Welcome back, friends! Don’t you wish all weekends are 4-day weekends?!? I just love the feeling when you think it’s Saturday, but it’s Friday! We filled our long weekend with plenty of food, lots of fun, some Christmas shopping, and a few games of basketball.
1. This Thanksgiving, I was in charge of dessert. Chocolate Mousse to be exact. The only problem is that I lost the recipe that I’ve used for 10 years! You would think that after making this dessert for that long I would have it memorized. That’s just not how my cooking/baking brain works. I sort of memorize things, but I like to have the recipe there to make sure that it’s absolutely perfect. I ended up making two versions of the mousse. A good version and a perfect version. Somehow it did come back to me – only after I realized what I had done wrong during my first attempt. Just so I never forget this recipe, I think a blog post complete with pictures is in order!
2. Along with something rich and sweet, I was also in charge of making something savory for our Thanksgiving potluck. Tom Douglas‘ smashed garlic-fried potatoes sounded perfect. Luckily for me, I had my cookbook. No improvising involved. They were crispy and garlic-y perfection.
3. Craft Night with some rose` and chocolate chip cookies is WAY better than braving the malls to cash in on Black Friday deals.
4. The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. Which translated means, stay as far away from the mall as possible. That’s how I interpret it. I actually try to get a lot of our Christmas shopping done online. But this year, we ventured out to University Village to try our luck. We were pleasantly surprised by the lack of crazies and also a lack of long lines. Plus we were able to cross off a few names from our Christmas list – score!
5. My favorite find on our shopping expedition. JCrew had an amazing deal on Baggu bags. So we got 4 of them! They will make great gifts, but I’m thinking that I may need one too, haha. Which one do I choose? I’m sort of loving the elephant bag.
6. No trip to University Village is complete without stopping by Trophy Cupcakes! Nutella, Strawberry Lemonade, Salted Caramel and (new) Pumpkin Pie cupcakes came home with us. Yum. Yum. Yum!
I hope that your Thanksgiving was warm and filled with all the people that you love!
xo,
Andrea
