Fruit Leather

Did you know you can make fruit roll-ups at home? With no added sugar, no preservatives, and for a fraction of the cost! Actually, I don't know about that, but the first two sold me. :)

I got this recipe from the book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron. She says you can puree any type of fruit and then dry it to make fruit leather - she lists several delicious combinations like strawberry/banana, or peach/mango...mmmm. :) Then she gives the easy (well, even easier!) recipes. And this is where I come in! :)

The first batch of fruit leather I made was strawberry - I thawed out a bag of frozen strawberries (sun-sweetened, no sugar added), pureed them in the blender, and poured them onto a cookie sheet. I tried to make sure the puree was evenly spread on the cookie sheet, but it was hard. Then I cooked the puree at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, and then turned the oven off and let the puree dry. It took about 8-10 hours for the edges to dry, and the middle never did - I ended up throwing it away a couple of days later. So either I did something wrong...I don't know. But the parts that did dry are delicious! And so natural!

Then I made apple fruit leather, using a half a jar of applesauce - I just poured it onto a cookie sheet and dried it just like the pureed strawberries. It dried about as well as the strawberry, actually the edges got a little burnt. :( And then I left the middle in to see if it would dry, but the next day I turned the oven on, forgetting it was in there, until I smelled burnt applesauce. So I don't know if it dried overnight or not. :)

There are other methods of drying in your oven, but they require you to leave the oven door open while it's hot, which I can't really do with Zachary around.So if anybody has any tips on drying, or any experience with fruit leather, I'd really appreciate any help! :) Even with the drying issues, however, this fruit leather is a delicious snack. I will definitely make it again! :)

Cake Balls

So, after you've finished carving your tractor cake, you're going to have a bunch of leftover cake.


And possibly some leftover frosting, am I right?

And we wouldn't want that all to go to waste, right? So here's the perfect recipe to use it up, and make some delicious treats in the process! This recipe is completely not mine, it is totally stolen from Bakerella, who is amazing. If you've never visited her blog, it is a real treat - every one of her pictures is beautiful, and she gives easy step-by-step directions for every gorgeous confection she comes up with. Anyhow, she makes these great treats called Cake Balls (and cake pops, which is what I set out to make, but I couldn't find any sucker sticks).

So, the first step is to crumble your leftover cake into crumbs in your bowl:


Elmo placemats and an adorable helper are completely optional.

Next, you combine the cake crumbs with the frosting, at a ratio of one box of cake mix to one tub of frosting. I estimated that we had about 2/3 of a box of cake mix worth of cake left over, so we started with about 2/3 of a tub of frosting, and mixed them together, with our hands.

Then you form the mixture into balls & put them in the fridge for a while. Please ignore my nasty old cookie sheet.


After you let them cool for a while, then you can cover them with candy melts or just melted chocolate chips or whatever you have on hand. I covered some with peanut butter chips, and they taste delicious, but don't look so great. So then I switched to milk chocolate, and finished up with semi-sweet chocolate chips, just for variety. :) And here is the finished product:


This was actually a really easy and fun recipe to make, and the truffles/cake balls turned out really well. Hubby says they taste like brownies. :) They would be really cute to give as gifts - Bakerella puts them in mini-muffin cups, or in a little box like a box of chocolates and they're super cute! :)

When you're done, make sure to take some time to put your feet up and relax! :) Here's a favorite picture from today - Z loves to put his hands behind his head like this when he's relaxing with Daddy. :) He also says, "dis is cozy" when they're under the blanket together. :)

Tractor Cake

A few days ago, I posted about the tractor cake that I made for Zachary's 2nd birthday. A few people commented on it, on here and on Facebook, so I thought I'd post about how I made it.

I enjoy decorating cakes, it would be fun to do as a hobby someday, but I am by no means an expert, or even very good at it. I was happy with how the tractor turned out in spite of my decorator shortcomings. :)

I started by looking for patterns online. The best site I found was here, Coolest-Birthday-Cakes. They had all kinds of different tractor cakes, so I looked through all of them to see what kind of cake I wanted to make. After last year's attempt at a stacked cake (which was supposed to look like a block), I knew I didn't want to try a sculpted/stacked cake again, just a flat cake. I also knew that it had to be a John Deere tractor, because my dad has worked at John Deere for longer than I've been alive, and I knew he would appreciate that. :)

So I figured out from some of the pictures on the Coolest Birthday Cakes website what I wanted my tractor to look like, and I carved it out of two 9x13 chocolate sheet cakes - one for the tractor, and one for the wagon. The big tractor wheel is also carved out of the tractor part of the cake.

I read a tip about adding a 'crumb coat' of frosting, thinned with water, all over the cake - then you leave it sit or put it in the fridge for a while & it hardens up & you can just decorate right over it, and not worry about crumbs in your icing. So here is the cake with the crumb coat:

It actually didn't work that well for me. I think I added too much water to the crumb coat, because crumbs still kept getting caught in the top layer of frosting.

Here are the other tractor wheels: They are made of three Oreos stacked on top of each other with frosting, and then coated in melted chocolate chips. (of course I made some extra, because, who wouldn't?) Also - I have no idea why this part is underlined - sorry!


I didn't take very good pictures of the next steps, but next I frosted the white cab, green tractor body, green wagon and brown big wheel, including all the sides, with a spatula. I also frosted the sides of the hay bales with a spatula, but left the top with just the crumb coat.

Then I piped the dark brown- stripes on the wheel, grill, JD, steering wheel, exhaust pipe, and stripe. Then I piped the edges of the tractor & wagon with green (star tip). Then I piped the hay bales with a larger 4-sided star tip, and finally I added the yellow finishing touches. I also 'glued' the small wheels onto the cake board with frosting.

So, again, here is the finished product: not professional by any means, but I was pretty happy with it. :) And Zachary liked it - he told everyone that the "cake looked like a twactor", so that made me happy. :)

So, go for it! If I can do it, you all CERTAINLY can! :)