I Really <3 Hebrew School Teachers

Last week, I baked some amazing chocolate cookies for our Hebrew School teachers. They really are amazing people who put up with some crazy stuff in their classrooms.

I do like to bake...um...a lot. The teachers seem to be willing guinea pigs for my baking experiments.

So I just whipped these up for our teachers:

Strawberry Cheesecake Bars
adapted from the King Arthur Cookie Companion (which is seriously one of my favorite cookbooks)

Crust:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup unsalted butter

Filling
2 8 oz packages cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1/4 cup strawberry jam

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9x13 pan. Make the crust: mix together flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and butter. I mixed with my hands. Do not lose your rings by leaving them on the counter and sweeping them off into the sink. I'm just reminding you in case you might ever think to do something like this. Press into the bottom of the pan. If it's not smooth, spread some plastic wrap over the top and even it out with your hands or a small rolling pin (can of beans, BPA free please, works well.) Bake 12-15 minutes, until set. Remove from oven and let cool for 15 minutes or until you're done making the filling

Beat the cream cheese and sugar together until smooth. Correct Spanish homework while beating. Oh wait, that was just me. Gently beat in the vanilla and eggs. Spread over the crust. I used an offset spatula to make it all smooth and pretty.

Put the jam into a ziptop bag and squish it around to make it really spreadable. Snip off one corner and pipe lines of jam the length of the pan, I did three lines. Then use a knife to pull the jam from side to side through the cream cheese mixture to make a cool swirly effect. This was the reason I made the recipe, because I thought it looked so cool in the book. Hold up children who want to see what Ima's doing.

Bake for 20-22 minutes, until the filling is set. Middle will wobble slightly. Remove from oven, run a spatula around the edges of the pan to loosen and keep from cracking. Cool for 1 hour at room temperature and then refrigerate until chilled and firm. Then hide the whole pan away because you'll want to eat it all.

Wow.

Thanks to my dad for the photography:-)

Monster Truck Cake

I always browse around to try and find great looking cakes. I've made a Ninja cake, blues clues cupcakes, lion cupcakes, tie-dye cupcakes (I get a lot of hits on this one, actually)...and a few miscellaneous chocolate frosted things.

I knew I could make a cake that looked like a monster truck.
Started with cake baked into two loaf pans, stacked up after cutting at an angle like a windshield.
(I use cake mix. Go ahead, flame away. Everyone's got their ability limit.)

Covered in bright yellow frosting. I use the frosting recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Yum! (I'm not sure why, since we're not vegan. And I usually sub in butter for the vegan margarine. But it's a good and easy recipe.)

We needed to add some reinforcement to the body of the truck. My husband helped me stick two drinking straws through the cake. This helped hold it together after it started to collapse.

Chocolate-covered donuts served as the wheels. That was a huge hit. Everyone wanted to eat them along with the cake!

The finished product - a big hit!
Sam greeted each of his friends with "come see my truck cake!" which was enough for me!!!

Day 10 of NaBloPoMo, still going strong...I've gotten three days out of this one birthday!

Monster Truck Monster Party

Sam really wanted a "monster truck" party for his birthday.

Let's go back a step...our approach to birthdays tends to be low-key but creative. I love to come up with a fun party idea that we can execute at home. We've done superheroes, ninjas, and legos. My kids get one invitee per year of age (a concept I think I'm about to regret with next week's 8-year-old party) and I try to do homemade cakes.

So we invited four friends (3 came, one was downed by the nasty cold bug going around). We planned a few games but the kids had so much fun just playing with all the monster trucks we'd collected that we almost ditched the games! But each time there was a little lull, we pulled them in to...

Hot Truck (a version of Hot Potato)

Pin the License Plate on the Monster Truck
(there's almost always a version of this old standby at our parties.)

We also colored a monster truck mural and offered some truck racing...
And of course, cake eating!

Can you see the cool placemat under his cake? I made these for each kid, personalized with a different truck picture and their name. They were a huge hit - the kids were so excited to take them home. We also gave each child a small monster truck as a "thank you for coming to my party" present. (That's what Sam called it.)

The whole party was set for one hour. The friends stayed a little longer because they were having so much fun playing.

Doesn't get much better than this!
(Come back tomorrow for cake pictures - the best part!)

This is your birthday song...

My second-born turned four today. It's hard to believe he's gone from this:

...to this first birthday...

...to this second birthday...

...to this third birthday...

...to this...fourth birthday...

My Sam is a very grown-up little four-year-old guy. He's full of opinions about what it means to be four. For example, today he told me that four-year-olds don't have to take naps. He protested right up until he dropped off to sleep midafternoon!

His birthday party? Monster trucks. Stay tuned for birthday party pictures.

Each year brings new blessings. May this one be no different.
Happy birthday, Sam!


NaBloPoMo Day 8 - how convenient of my children to have birthdays in November to give me material...

It's Nearly Tomorrow

It's almost tomorrow but if I don't put this up, I'm skipping out on my NaBloPoMo challenge.

So....it's a post.

Shavua tov!

URJ Biennial

I'm in the Toronto airport waiting for the flight that will carry me home to Chicago. I've been, for the last two days, a participant in the Union for Reform Judaism's Biennial convention. http://biennial.urj.org

Every other year, Reform Jews get together to celebrate Jewish life, to learn from each other and share music, worship, and companionship. It's a really wonderrful experience, with some of the finest musicians, teachers, speakers and programs.

Some of the highlights of my biennial experience:
- seeing my friends. For me, there's an element of reunion about the biennial. Nothing quite matches the hug you get from a friend you haven't seen in a year or two, and the delight at being surprised by someone you didn't know was coming!

- making new friends and connections. I exchanged a lot of business cards, shook a lot of hands. It was like Facebook in real life :) and I loved meeting friends of friends.

- putting faces to names, blogs, twitter handles. There are many people, particularly rabbis, cantors and teachers, among others, that I only know from their blogs or twitter feeds. How wonderful to meet and be together in real life - how delightful to make a "real" friend out of an online friend.

- the one large session I was there for was really great. Honorees were Dr. Avivah Zornberg, who taught marvelous Torah, and Harold Grinspoon, who has given so much to our camping movement. Dr Eboo Patel spoke and truly held the room, fascinates by his explanation of "theology of the bridge" - the idea that every religious tradition, at its heart, has respect for the humanity that God created. The evening ended with a performance by Josh Nelson and Craig Taubman....always wonderful and uplifting.

- my own session - I led, along with four others, a session on social media. Not a how-to session, but more a "why" and "what". I shared some of my own experiences with Twitter, Facebook, and this blog, and really felt that my words had relevance and resonance for the participants. It was fun, too! We had a large screen with a live twitterfeed following the hashtag #urjbiennial - fun to see live tweets coming from within the room.

And now I head home, the Biennial continues on with Shabbat and all the festive ways in which it's celebrated with 2000 of your closest friends. For me, a quieter Shabbat back in Chicago.

I feel that my cup has been filled up with the human connections, the hugs, the smiles of recognition and the new relationships formed.
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So Quiet When They're Sleeping

{{{sigh}}}
It doesn't get much better than this.