The first, more of a helpful hint rather than a meal. Jakob's birthday was this weekend and he wanted a cake of Europe (our b-day tradition is for me to make a cake to their request. It's been fun for me and the kids love coming up with something new every year). My genius idea was to cut out a paper template of a map of Europe, assign the countries one of 6 colors, cut them out using the template and piece them together on top of the cake like a puzzle. What to cut them out of though? I knew I didn't want to use fondant. That stuff is nasty tasting and costs a pretty penny. I thought about edible play dough (the peanut butter, powdered sugar kind), but knew that it came out brown. Then I remembered hearing about marshmallow fondant from my little sister. I found the recipe on line, set to making it and found that it was amazingly easy to work with and it takes color like no other frosting. These colors were made with the same amount of gel coloring that I would have put in frosting and ended up with a pastel shade. And the bonus, it tastes great (sugary but great). I thought the cake turned out really well too. Kind of a modern map look to it. Most importantly, Jakob was as happy as could be with the outcome.
The second recipe I tried was for a soup. I needed to take a soup to the pre-Women's Broadcast dinner and I wanted to try something a little different. I had read about the squash apple soup a couple of weeks ago and thought that I would try it for the first time that night. Not the best idea, I know, because I've had my share of failures with stuff I needed to take somewhere. This one however, is a keeper. Easy to make, simple ingredients, really healthy and really, really good tasting. You should add it to your fall soup repertoire.
