We ate a TON of good food. Like seriously. These are the Sour Cream, Cherry and Tequila popsicles that were just out of this world. Also worth sharing, although not pictured, sea salt brownie cookies (without the caramel), Orange Pecan French Toast, and crab linguine with Basil, Lemon & Chile. So good.

We saw the biggest full moon of the year over the water…

while roasting marshmallows and making s’mores.

We enjoyed a picnic lunch of some decadent goodies:

My favorite was the Dai Due chicken liver mousse with white mulberry jam!

We enjoyed some yummy cocktails like the French 75.

And I got to take naps in the hammock! Yay for naps!

While I napped, the other ladies kayaked. I think napping wins but they had fun.

We indulged in some yummy Summer Berry Pizza with Nutella and White Chocolate (um yes please)!

As well as ward of these little guys that seemed to be everywhere:

Oh happy little lakehouse, you treat us very well.

Such a nice refreshing time with good friends. Toenails are still painted and looking pretty and I’m still thinking about the ending of Another Earth. Looking forward to doing this again!

It’s a quick toddler tuesday around here since we are busy up to our ears with a bathroom remodel (before and after coming soon!), work and some fun getaways!

I took the marble paintings Jude made and turned them into mother’s day cards for all the grandmas in our family. Took a little inspiration from Marimekko and cut out poppy shapes and glued them to construction paper.

And then my mom’s birthday is coming up soon so we took one of Jude’s watercolors and cut it into a heart and wrote our happy birthday wishes.

We got to get away this weekend to Fort Worth for a college classmate’s wedding so we dropped Jude off with my parents. My mom always has fun activities to do with Jude and like me, she loves food. She made these cute stop light jelly cookies with Jude. They were quite the hit!

And finally, she showed up a fun way to use bubbles – wrap cheese close around the bottom of a toilet paper roll and the bubbles turn to foam! Jude thought the foam was perfect to jump on.

Feel free to link up to the post or leave a link in the comments if you want to participate in Toddler Tuesday and let everyone know what you have been up to!

If you haven’t bought the Best New Recipe cookbook yet, you really should. I haven’t had a failed recipe from it yet. And this pasta carbonara is no exception. Eggs, cheese, bacon, white wine, garlic, pasta. Yum. It’s a default recipe that I turn to again and again when I have no idea what to make. It’s quick, easy and tasty. . . maybe lacking in the nutritional category, but you know, you can’t win them all!

You have to like sweet potatoes to like this one, and possible own a mandoline or other thin slicing device. I wouldn’t have had the patience to slice all of the sweet potatoes as thin as they need to be with my chef’s knife for this spanish sweet potato tortilla with salsa verde. I loved this dish but Jason, not so much. He doesn’t like sweet potatoes. . . I loved it again and again as it reheated well and was even tasty at room temperature.

And again with the  Best New Recipe cookbook, their eggplant parmesan is so amazing. It’s seriously some of the best I’ve ever had, and eggplant is one of the few vegetables that I don’t particularly care for. But I like it this way!

And no recipe post could be complete without some nutella! These no bake nutella peanut butter cookies as so addicting. So amazing. I threw in some extra chocolate chips just to take them completely over the top, and oh man, I want some more now.

Alright, what recipes have been successes in your house lately? I always am looking for new ones to try!

We had the ingredients on hand to whip a batch of these up (sadly, only 24 cookies and they went FAST) and we baked them off. The addition of the instant espresso powder is perfect. It is barely detectable when the cookies are warm but develops into a bit of ‘je ne sais quoi’ when they cool.

I think Jason was especially appreciative of these cookies as they were simple chocolate chip cookies. No nuts, nothing else, except for that tiny hint of coffee flavor that just amplifies the chocolatey goodness. I can certainly see why these cookies are the staple chocolate chip cookie for Neiman Marcus’ cafe.

Recipe for Neiman Marcus Cookies

Well, of course I turn to Deb from Smitten Kitchen. I found her recipes for Crisp Salted Oatmeal Chocolate cookies, and I wanted to make them. She had me hooked at salted. Salt. My weakness. One of many.

The original cookies had white chocolate chunks in them, and I’m not a big fan of white chocolate (as it’s not chocolate at all, just cocoa butter) but she adamantly said that white chocolate was the way to go with these. I thought I bought white chocolate. I really did. The wrapper of the chocolate bar I bought was white while the dark chocolate bar of the same brand was dark! But it was semi-sweet chocolate. So, instead of getting white chocolate, I just used what I had. And I’m happy I did. I mean, I’d still like to try them with white chocolate,  but this batch was not disappointing at all! They are thin, but not too thin. There’s a bit of chewiness but a good amount of crunch around the edges. I think she described them as ‘shattery’ which is definitely a good descriptor. A worthy cookie.

Recipe for Crisp Salted Oatmeal Chocolate Cookies

I think the thing I liked most about these cookies is that the insides were soft and full of the chocolate pieces while the outsides were a light, crunchy and melted in your mouth. I will never waste an egg white again. . . these will be made again and again!

I actually forgot to add the cream of tartar, intentionally left out the nuts and the cookies came out great. Not bad for a cookie with only five ingredients! And really, they tasted more like candies than cookies at all.

Recipe for mom’s chocolate chip meringues

I threw the pecans that are called for in the recipe into the food processor and processed them until they were almost pecan flour. . . I found out long ago that leaving out the nuts in a recipe that calls for them makes a strange cookie. Apparently you have to do something to make up for the subtraction and I’m not an experienced enough baker to know what that substitution is. Therefore, I leave the nuts in, just pummeled until you just get the taste of the nuts and not much of the texture! Oh and I’m falling in love with my silpat all over again. One of my favorite kitchen items, for sure. If you don’t have one, you should get one soon. NOTHING sticks to a silpat which is good because my baking pans suck. A lot.

And much to Jason’s pleasure, the cookies turned out fantastic. Crispy on the edges and soft in the middle, packed full with chocolate chips. And I just used boring old tollhouse semi-sweet chocolate chips. Next time I’m making these with some delicious bittersweet higher quality chocolate chips. . . drool.

Recipe for Our Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

I decided I needed to venture away from chocolate based treats just to make sure that I wasn’t missing out on something delicious that wasn’t chocolate (blasphemy, right?). Well, I do have a soft spot for shortbread style cookies. Dipped in chocolate though. Enter, pecan sandies. . . essentially a mexican wedding cookie without the powdered sugar on the outside. Sadly, I over-roasted the pecans and these cookies tasted vaguely of burnt popcorn. The texture was perfect and the taste would have been had I not been preoccupied with baby while the pecans were roasting. I love the size and the shape of these – perfect for grabbing a small handful of to munch on. Even though I messed up the pecans, I still feel that recipe is worth passing on:

Recipe for Pecan Sandies

After the pecan sandies, I thought it might be nice to gift some biscotti to a friend of mine, so I did a bit of research and came up with this recipe. Biscotti seems so fancy, but it’s really so easy! I kept these guys a bit smaller than my last biscotti that I made and I thought they turned out great. Perfect for dunking in a cup of coffee or tea. Loved the almond flavoring.

Recipe for Nonna’s Biscotti

And of course, both are delicious dipped in chocolate (I couldn’t resist)!

They are essentially chocolate wafer cookies that have bittersweet chocolate chips in them. They have this delicious sandy texture, and my favorite part? The fleur de sel salt. I love salt and sweet together.

They are pretty easy to make, albeit a bit messy. When combining the creamed butter with the cocoa mixture, make sure you do it slowly, or you’ll end up with cocoa powder all over everything. The dough mixture is very crumbly but it solidifies once you refrigerate it. Watch out on the dough though because there are no eggs, therefore it is safe to eat. And once you start eating the dough, you may not want to bake the cookies!

My recommendation when slicing the cookies, let the dough sit out at room temperature for about 20 minutes and make sure that your chocolate chips are small, otherwise it will pull the dough when slicing and crumble. If the pieces do crumble, just eat them reshape into a circle and it will bake together just fine. Be very careful not to overbake these cookies. They may not look done when you pull them out of the oven but let them sit a couple minutes before putting them on the cooling rack and they’ll be perfect.

So yes, I think this recipe is up there with the Car Bomb Cupcakes, but much less time intensive and a bit more elegant (I mean, come on, it has fleur de sel salt in it!). You may even already have all the ingredients in your pantry, and if you do, you should grab a glass of milk and certainly make these today!

Recipe for World Peace Cookies

Recipe for Sugar Cookies