Candy Houses

I figured since it's almost Easter, we should make bunny houses. The graham cracker version of a gingerbread house looked pretty easy in the photos on the Internet. So I gathered together some ingredients and a couple of extra kids to work with us on this project.


Sticking together the graham crackers wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. Trying to avoid canned frosting, I used melted chocolate for the wall cement. That required putting the joined walls into the freezer to harden the cement. We used white chocolate sprayed with green food coloring on the cake boards and added green sprinkles for the grass. Then we put our houses onto the grass.

Fortunately my daughter-in-law Kris decided to run to the store for cans and bags of prepared frosting, throwing all hopes of these being "healthy" candy houses to the wind.

As you can see the shingles are Necco wafers.

Building houses takes a lot of concentration (and finger licking). Here Kris helps to apply a baby chick to the roof of Fifi's house.

Success!

Meanwhile, Aliyah added some flowers to her roof.

Saraphina was happy to have these lovely princesses helping her with the candy house project.


Phina's house came out quite beautiful. She was especially fond of the pink pearls and her rabbits seem quite pleased with their new home.

Catching Up

I'm a bit behind on blog posts. This, of course, doesn't mean that there hasn't been a lot of cooking in my kitchen, just not enough time to write about it.

I'll backtrack a little after this post to post some photos of previous cooking adventures.

But first I want you to see Sunday's bread harvest:


These are made with the sourdough starters I developed for my Winter Edible Santa Barbara article on making bread with wild yeast. Two of the starters are made with grapes from Alma Rosa Winery, two were made with yeast from a locally grown wheat. None of these breads have commercial yeast in them, just wild yeast starter.

Yes, there were actually four loaves, but one didn't last long enough to be in the photo.