Liam and I frequent Starbucks mostly due to his cake pop love. I keep wanting to make him soemthing similar at home, so my mom found this recipe and sent it to me to play with. They turned out VERY delicious. Tasted a lot like cookie dough in chocolate. In the future I would use a bit less flour since they were a tad bit crumbly and cut the white chocolate with cream or frosting. It was a humongous sticky mess to coat the balls in JUST white chocolate. Very yummy though.
Ingredients: (makes about 14-20 balls depending on how you roll them)
1/2 Cup Butter (1 stick, softened)
1/2 Cup White Sugar
1 Cup Vanilla Cake Mix
1 1/2 Cup Flout (Start with just 1 Cup and add in as you need)
pinch of salt
2 tsp Vanilla extract
1/4 Cup Milk
6-8 oz white chocolate (again you may want to add in some milk or cream or even some frosting (homemade or store bought) to keep it from being quite so sticky)
Sprinkles Directions:
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and coat a wire rack with non-stick spray.
Mix all ingredients except the chocolate and sprinkles and roll into balls that are about 1 inch in diameter. Set the balls on the cookie sheer and chill in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
Melt chocolate and stir until smooth. Dip each ball into the chocolate, coating completely and set on rack. Top with sprinkles and chill all balls in the fridge until set.
Serve and enjoy! They taste amazing with milk.
Soften the butter
Add in the sugar
Add in the flour
Add all ingredients except for the chocolate and sprinkles
Mix until starting to crumble
Roll into balls and set on cookie sheet to be chilled
Dip the balls into the chocolate
Top with sprinkles and set on drying rack to be chilled
I try to keep track of some of the random Liam moments that go on in my life throughout the month! It is great to compile them once a month to look back and laugh about all of the things that stood out with my son. In case you don't know my son is 3 years old and a constant source of entertainment. Here are some of the random things that came from him mind for the past month. Enjoy! And please feel free to comment on the moments you have experienced with your toddler(s) as well!
Just this weekend Liam put me in timeout. I was overjoyed by this because it meant I had to go to my room... Unfortunately my timeout was not quite the same as Liam's time out. When Liam puts me in timeout I need to go to my room and sit on the floor.. Then Liam comes and sits on my lap and then he is not quite comfortable and if I try to get up I get told to stay in timeout... He then goes to gets a blanket comes back to my lap and covers us up with a blanket. I can't say that it was quite how I imagined it would go but it was definitely wonderful all the same.
Just now as I was writing Liam came out for the 20th time in his nightly routine of trying to make bedtime stretch out for as long as possible with any concocted excuse that he could come up with. So when he asked me what I was doing I told him I was writing. He suggested that I write about ducks... so now I will have to find a reason to write about ducks int he near future so that I can show him the ducks that I wrote about haha. No idea why he wants me to write about ducks....
Liam has been noticeably sweet about sharing with food this month. The other day we were having some cheesecake and I got us two spoons and we ate half of it and put it back in the fridge. The next day Liam went into the fridge got the cheesecake out and then went and got two spoons and gave me one and told me it was my spoon for cheesecake haha. How nice of him to want to share something so delicious with mommy :)
Liam knelt on a block and his knee was hurt. I did the normal kissing it better routine, but apparently that wasn't enough. Instead I had a request to get the bubbles out and blow bubbles onto his knee. I of course obliged and it seemed to do the trick. Haha where does he get these ideas?
Liam likes to play a game with Kiri (our dog) where he has one of her treats and then he runs through the house while she chases him. He was just playing this game and ran into my room and went for a slide across the floor and hit his head on my dresser. I of course saw and heard the while thing, so when Liam came to me and told me "Kiri did it" I had to try really hard not to laugh. He is very adamant that it is Kiri's fault still haha. He ended up blaming Kiri for over a week for this incident. Liam and I were getting ready to go for a walk when I noticed he had two container from the fridge. He was trying to bring along some ground hamburger and some sausage links. At least they were already cooked ha ha! Haha you know you live with a man when.... You never know when you might get hungry and need a snack
Earlier this month I was just reading a bedroom stalling list from a 2 year old's point of view giving pointers to other toddlers and Liam DEFINITELY picked this one up and uses it EVERY naptime and bedtime: LESSON FIVE: BOOK NEGOTIATION
When it comes to selecting books for bedtime stories, try standing frozen in front of your bookshelf, unable to make a decision. You can also attempt to renegotiate your allotted number of books. If your parent says you can have two, ask for three. If they say three, ask for four. The important thing is to never be satisfied. Lastly, pick the longest book possible or if you are feeling extra daring, pick the book with 100 “look and see” flaps. Those things take FOREVER. We actually have different shelves with different sizes and types of books now, depending on how long the rest of bedtime has taken, Liam is told that he may select any book from a certain shelf or shelves based on time. Luckily he is ok with this because he still has choices and rarely tries to negotiate outside of that. But the number is still a constant battle. If someone else is over reading to him (ie. auntie Shayna) he always goes for a longer book or one with lots of flaps so that he can have more of her time reading to him. I let him do this since it doesn't happen often and I think it's cute.
When Liam wants to go to the park he always tells me he wants to swing up into the sky. He tells everyone about swinging up into the sky. However when we go to the park he spends a total amount of 5 minutes or less on the swing and refuses to swing anymore... I never know why he uses the swing as his reason... maybe he is just always disappointed when he gets on the swing and never actually makes it up into the sky.... Or maybe it's just easier to talk about than a sandbox or the slide... Hmm....
I guess there were a lot of timeouts issues this month! Liam had a dryer sheet balled up into a fist in one hand and then he was hitting his other hand which was opened saying "time out! Time out hand. No hitting!" Does it make me a bad parent if I burst out laughing haha. Never a dull moment.
From earlier this month: I get out of the shower and Liam says to me "Yay mom, you're done taking a shower!" I say "Yes I am" He then says "I eated a cookie". I ask him "Was it yummy?" He says "YES!" I ask "Did you just eat one?" He says "I eated three", happily showing me how many on his fingers..... Note to self, place the cookies higher and teach Liam more past tense words haha. I love the unabashed honesty of a 3 year old.
Liam likes to postpone bedtime for as long as possible and is always finding new reasons to stay up and get me to come into his bedroom, one night it was to keep adding pillows. By the end he had 5 pillows stacked up and was laying on top of them while wearing a knit winter hat, so I had to take a picture since it was so hilarious. As he was winding down to actually go to sleep he wanted me to put all but one pillow away and I did and said goodnight and left the room. I was in the kitchen and heard Liam crying, so I walked back to see what was wrong. All he says is "picture" through his tears. That's right my child is crying because I didn't take a picture of him with the one pillow haha, so I will have to upload them since he posed so cutely with a huge grin on his face. Gotta love parenthood.
Liam loves getting a cakepop on our occasional Starbucks stops (ok so maybe they are more like once a week). One day we went and got one and I handed him back his delicious treat and he said "oh boy oh boy oh boy" in glee! Needless to say I still have yet to regret getting him one based on his happy reaction to it :)
Liam hurt his hand, so he came up to me showed me his hand saying "Here mom, ow-wee" So I say "Oh No!" And kissed it. Then he happily bounces off to resume playing haha. The joys of motherhood
And it all started on the first day of this month: Liam and I were playing and he told me to go to timeout. At lunch I ate a carrot off of his plate and he told me to go to timeout again. We were watching Despicable Me 2 and we always talk about wanting chip hats... I told Liam I wanted a Chip Hat and he said "No I want one, timeout!" Somehow I think this has backfired on me......
If you would like to check out previous editions of The Mind of Toddler click the links:
Having taken a break from Insanity for awhile after it kicked my butt a few times (Insanity Plyometrics Review), I wanted to start back in to things a little slower, so I chose a 20 minute workout. This happened to the be the Cardio Abs workout. Having done a couple of the Insanity workouts before I was mentally prepared.
I'm not going to say that it was a bad workout, because it definitely did work my abs. I felt that it was a little weak in comparison to the other things that I have come to expect from Insanity. My Belly Pilates totally kicked that workouts butt! See Belly Pilates Review
The workout starts with a warmup as they all do with Shaun T. The most intense part would be the jump leg curl ins, which is very high impact on the body if you have back or knee issues, but you can definitely feel it. About 3/4s of the exercise is spent on the mat. I am not saying that this is a bad way to work your core, because I think you can reach your core splendidly this way. I am not really sure how you can call it cardio given the slow pace and a lot of movements involving planking. Once the mat came out I didn't feel like my heart rate really stayed up.
Overall I call this a nice, slower paced workout in terms of insanity. It is definitely a core workout, but I would hesitate to classify it as full cardio. There is some cardio in it, especially in the beginning. If you haev never tried Insanity before, I would suggest it as a nice "easing into it" exercise, as the fit test can make you feel like you suck and shouldn't even start, and the Plyometrics leaves you in so much pain you never want to go back.
*As I could not find any actual Shaun T previews, here is an exercise class a workout facility doing the workout, if you want to get a feel for what the workout is.
COOKIE FAILURE
Now back to the failed cookies. If you read my blog last night about Liam's being fully potty trained, he still does want his cookie now and again after he goes potty and washes hands. not always, but when he does there better be a cookie, needless to say we ran out of cookies this morning and he was LESS than impressed. So I figured we could just makes some (did I mention that we need to go grocery shopping). My recipe ended up with so much improvisation that it was a big mess. However after tweaking with ingredients and adding some more stuff (mostly flour) I was able to make the second batch that came out of the oven more than a big mess, and actually suitable for the cookie container on the window sill. I can show you the photos, but I won't give you the actual recipe because it did NOT work for me. here are the 3 main reasons why it did NOT work.
1. When making cookies you should ALWAYS use unsalted butter. I only had 3 TBsp left and substituted margarine the rest of the way and this made the cookies not stick together as well and greasy
2. I know when I move I will find a thousand containers of baking soda as I see it all the time. However some magical entity steals my baking soda when I go to make cookies which left me instead with 2 separate containers of baking powder. this usually makes your cookies not rise as well and they stay flat and spread out.
3. I was trying to half a recipe that I was only half following anyway... So it was a mess I can admit I had a cooking failure today haha
Needless to say I did get a GOOD dozen chocolate chip heath cookies that are a little flatter than they should be and also a big spread out cookie sheet of cookie mess, all tasted amazing, and I am saving and eating off of the scraped off flat spread out greasy cookie mess because I suck at presentation anyway and taste is definitely high for this mess :)
*Even though i am the improvisation queen, some things CANNOT be improvised, and when you improvise TOO much you end up with something else ENTIRELY :) Have a great Saturday night.
