Chocolate Eclair Cake

Hello my friends! I'm back today (after a MONTH away?? How did that happen??)with a recipe!! Last week while aimlessly scrolling on Pinterest I found the most beautiful looking recipe. Now, for an event to make this lovely dessert. Lucky for me (and in turn, all of you) my co-worker and friend starts a new job next week. We are having a big potluck for her, and this lovely cake is my contribution!

I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive about baking the crust, but it turned out golden and gorgeous. And the filling? OH. MY. WORD. The FILLING. It is unbelievable! Soft and light and creamy and glorious. I may have to find a way to make individual éclairs so I can use it in my Quest for the Perfect Cupcake!!

The only issue I ran into was with the chocolate pudding. Since my Walmart didn't have a 5.1 oz box, I ended up buying two regular sized boxes and just keeping the excess pudding out for the girls. Win-Win! Now, without further adieu, here is the recipe!

Chocolate Éclair Cake

Recipe adapted from The Girl Who Ate Everything.com

Ingredients

Crust:
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup flour
4 large eggs

Filling:
1 8 ounce package cream cheese, softened
2 102g boxes instant vanilla pudding
4 cups milk

Topping:
1 8 ounce container cool whip (enough to cover the cake, I didn't use the whole container)
Chocolate syrup (you could make your own, but I just used ice cream topping)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400F. Lightly grease a 9x13 glass baking pan. If the sides of your pan are too heavily greased, the batter will not stick to the sides. Not a huge deal, but it's prettier if the base bakes up the sides.

Here is the crust pre-bake, I tried to pull it the whole way up the sides of the pan

Éclair crust: In a medium saucepan, melt butter in water and bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Remove from heat and use your arm muscles to stir in that flour. At this point, I transferred by batter to my Kitchenaid mixer bowl, because I was worried that I wouldn't be able to mix fast enough - it worked perfectly! Mix in one egg at a time, mixing completely before adding the next egg. Spread the mixture in the pan, covering the bottom and sides evenly. The mixture will be very wet.


Here's the crust after baking, all puffy and golden brown

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden brown. Check it occasionally during baking to ensure the crust doesn't burn. Remove from the oven and let cool completely. The crust will likely be puffy and have big bubbles, just leave them, they'll go down on their own.

Filling: Whip the pudding mix and milk according to package directions. When it's all mixed up, remove 1/4 of the pudding into a separate bowl. This excess pudding is not needed for the recipe, so you can enjoy it anytime! Put the pudding into the fridge and wait until it is fully setup before moving on to the next step.

Whip cream cheese in the bowl of your stand mixer. If you don't have a stand mixer, I hope you have strong arm muscles because this process takes a while... Once the cream cheese is nice and smooth, slowly add the pudding to the cream cheese, and continue to whip together. Mix until there are no lumps and the mixture is nice and smooth. This took almost five minutes in my mixer.

When the crust is completely cooled, pour the filling into the crust. Spread out until it is evenly distributed over the entire crust. Top with a layer of cool whip (or if you are really good, some homemade whip cream) and drizzle chocolate syrup on top.

I hope my friend loves this cake as much as I loved making it!! Thanks for stopping by to read today, I really appreciate it!



Linking to Joyful Homemaking, Not Just a Housewife and A Bowl Full of Lemons.

Teacher Gifts for a Summer of Fun!

Hello my friends! I’m back with a project – finally!! I have a bunch of projects in the works, some that are finished, and photographed but not yet written. It’s just been crazy busy with the kids, school, life and all that fun stuff.

Can you believe it’s June already? I can’t! It seems like just yesterday I was happily purchasing school supplies and labelling them with my littles’ names in preparation for the first day of school. Now here we are at the end of the school year and it’s time to celebrate the year that was.

Miss A is finishing up first grade and she has learned so much this year – she can read independently, she can do math equations and she knows much more about life under the sea than I do! She has also started to really love Irish Dancing. She competed in her first Feis this year and although she didn’t take home the great big medals, she tried her best and I couldn’t be prouder of my little dancer.

Miss E was in preschool this year and her biggest accomplishment would have to be how many friends she has made! She started the year sitting quietly on the carpet listening to her teacher. Now she shows up in class and half of the kids call out her name and want to play with her. She has another preschool year ahead of her before she’s off to kindergarten, but my baby is definitely growing up!

Alright, enough proud mama-ing! It’s time for the project! Last year the girls and I put together these adorable gifts for their teachers. We filled insulated cups with drink mix and candy and added a thank you card. 

For the teachers this year, I’m going with a Summer Fun theme! I found these adorable bright and sunny beach towels at Walmart in the states. Miss A was my helper in putting the gifts together. 

To the beach towel I added some candy, sunscreen and some bright summery nail polish for a fun beachy pedicure, and a pair of flip flops. I wrapped it up and added a little card signed by the girls.

The card reads “Thanks for making learning fun, now enjoy some summer sun!” I mounted the sign on some summery cardstock and tied it onto the ribbon I used to bring the gift together.

I also made some cute cards (if I do say so myself!).  The girls will write messages to each of their teachers inside, plus there will be room for a note from me!

We are giving these gifts to their preschool, first grade and dance teachers. I hope they will love them!

Thanks for stopping by today, and if you like this post, I hope that you will Pin It!



Linking to Joyful Homemaking, Not Just a Housewife and A Bowl Full of Lemons.

Menu Plan Monday - June 10, 2013

Hello everyone! I hope you had a fantastic weekend! We had amazing weather and spent the weekend doing family stuff - we cleaned the house, had dinner with family, I got to have brunch with some lovely ladies and the hubs took the kids for a bike ride. All in all a perfect weekend!

Things are finally starting to calm down schedule-wise for us. The girls' activities are finally winding down for summer. Miss A is finished Irish dancing today, and she can't wait to give her teachers the presents we put together last week. I'm putting the finishing touches on the post showing how we threw together a summer fun kit for the teachers in our lives.

This week when not chauffeuring my children around town I'll be spending my nights in the kitchen, oven on! Miss A has a summer birthday, so she always brings "un-birthday" cupcakes to her classmates to celebrate her upcoming birthday. She has already requested caramel cupcakes with chocolate drizzle. I think my girls are spoiled in the cupcake department for sure!

We are also having a birthday celebration at work this week and I volunteered to make the cake. I think a chocolate/chocolate/chocolate cake is in my future!

I am proud to say that we managed to stick to last week's menu plan! We had proper dinners every night of the week, and that almost never happens! We usually cave at least once, but last week we ate healthy, nutritious meals every night we were home.

On the Menu This Week:

Monday Dinner on the go for the kids, pizza for the hubs

Tuesday Teriyaki steak stir fry with veggies

Wednesday Turkey burgers and yam fries

Thursday Savory pasta with prawns and vegetables

Friday Camping!!

Saurday Camping!!

Sunday Father's Day dinner with family

I’ll be linking my menu plan up to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday – check it out!! 

Menu Plan Monday - June 3, 2013

Oh what a glorious morning! The perfect way to start a week filled with sun, fun and adventures! We had a lovely weekend away camping. 

  

The girls went horseback riding with their cousin and we had gourmet s’mores made with fancy chocolate. All in all, it was a perfect weekend.

Even though I haven’t been posting them on the blog, I have tried to keep on menu planning through the chaos of the past few weeks. 

We had a new addition to our family, my sweet little nephew Pierce (more on him in another post to come!) and Miss A competed in her first ever Feis (Irish Dancing competition). 

All of this real life excitement has kept me from posting to my online life here.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you all have a fantastic week!

On the menu this week:

Monday: Dinner on the go! Between dance and swimming lessons, we’ll have to grab something en route!
Tuesday: Beef tacos and cheese quesadillas

Wednesday: Ravioli Lasagne
Thursday: Roast pork, salt and pepper potatoes and veggies
Friday: Shake and bake chicken with rice
Saturday: Father’s Day dinner with my in-laws
Sunday: Steak, stuffed mushrooms and baked potatoes

I’ll be linking my menu plan up to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday – check it out!!

All Natural Oven Cleaner

Hello my friends! Hope you are having a fantastic week so far! I can't believe I am actually going to put these before photos on the internet for the world to see. I am so embarrassed that this disaster exists in my house. Well, it existed, it's gone now, thankfully!

My kitchen gets a LOT of action. I make about 15 full dinners a week (since my kids don't actually eat the same dinner I make for the hubs and I) and I bake two to three times a week. My oven is on all day and night some days - it takes many hours to bake 200+ cupcakes! The end result of all of this baking, cooking and frozen pizza heating is a really, really nasty looking oven.

I absolutely HATE using my self-clean option on the oven. I hate that it takes four hours, that it puts my smoke detectors on overdrive and it makes my entire house smell like ash. I am also not a fan of using harsh chemicals to clean the oven. The last time I used those I thought my throat was closing up on me! So, I took to Pinterest to find an all natural (and hopefully cheap!) way to get my nasty oven clean.

The only two ingredients in my cleaning arsenal this afternoon were extremely inexpensive and items I have on hand all the time - white vinegar and baking soda. I used almost an entire box of baking soda for this project, but I think that's likely because my oven was so gross!

I just took the baking soda and layered a large amount all over the surfaces on the oven, inside the door, on the base of the oven. 

Then poured a bunch of white vinegar all over the surfaces. The powder/vinegar combo sizzles a little when the ingredients combined.

  

I set the timer for 20 minutes, and took a little puzzle break with my kitchen helper. When the timer buzzed, it was time for the elbow grease. 

I'm not gonna lie, it took a LOT of elbow grease to get the mess out of my oven. Make sure you have some old kitchen cloths to do the scrubbing, because they will need to be trashed after! I probably scrubbed for a good 20-30 minutes to get all of the gunk off. 

However, a total time commitment of an hour (from baking soda to waiting and scrubbing) and my oven was clean without my house smelling like chemicals or smoke!

When the oven door dried, there was a little bit of white residue from the baking soda/vinegar, but it wiped away easily with a wet cloth. Thanks for stopping by for a read today! Hope these little tips can help your kitchen to sparkle!



Linking to Joyful Homemaking, Not Just a Housewife and A Bowl Full of Lemons.

Ravioli Lasagne Recipe

Hello my friends! I hope today finds you healthy and happy :) I'm back today with a delicious recipe to share with you. I was inspired by my husband, and his love for all things cheese when putting together this dinner. It was a definite hit and I'm sure your family will love it too.

I'm not going to lie and tell you that this recipe is low-fat or healthy, because it's not! It's rich and delicious and I will definitely be making this recipe again and again. But in moderation, of course, and served with a side salad!!

You could use any type of ravioli for this recipe (and if you're really talented, you could use homemade ravioli, but I'm not that talented!). I found ravioli stuffed with farmer's sausage, my husband's absolute favorite thing. I added one of my favorite ingredients, Boursin cheese.

I was really hoping for leftovers of this meal that I could bring to work for lunch the next day, but there were none. My husband ate the ENTIRE dish of lasagne!

Ravioli Lasagne

Ingredients

1 package prepared fresh ravioli noodles
1 brick Boursin cheese (I used garlic and fine herb)
2 cups prepared pasta sauce (I used my crockpot marinara sauce and added ground chorizo sausage, but any sauce will work)
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 375F. In a medium bowl, break apart the Boursin cheese and combine with shredded mozzarella.

In an 8x8 baking dish layer your ingredients. Start with 1/3 of your sauce mixture. Next place a layer of ravioli noodles on the sauce, and cover with 1/3 of the cheese mixture. Repeat two more times, ending with the last of the cheese mixture.

Cover the baking dish with tin foil and bake your delicious lasagne for about 45 minutes, until the cheese is luscious and melty. Remove the foil and keep baking for another 5-10 minutes so the top layer of cheese bakes up nice and crispy.

I hope you love this recipe as much as we did! Thanks for stopping by for a read today, I really appreciate it!



Linking to Joyful Homemaking, Not Just a Housewife and A Bowl Full of Lemons.

Menu Plan Monday - May 6, 2013

Oh what a glorious morning! The perfect way to start a week filled with sun, fun and adventures! We had a lovely weekend filled with bbq dinners with amazing people.

We actually managed to stick to our menu plan pretty successfully last week! Yay! The ravioli lasagne that I created for dinner one night was amazing and I’ll have the recipe all ready for you guys tomorrow hopefully.

The weather this week is supposed to be amazing all week long. I am looking forward to stooping with the neighbours during the week and then having a few lovely dinners with my mom and my mother in law on the weekend. I was really hoping to get a super cute Mother’s Day craft done and ready for the blog this week, but I just don’t see that happening with weather like this!!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you all have a fantastic week!

On the menu this week:

Monday: Lasagne Monday
Tuesday: Perogies and Guinness brats
Wednesday: Teriyaki salmon, rice and salad
Thursday: Beef tacos & cheese quesadillas
Friday: Shake and bake chicken with mashed potatoes
Saturday: Mother’s Day dinner #1
Sunday: Mother’s Day dinner #2

I’ll be linking my menu plan up to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday – check it out!!