair enough. However, her schedule was packed and she had to make the deserts ahead of time as she would be away on a school trip the day of the party. She planned to make royal icing cookies with an edible printable monogram made with edible printable icing, and enlisted me to do the graphics. So far so good......despite being rushed with shopping for her trip, she printed the icing sheet at a store in town. Then she pastuerized the eggs for the royal icing, and at this point it was already at least midnight, sigh. (On top of that we had some guests that were supposed to come on July 16/17 and showed up on July 14, so we quickly had to clean the apartment where they would be staying, while they sat and waited, not a great situation, especially with cookies waiting to be made!)

If you are reading this, lets just go to the next page for the end of the story, shall we?

No Bake Popsicle Cookies Are Simply Adorable

With everything looking pinker than pink in blog land this week, I thought I'd contribute with these super simple and beyond adorable no-bake popsicle cookies! And I'll just add that these are courtesy of my 16 year old daughter who is quite the expert at these kinds of things.......her mother would rather be painting, or making something healthy! Regardless it is great to have a trick like this up your sleeve when another neighbor's daughter is having an engagement party and the desert bar needs to be beyond gorgeous! Ah yes, and with Purim coming up, some of these presented with a summer theme could be an amazing mishloach manot! In fact I think that is what we'll do, just need to come up with the rest of the presentation, like summer umbrella, fruit punch, sunglasses..... stay tuned for that, in the mean time let's learn how to make these cuties!

Royal Icing Clown Hat Cookies For Purim

Yes it is true dear readers, this year I have had to significantly lower the bar for my traditional Purim extravaganza as there just haven't been enough hours in the day. And you know what, it really is okay, and our holiday will still be wonderful and festive on account of buying certain things we would normally make, or using decorations that we already have on hand.

My daugher on the other hand did have time to continue with her royal icing cookie adventures, and for starters she made these adorable clown hat cookies which I have already wrapped up and will use as gift tags, if you can imagine that? They actually are perfect and will look super sweet hanging off the handles of the bright bags I've purchased to fill with edible gifts for the neighbors.

Snowglobe Cookies With Royal Icing Make Great Winter Party Favors!

 

How about a big round of applause for my 15 year old daughter on her second attempt ever at royal icing, the outcome being these too adorable for words snowglobe snowman cookies! There is just something so wonderfully irresistible about royal icing, though since I'd rather not spend my creative time baking I'm more than happy to let my daughter have all the fun with this one. Since I'm there in any case I do get to live vicariously......though hoping we can figure out how to do this kind of thing without the huge time investment required, at least until we get to the top of the learning curve. We are learning all about royal icing and getting totally inspired to get really good at it from a lovely online cookine decorating class from brit and co, that I can recommend. Plus winter is a great time to spend learning something new, and especially something you can then use to spread joy all around.

The response when we served these cookies with desert this past shabbat was worth all the effort, though the Israeli born folks at the table aren't all that familiar with snow globes, so it was largely lost on them, nonetheless, the American guests appreciation was enough for the crowd. And as it turned out, we were in the middle of a huge storm, that even included a very nerve wracking power outage on Friday night, so the snowglobe theme fit right in.

DIY: Miniature Candy Apples Are Perfectly Adorable

I now present you dear readers with just about the simplest and most adorable way to decorate a cake, cupcakes, a dessert plate: mini candy apples made from toffee candies with clove stems! And of course you can use this same idea to make mini candy lemons, oranges and grapes. It is true I am the kind of mom who shudders at the thought of buying candy, but of course the candy thing is way beyond my control and the dreaded stuff does make its way into our house, and especially those little colorful gummy toffee candies as those are very often thrown from the balcony of the synagogue (at the groom, called the chatan) on the shabbat before a wedding. And yes, you'd better believe it, my kids are there front and center to scoop up as much as they can. The good news as that I can now tell the kids I need those toffees to make some adorable little candy apples, ah yes and one could even make a bunch and freeze them!

Oh, and just by the way, this was not my idea, though the clove stem was actually, it was directly inspired by the amazing candy filled cornucopia that I've featured on Craft Schooling Sunday, here, for two years in a row, because I just couldn't resist.

Ready to learn how to make these? I'm sure you'll be nabbing toffees from your loved ones too, as you should if you really love them, right?

Cinnamon Roll Cake Pops For The Dessert Bar Are Perfect In A Pinch!

Okay dear readers, I'm off sugar and flour entirely so I'm trying to post this fantastic idea for making cinnamon roll cake pops that look like lollipops without really looking too closely at the photos, and with the idea that while certainly I'm not encouraging folks to eat un-healthfully, sometimes you've just gotta bake that cake or make that special dessert for your child's birthday, a special event in school or important family occasion. If you're like me, and you're trying to mend your ways in the sugar department it may just be advisable to skip the baking and just assemble something from bakery bought items........and that is where this cinnamon roll cake pop idea really shines!

Of course if you love to bake, and especially if you can whip up a healthier version of cinnamon rolls using say spelt, why then go for it! The cinnamon rolls shown here were home baked by a friend of mine, and I just loved the idea so much I had to share it. Keep reading to find out how she made the display stand, an important part of the whole presentation!

Sugar Free Biscotti With Dried Fruit And Nuts

I love biscotti, what can I say, but I don't love the idea of eating a cookie packed with sugar and wheat, even if it is low-fat, as most biscotti are. So, I decided it was time to come up with a sugar free biscotti recipe, even though I'm not exactly an expert baker! Experimenting in the kitchen can have all kinds of results, but I have to say, my daughter and I really loved these fruit filled oat biscotti, even if my young boys crinkled up their noses and didn't even finish the pieces I gave them. Silly boys, I guess they need some chocolate chips thrown in there, sigh.

So I will say, these biscotti are for those who have shunned the taste of processed, sugar laden, white flour baked goods and whose tastes lean in the all natural, not so sweet direction. And I won't claim to have come up with the end-all in recipes, but it certainly is good enough to share, and maybe one of you will have fun tweaking it some more? I would love to make an egg-free version so that these could be classified as vegan biscotti, any ideas? And I do wish that these were crisper, like real biscotti. These are much softer, not sure why, maybe I needed to bake them at a lower temperature, so that they would bake longer without burning, next time! And just by the way, one can make biscotti that are vegan, and if you are vegan or want to incorporate more vegan foods in your diet, check out more tips for vegan deserts and lifestyle from Vegan Liftz