The Great Brownie Bake-off

Do you ever watch The Great British Baking Show? It’s on PBS and Netflix and we love it.  The best part about it is that inspires us to get in the kitchen and make something special.

The kids decided that special thing should be brownies. Nobody felt like making them from scratch (I don’t think I have EVER made brownies from scratch), so we divided up a box of Duncan Hines and told everyone to make their brownies unique and tasty.

Elle oversaw the operations in the kitchen while the bakers got to work.

Alyx decided her secret ingredient would be sugar.  Lots of it.  In the form of candy sprinkles of all varieties.

Anna and Djeryd both went for the classic combination of chocolate and peanut butter.  Anna mixed hers up in the bowl,

while Djeryd chose to add his in situ.

They stirred and scraped and prepared their pans. Alyx continued to add copious amounts of sugar sprinkles to her little portion of batter.

They finally loaded the batter into the pans and popped their chocolate experiments into the oven.

Sadly, I do not have any shots of the finished products.  It was all great fun, but we did learn one valuable lesson in baking: too much sugar is not a good thing.  Alyx’s sugar saturated creation never finished baking.  It was burning, but still liquid and quite raw looking.  She basically made burned molten chocolate candy.  Not so tasty from what I understand.  But it was a fun little evening.

Alyx’s Mad Hatter Tea Party

My sweet little Alyx turned seven!  We had a lovely little tea party for her with an Alice in Wonderland theme.  I would have loved to throw it outside in our woods with clocks and lanterns and tea cups hanging all about and lots of velvet, but March in the Pacific Northwest is cold and wet. Bleh.

Maybe we can move to California before Elle is too old for a party like this.  Or maybe I can talk Anna into a big-girl Mad Hatter party some year. Or maybe I can use it as the theme for my Midsummer Night’s Eve party.  (Hmmm . . . the possibilities are endless!)

Alyx had lots of friends over to make hats and snap pictures and make necklaces and eat peanut-butter and jelly finger sandwiches.

They ran around.  A lot. 

Anna and her friend Grace got to oversee some of the activities which made things nice for me.

And, of course, Grandma and Grandpa were there to help, too.

I think the best thing we did with this party, the one I will do again, is we took pictures of the whole group and pictures of each girl, and then had them printed at a one-hour photo place and slipped them into Dollar Tree frames for their goodie bags.  It made for such a  fun momento!

Sweet Lu, I’m so glad you’re you and I’m so glad you’re mine!  Happy birthday!!