Saturday, September 25, 2010

Botanical Gardens

Last month we took Owen to play at the Missouri Botanical Garden for the day. Here are some pics from the children's garden dancing waters area.
He loved getting squirted in the face.
And chasing all of the water around.
He was pretty thirsty after all of the running around.
Then we walked through my favorite part, the Japanese gardens. Owen just sat back in the stroller and looked around.


The guy on the left side of this picture was sitting on the bridge and would not get out of the way. I almost fell into the water trying to get around him, and the boards of the bridge are getting warped from being there so many years.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Grasshopper Pie and Oreo Pie

The first pie is grasshopper pie, which is basically a mint-chocolate-chip tasting pie. It went horribly wrong, when the directions weren't very precise... Here is a picture of what resulted in the chocolate layer. The directions called for 4 oz. of dark chocolate. I'm used to using baker's chocolate which comes in 1 oz. individually wrapped bars. Apparently I should have just used a Hershey's dark chocolate bar...
Melting down the marshmellows...
A little bit of green food coloring....
This is the very bitter chocolate layer...it was supposed to be light and fluffy. It turned out like mud.
End result...top mint layer very good...
Bitter chocolate layer...very bad. I should have taken a picture after this when I dumped it in the trash can.
My co-workers were very disappointed when they didn't get the grasshopper pie they were waiting for, so I made an Oreo pie the next week. It consisted of about 5 ingredients and was very easy to make. Here is the smashed up cookie crust baking...
Chopping up a whole bag of Oreo cookies....
Whipped cream, cream cheese and vanilla layer mixing....
Into the crust...
The end result...very good.
Cutting myself the first piece to test. Everyone at work LOVED it and keeps asking for it all the time. I kinda liked it, but it used a whole package of cream cheese which I don't like. Next time I'll use half the cream cheese so I can enjoy it more.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Pebble Beach

Here is a puzzle that I found with my mom and Owen at the Galleria a couple months ago. It's a puzzle of Pebble Beach golf course that my mom is going to get framed for Mike.