chocolate butterflies and pistachio cream cheese pie

I watched a video from How To Cook That showing how to make chocolate butterflies, and I thought it would be perfect to decorate a pie I made for Nana.

I did the butterflies with candy melts because I didn't want to mess with tempering chocolate.  a few of them didn't work out because they were too thin and it's HOT right now, so if they didn't crack while I was trying to peel them from the wax paper they melted when I touched them, but I made them a little thicker they did just fine.

I thought I came up with the pie recipe myself, but after a quick search I found it on cooks.com and it was exactly how I thought about doing it, so I went with just the addition of cream cheese to the pudding like it was written.  I would double the cream cheese next time, use less milk as if for a pie (1 3/4 cup instead of 2 cups), and maybe use heavy cream or evaporated milk instead of regular whole milk.  it was still good as it was - just a little mild for my taste! O:)

Eclair Cake

Friday night, Matt and I watched how to make an Eclair Cake on Cook's Country - it looked soo good!  so I told Matt I'd make it for him for Father's Day, which meant I had to start it the day before so it'd be all set up (unlike in their video... tsk-tsk!).

I added extra graham cracker layers and it almost didn't fit into my pan!  it makes a lot of cake so this would be good for a group of people.  the pudding isn't that sweet (to me!) but the chocolate on top is.  I'm a little torn on it, but Matt liked it so that's all that matters.  I think I'll half it next time I make it for just us, or use two smaller pans and give one away.

no-bake cookies

since we've had 30-something (36? 37? I dunno, too hot to keep track!) days of 100°F+ weather I can't bear to use the oven, but I REALLY wanted some cookies last night :( I didn't want to leave the house to go get some or get ingredients to make cookies, so I remembered back to the days I lived at home and the no-bake cookie my mom made. it was chocolate, peanut butter, oatmeal... and it was pretty quick and tasty. I looked for a recipe online and it's EVERYWHERE. I only had about 3/4 of a cup of oats so I chopped 1/4 cup of pecans and scaled down a recipe to 1/3 of the ingredients. I mainly did it by eyeballing and it's so dummy proof they came out just fine! it took more time to clean up my mess than to cook them on the stove and wait for them to cool. it made about 12 cookies, which is just enough for the weekend cause I'm still trying to shed the last 10lbs I packed on carrying Leo O:) but after a week of healthy food and only drinking juice and having a tomato for dinner I'm ready for something that's terrible for me!

so basically you boil sugar, milk, cocoa and butter in a pan on the stove, remove from heat and add some peanut butter, oats and vanilla. plop little balls out on a sheet of foil and let them cool and harden. way too easy. for a real recipe with measurements and everything just click on a picture of a yummy cookie - here's just 5 different recipes (MANY more online if you do a search) and they're all pretty much the same. I added nuts to mine to compensate for missing oats, so I'm sure you can substitute with other stuff too. maybe coconut if you're not an oats person. I think I might try that next weekend!

UPDATE:

I made these again using the full recipe and it took a looong time for them to set up. then someone sent me a message and said the same thing! I left mine out on the table to set up and a long time later they finally did. probably has something to do with how much butter is in them and how long it gets boiled for. some recipes say you have to boil for a minute, others don't specify. a whole stick of butter is a LOT and there's going to be a lot of liquid once that butter melts, so it makes sense that it needs to cook some of that out for them to set up. I think I'll just cut the butter down to half next time and maybe add more peanut butter (I think it could use a stronger flavor) in addition to boiling longer.