dessert ⁽⁷⁾

For The Offspring's birthday party, we have a mold with 2 of every letter that is meant to be filled with melted chocolate, my guess. We do outdoor birthday parties and the birthday is in late July, so melted chocolate would be melted chocolate still. And so instead, we pour hard candy over the mold and get hard candy letters. They don't melt in the summer heat.

My no-fail blueberry pie is the perfect balance of sweet, tangy, and comforting — all without the hassle of a top crust.

See the notes section at the end of this recipe for the simple substitutions one needs to make this vegan.

"We have a bag of matchstick carrots in the refrigerator that is about to go bad. Please do something with them," said The Mister after purchasing said carrots because The Inconsistent Toddler ate some of them one day, once.

I make a killer carrot cake, but why bake a whole cake when I can do the easy portioning of mini-muffins? The Inconsistent Toddler liked them so much, they ate four mini-muffins on the spot. Which is great, because they are otherwise against carrots.

Did you know there is a New York Times Cooking subreddit. Oh yes! There is a subreddit for everything. My library provides us with a subscription to the New York Times Cooking section and I generally find most things there to be far more ingredients and steps than my brain could handle, but some absolutely wonderful soul on the subreddit converted the Strawberry Drop Biscuits recipe by Andrew Purcell into something much more executive dysfunction friendly.

No rolling. No cutting. One bowl. You can use salted butter - which is what you have on hand, anyway, because it is the best bread butter. And to incorporate the butter it is fun sensory play; plus you don't have to keep the butter cold.

And they taste like BoBerry Biscuits. Plus they freeze well.

Today is Pi Day! While I much prefer to buy my pies and let some food processing robotic line somewhere handle pie crust and keeping the edges unburnt while getting the middle cooked through, when someone has dietary restrictions that don't allow for robot pie baking lines to labor for me, it means I have to cook it myself. Ughhhhhhh.

Here's a recipe that never lets me down. Crumble topping so I don't have to deal with that most finicky of pie crust edge burning annoyances.

See the notes section at the end of this recipe for the simple substitutions one needs to make this vegan.