Last Minute Valentine's Treat

We just got home from a long weekend on the road.  It would have been nice to stay another day in Wisconsin to visit with Joe's family, but it was still good to see them even if for a short time.  We celebrated Joe's Great-Grandmothers 100th birthday and it was great to see all the family there spanning 5 generations!

Now we're back in Kansas City and we'll be playing catch up tomorrow for the grocery shopping we missed this weekend.  I'm still hoping to make a special dessert tomorrow night to have on Tuesday for Valentine's Day, but I'd kind of like to bring a treat into work too.  I made this "fudge" last week and I think I might try it again with some slight variations.  My co-workers seemed to like it the first time around, so I doubt they'll be disappointed if I bring it in again.  This is another one of those recipes that is pretty easy to customize to what you might want.  Here are the basics:

Two Ingredient Fudge

1 12oz. bag of chocolate chips (white, milk, dark or probably any other kind of baking "chip" you can buy)
1 container of icing (really any flavor you want)
* Any flavors or mix-ins you might want to add

Lightly grease an 8"x8"  pan.  Melt the bag of chips in a double boiler or in the microwave.

Stir in the entire container of icing.

Pour into the pan and spread out evenly.  Place in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before cutting.

Notes:  I used white chocolate chips and vanilla icing.  Before melting the chips, I split the icing into 3 bowls and mixed food coloring in to make one of them red and one pink.  I split the melted chips evenly between the 3 colors, mixed them up then poured them into the pan and swirled around with a spatula.


I think next I'll try using chocolate icing,  chocolate chips and maybe melting some peanut butter with the chips.  


You could also try using any flavorings, extracts, or probably things like coconut or chopped nuts.  With just the icing and chips, it pretty much just tasted like canned icing.  But if you like that, then you'll love this fudge.  :)

Hopefully I have time to make a special Valentine's dessert, and if I do, I'm sure you'll see it up here.  I hope you all have a great week and get to spend some time with the people you love!

Home in Progress

Hopefully most of you will be able visit our house in person one day, but until then I'd like to give you a glimpse of things we're doing and changing around here.  The house has been a work in progress since we moved in, and we've made quite a bit of progress so far.  Almost all of the work has involved painting various rooms in the house and adding a few pieces of furniture here and there.  Now it's finally time to add some decorations and really make our house feel like a home and an expression of us.

I'd been wanting to display some of our honeymoon pictures from Italy for a while and I was also looking for something to put on the walls in our very plain half-bath.  Turns out that a gallery wall of Italy photos, Venice postcards, and a few sketches I made would be the perfect way to solve both problems.  I started by making my sketches from pictures, choosing some photos and then picking out a few pages from a postcard book of Venice paintings that Mom gave us.

 The artwork waiting to be framed. 

 My next step was to begin gathering frames for all these pictures.  Joe and I made several trips to our local Goodwill store to find the correct number and sizes for frames.  Once we had all the frames, I disassembled them, cleaned the glass and frames and labeled them all so I would know what glass piece went with which frame after I was done painting them.  A quick trip to Hobby Lobby provided the spray paint and one large photo mat board that I would use to make all the mats for the individual pictures.  Once the painting, mat cutting, and assembling was done, I traced all the frames onto brown craft paper and cut them out.  That way I could arrange them on the wall using painters tape and avoid having to make too many nail hole errors.

Some of my "ugly duckling" frames.

Arranging the frame templates.

With the papers all in place, Joe made quick work of hanging the actual pictures up and the art installation was done!  I love having something nice to look at on the walls, and of course I love remembering all the amazing things we saw in Italy.  I hope you enjoy it too!  Oh, and it definitely looks better in person, so you should probably come visit to see for yourself.  Plus, I couldn't get a nice picture due to the bad lighting and tight space in there.    

This coming weekend Joe and I will head to Wisconsin with his family to celebrate his Great Grandmother's 100th birthday!  We're looking forward to seeing everyone up there!

Crazy Cake Lady

That's me!

Several months ago I volunteered to make a baby shower cake for a friend at work.  They wanted a jungle theme cake, so I found one online that I thought I could replicate.  I ventured into the world of fondant icing and ended up making my own to mold the jungle animals out of.  It was very simple to do and tasted much better than most of the fondants I've tried before.  This inspired me to try covering an entire cake with fondant.

I got my opportunity to try that when we had a chili cook-off at work.  Instead of bringing in a pot of chili, I opted to bring in a pot of chili cake!  The cake was actually pretty simple to make but looked much more complicated, so people were pretty impressed :)

My most recent cake endeavor was this past weekend for the Super Bowl party Joe and I hosted.  I thought it'd be fun to make a football helmet cake showing both team's logos.  I knew the cake part wouldn't be too hard, but the face mask was going to be the trouble maker.  I couldn't have been more right.  My first idea was to make some modeling chocolate, which seemed pretty simple based on a recipe I found.  However, after I made it, it became completely unusable.  When I tried to knead and mold the chocolate, it just fell apart.  My "great" back-up plan was to make the face mask with some leftover white fondant.  Joe and I assembled the mask and laid it over a bowl to set-up and dry, but when we tried to attach it to the mask later, it fell apart.  With the help of some toothpicks and some luck, we managed to salvage it long enough to get a decent picture.  The rest of the cake went pretty much as planned, thanks to some emergency cake surgery done by Joe.  He is to thank for making it actually look like a helmet.  Well enough talk about it, here are some pictures of the process and the final product.

After bringing a couple cakes to work, I had a co-worker ask me if I'd be interested in making a birthday cake for her daughter in April.  Of course I said yes!  I'm not sure what she has in mind yet, but I'm hoping that maybe it will lead to a couple more cake orders.  Maybe I'll just have to keep "practicing" and bringing them into work :)

Energy Bites

Joe and I actually call these energy balls, but I thought you might be more inclined to read on if I labeled them as energy bites.  They're basically chewy homemade granola bites that you can customize with whatever fillers or flavors you want.  I'd seen a couple versions floating around throughout various blogs and decided to make them one day.  I've made them a couple times since then and they've been delicious every time.  We've actually stopped buying granola bars and just throw a couple of these in our lunches instead.  I'm thinking that white chocolate chips and some dried cranberries will be my next flavor combination.  I suggested to Joe that they'd be really great covered in chocolate, but he seems to think that would defeat the purpose of making a healthy snack.  I told him that dark chocolate was basically a health food.  Apparently we disagree on that fact.

Here's the basic recipe that you can adjust to make them the way you like:

Granola Energy Bites
1/2 c. peanut butter (or any other type of nut butter)
1/3 c. honey
1 c. old-fashioned oats
1 c. coconut
1 t. vanilla
1/2 c. other dry ingredients (mini chocolate chips, chopped nuts, ground flax, wheat germ, chopped dried fruit, etc.)

1. Mix peanut butter, honey and vanilla in a large bowl.
2. Mix oats, coconut and other dry ingredients in a medium bowl.

 
 3. Add dry ingredients to peanut butter / honey mixture and mix well.

4. Refrigerate for at least an hour, or up to overnight.
5. Roll into balls and keep in an airtight container separated by wax paper.

I typically make a double batch which is a around 3-4 dozen, depending on how big you make them.  They keep in the fridge for a long time, but I bet you won't have to worry about them staying in there for too long :)  Enjoy and let us know if you come up with any really good mix-in ideas!

Greetings!

Hello, family and friends!  As you can see I've decided to start a little blog to try and keep you all up to speed on our life here in Kansas.  The blog name, Lombardo Lagniappe, was a suggestion from my good friend Sarah.  I was having a hard time thinking of a name that would cover more than just baking and craft projects and lagniappe ended up being the perfect word!  For anyone who may not be familiar with the phrase, lagniappe is a Cajun word for "a little something extra".  So maybe you can think of this blog as a little something extra from the Lombardos.  My plan is to have posts about things we make, cook and do.  It will probably end up being mostly things I cook and make, but hopefully Joe will get a chance to pitch in too.  I hope that you all enjoy reading this and that it will help us stay in touch a little better.  

For this first post, I'll just give you a recap of the year so far (even though it's only February) and an idea of what you can look forward to hearing about in the year to come.  We had a relatively laid back January which was nice because we've had some pretty amazing weather here in KC.  Unfortunately the one day that the weather decided to dip into the teens was the same day I decided to sign up for a 5k race.  I ran "The Battle of the Bean" 5k when it was only 17 degrees outside, finished in under 30 minutes and actually felt pretty good at the end...or maybe I was just numb.  Hopefully it will be first of a few races this year.

The other "first of the year" we had this January was a friend's wedding last weekend in St. Joseph, MO.  We've got a total of 9 weddings to go to this year and are looking forward to catching up with some friends at everyone of them.

Well, I guess that's quite enough for this post.  I've got a couple more in mind already with some recent projects I've done, and after the "Big Game" this Sunday I'll post some pictures of the food and treats that I'm hoping to make.  I hope you're all doing well and that I can manage to keep this up!