Category Archives: Recipe

Soda Floats: Four Different Ways

Curly-haired-boy and I love to drink root beer floats together. They are delicious, we agree that they are delicious, and we usually keep a couple of beer mugs in the freezer so that the glasses will be nice & frosty when we decide to partake in a couple. Something about adding root beer to a couple scoops of ice cream makes it feel ‘special’.

So for his birthday party last weekend I was trying to decide on something relatively easy and fun to serve 20 odd people for dessert. (I’m not the best baker.) Then I thought ‘soda floats’! We purchased four cartons of ice cream and five kinds of soda, a big stack of mason jars & straws and then let people go to town.

Sodas

  • Grape
  • Creme Soda
  • Orange
  • Jones Fufu Berry
  • Root Beer (naturally)

Ice Creams (We avoided anything with chunks in it)

  • Vanilla Ice Cream (Obviously)
  • Original Tart Fro-yo (Ours is from Menchies, but every fro-yo place I’ve been too has a similar flavor)
  • Peach Fro-yo (Kroger variety, we are big spenders!)
  • Chocolate Ice Cream

Some fan favorites:

  • Grape Soda + Vanilla Ice Cream
  • Jones Soda Fufu Berry + ‘Original Tart’ fro-yo
  • Orange Soda + Peach Fro-yo
  • Creme Soda + Chocolate Ice Cream

Curly-haired-boy & I tried all of these combos and agreed that the orange + peach and the creme soda + chocolate were the best tasting. I’m also big fan of the Fufu berry + Original tart, but Curly-haired-boy isn’t a big fan of either or those things, and the two mixed together didn’t make them taste better.

Other combos I haven’t tried yet but probably will with all the left overs!

  • Grape Soda + Peach & Vanilla ice creams
  • Orange Soda + Chocolate Ice Cream
  • Grape + Original Tart
  • Creme Soda + Vanilla & Chocolate Ice Creams
  • Orange Soda + Original Tart

Warning: Do not attempt to consume four soda floats very quickly in order to taste all the combinations before they melt. An ice cream headache will occur.

How-to: Potentially Ruin Cupcakes

Step 1: Friend is turning 22, miss her big blow-out going out party. Offer to have her over for wine & cupcakes.

Step 2: Look up some awesome cupcake recipes online.

Step 3: Remember that you are not a good baker.

Step 4: Remember that this lady is a very good baker. Ask boyfriend to pick up devil’s food cake mix on the way home.

Step 5: Realize you do not have 1/3 cup of vegetable oil other than olive oil (not cake friendly). So substitute butter instead, it will be fine you’ve done it before. Add those farm fresh eggs that mom keeps insisting that you should take even though she just gave you half a dozen last week.

Step 6: Realize that you do not have enough cupcake liners. So go out and pick some up, grab some chocolate chips to make it extra wonderful. (Don’t bother buying extra vegetable oil.)

Step 7: Come back, realize oven had been preheating the entire time you were gone and you almost burned down your home.

Step 8: Add all ingredients together. Reach for electric mixer. Remember that you threw away electric mixer after the last time you made cupcakes because you burned out the mixer while accidentally making a gallon of icing.

Step 9: Mix.By.Hand.

Step 10: Batter is lumpy.

Step 11: Keep.Mixing.

Step 12: Batter is still lumpy.

Step 13: Realize that you will never get the batter to be smooth because you used butter and not vegetable oil. Decide that butter is delicious and that  the little lumps will probably make tiny delicious butter spots in cupcakes and everything will be fine.

Step 14: Fill cupcake liners. End up with 21 instead of 24 cupcakes, realize you probably filled the other cupcakes to full.

Step 15: Decide it will be fine, extra big cupcakes are extra exciting and put cupcakes in oven.

Step 16: During clean-up find the chocolate chips that you forgot to add.

Step 17: Lick.Mixing.Bowl.Clean

Step 18: Pull cupcakes out of oven, they smell delicious but have weird little butter holes in them.

Step 19: Fill chocolate cupcakes with this amazing lime marmalade using this method.

Step 20:  On the way home the next day stop at Tar-jay to pick up a new electric mixer & discover that TARGET IS OUT OF ELECTRIC MIXERS!

Step 21: Briefly consider putting one of those $300 counter mixers on your credit card but nix the idea since you haven’t missed the hand mixer in the last 10 months and pick up a cheap blender instead. Because you need a new blender anyway and you are 63% sure that it will make the icing for you.

Step 22: Make homemade vanilla frosting in the blender. Nearly burn out the motor because it was a $16 dollar blender and really… did you expect it to be able to mix together butter and sugar?

Step 23: Ice cupcakes.

Step 23: When you only have two cupcakes left… run out of icing…

Step 24: Eat the dog gone cupcakes anyway. Because it will be delicious.

All the cupcakes we have left! Ultimately we had a fantastic time hanging out together. It was just five of us, we killed 3 bottles of wine, a dozen cupcakes, and a huge spinach salad I threw together last minute. To be fair the birthday girl took home some of the left over cupcakes, but these wouldn’t fit in her Tupperware.

 

The Very Best Hot Chocolate Recipe

I don’t do recipes on this blog, there’s a good reason for that. My cooking is rare, simple and not photogenic. But I do have this for you guys. The best hot cocoa.

Ingredients

  • About 3 or 4 cups of milk
  • One chocolate bar
  • Mini Marshmallows

Directions

  1. Pour a little milk into the bottom of your pan, put heat on low.
  2. Break chocolate bar into chunks. Add to pan.
  3. Stirring regularly melt chocolate.
  4. Pour in rest of milk and finish heating.
  5. If desired add a little, cinnamon or vanilla extract.
  6. Put as many mini-marshmallows into mug as desired possible.
  7. Pour hot cocoa over top.
  8. Enjoy.

Seriously, you can spend whatever you want on hot cocoa mix, but this tastes the BEST.